Gardening is full of received wisdom. Advice passed down through generations, repeated in books and magazines, shared confidently over fences. Some of it is sound. Some of it was sound once but conditions have changed. And some of it was never particularly well supported — it just became familiar enough that nobody thought to question it.
After fifty years of maintaining gardens and landscapes across Surrey — seeing what works, what doesn't, and what people spend time on for no measurable benefit — we've developed a healthy scepticism toward maintenance advice that starts with "you should always" or "you must never." Here are some of the most persistent myths, and what the evidence and experience actually suggest.
Myth: You Need to Feed Your Lawn Every Six Weeks
The lawn care industry has a clear commercial interest in frequent feeding regimes. Fertiliser manufacturers recommend their products at intervals that, conveniently, maximise consumption. The reality for most Surrey lawns is simpler.
A well-established lawn on reasonable soil needs feeding once or twice a year at most — typically a spring feed when growth is active and optionally an autumn feed to support root development over winter. This is standard turf management guidance, and it holds on both the free-draining Bagshot sands around Woking (where nutrients leach quickly, making frequent light feeds wasteful) and the heavier London Clay further east (where nutrient retention is better but excessive nitrogen pushes soft growth vulnerable to disease). More frequent feeding produces weaker grass that's more susceptible to disease and can contribute to thatch buildup.
If your lawn looks thin or yellow, the problem is more likely to be soil health, drainage, shade, or compaction than a lack of fertiliser. Feeding a lawn that's struggling for other reasons is treating the symptom while ignoring the cause.
The exception is newly established lawns, which do benefit from more regular feeding during their first full growing season as the grass is actively building root systems.
Myth: Watering Little and Often Is Best
This one sounds logical but produces the opposite of what you want. Frequent light watering encourages surface roots — the grass and plants learn that moisture is always available near the surface, so they don't invest in deeper root systems. When a dry spell comes, those shallow-rooted plants fail quickly because they've never developed the infrastructure to access deeper water reserves. This is well-established plant physiology, not opinion.
Less frequent, deeper watering is more effective. A thorough soaking once or twice a week (when rainfall is insufficient) encourages roots to grow downward in search of moisture. The result is a more resilient garden that copes better with drought — increasingly relevant in Surrey, where the 2022 drought saw the Thames region receive just 46% of average summer rainfall and dry spells have become more frequent in recent decades.
For lawns specifically, the guidance is even more straightforward: established lawns in the UK rarely need supplementary watering at all. Temperate grass species evolved for a dormancy-recovery cycle — they go brown in dry conditions but recover when rain returns. The instinct to keep a lawn green through July is understandable, but the water cost — both financial and environmental — is difficult to justify for a plant that will recover on its own.
Myth: Pruning Cuts Should Be Sealed with Wound Paint
This was standard advice for decades. Cut a branch, paint the wound, protect it from infection. It seemed intuitive — we put plasters on our own wounds, after all.
Research from arboricultural science — most notably Alex Shigo's foundational work on tree biology and compartmentalisation (1986) and subsequent studies — has consistently shown that wound paints and sealants are at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. Trees and shrubs have their own wound-response mechanisms — they compartmentalise damage by growing new tissue around the cut. Wound paint can actually trap moisture and pathogens beneath a sealed surface, creating conditions for decay rather than preventing it.
The Royal Horticultural Society, the Arboricultural Association, and most current professional guidance recommend against wound painting. A clean cut made at the correct point (just outside the branch collar, where the branch meets the trunk) allows the plant to seal itself naturally. That's it.
The persistence of this myth in garden centres — where wound paint is still prominently sold — is a good illustration of how commercial availability can sustain outdated practice.
Myth: You Must Dig Your Borders Every Year
The tradition of autumn or spring digging — turning the soil over to "let the air in" and incorporate organic matter — has deep roots in kitchen garden practice. For established ornamental borders, it's not only unnecessary but actively harmful.
Digging disrupts the soil ecosystem: mycorrhizal fungal networks are severed (Smith & Read's work on mycorrhizal biology documents this extensively), earthworm burrows are destroyed, soil structure that took years to develop is homogenised. The organisms that make soil fertile and well-structured need stability to do their work.
The alternative is surface application: spread compost, well-rotted manure, or mulch on top of the soil and let the biology incorporate it. Earthworms pull organic matter down into the soil profile far more effectively than a spade, and they do it without destroying the structural channels and biological networks in the process.
Charles Dowding's long-running no-dig trials have demonstrated comparable or superior yields in vegetable production without cultivation, and the principle applies equally to ornamental borders. We've maintained borders across Surrey for decades using surface mulching alone, and the soil condition improves year on year — better structure, better drainage, better water retention, more biological activity.
If your soil is severely compacted (hard, water pooling, poor root penetration), targeted intervention may be needed. But routine annual digging of established beds is a habit worth breaking.
Myth: Moss Means Your Lawn Needs Treatment
Moss in a lawn is almost always a symptom of underlying conditions: shade, poor drainage, compaction, low fertility, or a combination. Applying moss killer removes the moss temporarily but does nothing about the conditions that produced it. Within a season or two, the moss returns because the environment still favours it.
The more productive approach is to address what's causing the moss. If it's shade, the honest answer may be that grass isn't the right plant for that spot — ground-cover alternatives like Soleirolia or Pachysandra tolerate shade better and look good where grass would struggle. If it's compaction, aeration helps. If it's poor drainage, that's a more fundamental issue worth investigating properly.
Moss is information. Treat it as diagnosis, not disease.
Myth: You Should Rake Up Every Fallen Leaf
Tidiness has its place, but the compulsion to remove every leaf from every surface is working against your garden's interests. Fallen leaves provide habitat for invertebrates, feed soil organisms as they decompose, return nutrients to the soil, and provide winter mulch for borders. This is established ecological science, not sentimental greenwashing.
On lawns, heavy leaf cover should be cleared because it blocks light and encourages fungal disease in the grass beneath. On borders and under shrubs, a moderate layer of fallen leaves is beneficial. Under hedges and in quiet corners, leaf litter left undisturbed becomes habitat for hedgehogs, ground beetles, and other creatures that contribute to garden ecology.
The balance is practical, not ideological. Keep lawns and paths clear. Let borders and edges have their leaf cover. The garden will be healthier for it, and you'll save time in the process.
The Principle Behind the Myths
Most garden maintenance myths share a common thread: they assume more intervention is better. More feeding, more watering, more digging, more treating, more tidying. The evidence — both scientific and experiential — suggests the opposite. Gardens that are managed with restraint, that allow natural processes to operate, and that address causes rather than symptoms tend to be healthier, more resilient, and less labour-intensive.
That's not an argument for neglect. Well-maintained gardens need attention — informed, well-timed, purposeful attention. The difference is between doing the right things and doing everything.
