For the Fun of It: 12 Famous Gardening and Lawn Care Idioms
We love a good idiom. We also love a good garden. So, you can just imagine our delight when we realised so many of the best idioms are gardening-related!
Whether you’re a language lover or a great gardener, we know you will enjoy these famous gardening and lawn care idioms just as much as we do!
To Cherry-Pick
We love fruit trees, so the idiom ‘to cherry-pick’ or ‘cherry-picking’ is high on the list as one of our favourites. To cherry-pick means to select a small amount of information from a larger amount of data to favour you in a discussion or argument.
Cherry-picking is a common practice of people who disagree with an idea widely held or shared by the majority. They might find one source or study to support their position and disregard the others that go against it.
Dig Some Dirt Up
In the gardening world, digging some dirt up would be as it sounds. You literally dig dirt up from your garden to prepare it for new plants. But digging dirt up is more commonly used to describe someone looking for negative information about another person.
For example, if someone knows someone did something wrong, they might ‘dig some dirt up’ to learn more about that person and other things they might have done.
A Green Thumb
No one actually has a green thumb, but to say someone has a green thumb or is a green thumb means they are good at gardening or are passionate about gardening. Sometimes, people say they are green-fingered, which means the same thing.
Lead You Down the Garden Path
If you were showing someone around your property, you would literally lead them down the garden path. But you might also use this phrase if you were going to lie or deceive someone. Rather than say you were lying or deceiving someone, you would say you were leading someone down the garden path in an attempt to throw them off your scent.
You’re Barking Up the Wrong Tree
You’re barking up the wrong tree is one of our favourite gardening and lawn care idioms because it includes both an idiom and a pun! You’re barking up the wrong tree. Get it?
In everyday language, someone might say this if you were wasting your time taking a specific action or approach to solve a problem or achieve a particular result. For example, if the police were looking for a murder suspect, someone might say they were barking up the wrong tree if they were targeting the wrong suspects.
Grow Like a Weed
Weeds just don’t stop growing! And that’s why many people use the expression ‘growing like a weed’ to refer to children who have experienced a growth spurt. But that’s where the similarities between weeds and children stop. For the most part, we enjoy having our children around, and we can’t typically say the same about weeds.
Hearing Something Through the Grapevine
I heard it through the grapevine. It’s such a popular saying that there’s even a song about it. This saying means that you heard information about something or someone from friends or acquaintances. In a sense, it can also be a rumour or gossip rather than a hard fact.
It’s All Rosy
We love roses, which is perhaps why we use variations of the phrase ‘it’s all rosy’ and ‘everything is rosy’. Unless used as sarcasm, it’s all rosy means everything is fine and well.
Put Down Roots
All living plants have roots, which allow them to establish themselves on a property or in a garden and thrive. We use the idiom ‘put down roots’ to essentially describe the same thing about ourselves. When we put down roots in a particular place, we make it our home. You might hear people say they are putting down roots when they finally give up a life of travel and buy a home.
To Rake In
We rake leaves, we rake dirt, we rake a lot of things around our properties. But for some reason, we also use the idiom ‘to rake in’ to describe earning a lot of money. You might hear someone saying they are working overtime ‘to rake in the money’.
A Wallflower
Wallflowers are beautiful border flowers that can also look the part in cottage gardens and garden beds. They flower in winter, spring, and summer. Not everyone is familiar with wallflowers as plants, but most of us are familiar with them used in the sense of a person being a wallflower.
In this regard, someone can be a wallflower if they’re introverted, have social anxiety, and don’t typically participate in social activities.
You Reap What You Sow
When you reap what you sow in a gardening sense, you’re cutting or gathering a crop or harvest which you would have planted earlier. However, we rarely talk about reaping what we sow in this sense. Instead, we use this expression when we experience something bad due to something we did. If you did something bad, you experience something bad as a result.