"Community gardens" in parks are popular right now - with parks bodies anyway. They allow councils to give the impression they are responding to the high demand for allotments without having to find new sites for them, or become lumbered with a legal obligation to retain them. They also offer a new way to engage with existing parks, and tick a few more boxes too - health, education, sustainability, community interaction...

But they will always leave a few questions in people's minds, namely:

- who decides what gets planted where?
- who gets to use the resulting produce - the growers themselves, or the whole "community"?
- how can growers be confident that what they've planted won't get trashed?

My first brush with the format last night didn't resolve any of these questions. Unfortunately, the corner of my local park that has been ambitiously landscaped for community gardening is also the ideal site for the local youth to hang out and drink, and last night they rather outnumbered us doughty would-be community gardeners. That and the large number of dogs that use the area meant it didn't really feel very conducive to productive horticulture.

Like the local currencies beloved of newspaper feature writers, community gardens sound appealing in theory but in practice require a degree of trust and sense of shared purpose that few communities are lucky enough to possess.

Remember the horticultural exoskeletons? This (be sure to play the video) is slightly less wacky - a robot tomato plant tender that not only monitors soil humidity but also waters them and picks them when they're ripe. I wonder if the students at MIT have been watching Silent Running?

One of the first rules of marketing is not to give your product a name that your potential customers won't know how to pronounce. Unfortunately for plant suppliers, they have largely been beaten to it by botanists who presumably never manned the phones in sales.

For example, we have an upcoming Plant Focus on the oriental quince, Chaenomeles (from Greek chainô "gape" + mêlon "tree fruit" - gee, thanks John Lindley). My colleague Kris Collins reckons that ought to come out as "shenOmeleez". For me it's "keenomEEleez" - after all we don't say "shameleon" or "sharacter".

If anyone can settle it, the RHS can, I thought. But a call to them only yielded a score draw, with head of botany Dr John David siding with me, head of horticultural advice Guy Barter with Kris.

"There is no absolute, final way of saying what's right," says David. "You could say, follow classical practice, but that might make it seem a bit exclusive. We don't want to put people off."

So take your pick really...