GARDENING: You might have green fingers, but do you have a fertile mind to match?

Find out with our annual Christmas gardening quiz and be in with a chance to win a €300 gardening gift voucher

IT’S TIME TO dig deep, fellow gardeners, deep into your vast stores of knowledge. It’s the annual Irish Times Christmas Gardening Quiz.

If you’ve been following this column during the year, then you know the answers to at least 50 per cent of the questions – so you’re halfway there already.

The first correct entry out of the hat wins a €300 gift voucher to spend at Mr Middleton Garden Shop, at 58 Mary Street, Dublin (or you can shop online  or by.

The company’s mail order catalogues, available from 01-8603674). Mr Middleton stocks thousands of garden products, including plants, seeds, bulbs, wildlife supplies, plant houses, tools, propagators and other garden essentials. The prize for the next three correct entries out of the hat is a year’s subscription to Irish Garden magazine (10 issues, value €46) for you, or for a friend if you are already a subscriber.

1 What do these plants have in common, seasonally speaking: I ris unguicularis; Helleborus niger ; and Jasminus nudiflorum ?

2 “I paint toes” is an anagram of what seasonal plant?

3 Name the Irish garden festival that has taken place in the Phoenix Park for the past three years, and which will be on again next June.

4 What is the “Chelsea chop”?

5 What unusual characteristic do these conifers have in common: larch ( Larix ), swamp cypress ( Taxodium distichum ) and dawn redwood ( Metasequoia glyptostroboides )?

6 At what time of the year would you be likely to see the greatest concentrations of anthocyanins in tree foliage?

7 With which parts of a plant are mycorrhizal fungi associated?

8 Avondale House in Co Wicklow is famous for being the birthplace of Charles Stewart Parnell, but what famous tree man lived there in the previous century?

9 What is the name of the white flower in the photo?

10 What plant was Ted Hughes writing about here? “Every March since they have lifted again/ Out of the same bulbs, the same/ Baby-cries from the thaw,/ Ballerinas too early for music, shiverers/ In the draughty wings of the year.”

11 Which chilli is hotter: Jalapeño or Habanero?

12 What is the name of the designer who won best show garden at this year’s Chelsea Flower Show?

13 What do the following plants have in common: Galanthus nivalis, Cerastium tomentosum and Symphoricarpos albus ?

14 Stamens and anthers are the male parts of a plant structure. True or false?

15 The Sicilian monk Francisco Cupani is believed to have introduced a popular summer plant to gardens in Holland and England around the end of the 17th century. What was its name? Helpful hint: it was then known as Lathyrus distoplatyphyllus, hirsutus, mollis, magno et peramaeno flore, odoro .

16 What is the name of the Co Wicklow garden, dating from 1682, that was designed in the French style by a Monsieur Bonet?

17 Rearrange these seeds in order of size, smallest first: common foxglove; horse chestnut; tree peony.

18 Is the plant in the picture an adenoid, an aroid, or an android?

19 Which one of these rhododendron varieties is fictitious: ‘Christmas Cheer’, ‘Jingle Bells’, ‘Silent Night’?

20 What is the most common way of propagating radishes: by cuttings; by seed; or by air-layering?

21 What is the national floral emblem of the US?

22 What other country, besides the US, has this flower as its national emblem?

23 Red Russian, Black Tuscan and Redbor are varieties of what vegetable?

24 The botanical name of what well-known, blue-flowered Mediterranean herb comes from the Latin words for “dew” and “of the sea”?

25 What is unusual about the snowdrops ‘Primrose Warburg’ and ‘Lady Elphinstone’?

26 The keeled slug is a pest to potatoes because it: a) eats the tubers; b) bores holes in the foliage; or c) leaves slimy trails all over the flowers?

27 What is the name of the château in the Loire valley with the famous vegetable garden, in the picture?

28 A certain DIY chain was selling mole-deterrent devices in Northern Ireland last year. Why was this inappropriate?

29 What genus of plants includes these classifications: Triandrus, Tazetta and Poeticus?

30 What have these plants in common: Stachys byzantina, Valerianella locusta, Chenopodium album and Raoulia eximia ?

31 The Cherokee rose, Rosa laevigata , is from what country?

32 Why do gardeners “rogue” or “rogue out” plants?

33 The varroa mite is a pest of what important garden inhabitant?

34 What climbing plant with red flowers and edible pods was introduced to Europe more than 500 years ago from South America?

35 What is the name of the British garden writer, holder of a RHS Veitch medal, and often known as the “Vegetable Queen”, who moved to west Cork in 2002?

36 It is recommended that cherry and plum trees are pruned in early summer to avoid which disease: silver leaf; dollar spot; or money grub?

37 When you add lime to ordinary garden soil you are raising the pH, true or false?

38 What is the name of the grand house and garden in the photo?

39 Mossery, fernery, vinery, pinery, peppery, rosary, nuttery: all denote places in the garden for growing specific kinds of plants, except one. Which is the odd man out?

40 These plants are very different, but they share what common and odd characteristic: Dianella tasmanica and Billardiera longiflora?