When faced with a new plant, even I can find the label completely baffling. The small forest of symbols, abbreviations and numbers mean absolutely nothing to most people and, frankly, not always all that much to the person who wrote them either.

Plant labels are trying to do an impossible job: compress everything you need to know about a living thing onto a strip of plastic the size of a bookmark. Some do it well. Some are actively misleading. Nearly all of them assume you already know what they mean. So here's the decoding.