The days are longer and the light is strengthening—triggers that don't just start to wake up our plants, indoors and out, but also get us gardeners going. The signals have my propagation-mad friend Ken Druse starting more seeds each week and looking around the landscape and the houseplant-filled sunroom for some chances to make more plants, his favorite pastime.

Ken is author and photographer of 20 garden books, including one on plant propagation, and is a daring plant propagator himself. Together since 2021, we've co-hosted the Virtual Garden Club, a series of online classes about our favorite subject: plants. Ken gardens in New Jersey, mostly in the shade.

Today’s guest says you can tell a lot about a tree by the company it keeps – from unseen microbes to fungi, countless insects and other arthropods, to vertebrates like birds, squirrels, and even porcupines. From soil life around their roots to the action up in their canopies, trees are swarming with life, and their diverse community of companions is our topic.

Dr. James Nardi is a research scientist in the School of Integrative Biology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and the author and illustrator of several previous books. His latest is “The Hidden Company That Trees Keep: Life From Treetops to Root Tips,” and I am happy he’s joined me to talk about it. 

Could your houseplants use a tuneup after a hard winter indoors? I know mine will need it, from re-potting, to light pruning, to full scale rejuvenation in some cases, so I wanted to get expert advice. Today's guest has been growing houseplants since age 5, and the last 25 years he's been doing that not just at home, but also in historic Longwood Gardens Conservatory in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, where he's the conservatory manager. 

In 25 years working in the conservatory at Longwood Gardens, Karl Gercens estimates he's seen more than a million pots of display plants, many of them species we think of as houseplants, move through its galleries as different seasonal shows were staged. Each one has to be exceptional to make the grade, the best varieties and grown to perfection. So I know he has the answers on both fronts on which plants to choose and how to care for them. 

Each year the powers that be in the horticulture industry declare what the trends are—what color is “in” and what design styles we’re all meant to adhere to, and what plant is hot—or not. Today’s guest and I beg to differ, and have decided to do some trend declarations of our own ... from big bold perennials to why you should learn to propagate and share some plants. 

Dr. Jared Barnes is an Associate Professor of Horticulture at Stephen F. Austin State University in Texas, and the creator of the Plant-ed blog and e-newsletter, and the monthly Plantastic Podcast. He has been gardening since about age 5, and I’m so glad to welcome him here today to do some forecasting together. 

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It’s probably the question I am asked most: Gardeners want to go wilder and use more native plants to create habitat. But how do they figure out which plants, since it’s not one size fits all regions, or even different locations within a region...and choosing as we mostly do by hardiness zone isn’t going to get the ecological job done. Help! 

Benjamin Vogt has just published a new book that takes us through prescriptive steps to get started in natural garden design. He is the owner of Monarch Designs LLC, a prairie-based design firm specializing in natural landscapes, and the book is “Prairie Up: An Introduction to Natural Garden Design.”  

Like any gardener looking ahead to another growing season, I’m deep into the seed catalogs, dreaming of things to come. But many seeds also offer us a window to look back in time by telling us their stories, which are also the stories of the people who grew them before us, and the places those people and seeds have journeyed from. 

I have a special affection for catalogs that celebrate seeds with such histories to share. Ujamaa Seeds, founded in 2021, is one such place, and one of its founders is here to talk about “seeds as vessels of cultural heritage,” as they refer to them. 

Bonnetta Adeeb, a retired educator, is President of Steam Onward, Inc., a nonprofit dedicated to increasing the number of minority and under-served youth pursuing higher education in STEM-related fields. In 2020, she founded the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, a collective of BIPOC growers, farmers, and gardeners who cultivate and distribute heirloom seeds and grow culturally meaningful crops ... and in 2021 the Ujamaa Seeds online catalog that’s our subject today was born.  

Promises of less work with more garden productivity often raise my suspicions, perhaps sounding too good to be true—except when the subject is no-dig gardening. 

The no-dig method of caring for our vegetable beds, which today's guest, Charles Dowding, has popularized, is not just good for maximizing output while minimizing labor, but also of great benefit to the soil and the greater environment. I learned more about how to get started from Charles. 

Charles Dowding is often called the guru of no-dig gardening, which he practices today in his organic market garden in Somerset, in Southwest England. He began experimenting with no-dig in 1982 and, over the years since, in his many books and in person and online teaching, including his massive YouTube channel, Charles has brought countless people into the no-dig fold. 

His most recent book is “No Dig: Making and Managing a Vegetable Garden Without Tilling.” 

If you think you know what a cucumber is, think again. Spend even five minutes on the website of The Cucumber Shop, a passion project of today’s cucumber-mad guest Jay Tracy, and you will realize that you don’t. At all. The incredible diversity of cucumbers is our topic today. 

California-based Jay Tracy is a teacher, and a father of four teens—and also the person behind the collection of exceptional and unusual cucumbers called The Cucumber Shop, a mail order seed catalog he created about 10 years ago and that evolved into cucumbershop dot com in 2019. 

With the surge in interest in lawn alternatives and other native choices for groundcover, the genus Carex is always mentioned high up on the list. But which of these grass light perennials, most of them labeled as best suited to shade, can actually substitute for lawn, and which sedges can serve other landscape roles? 

A four-year trial at Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware, the renowned native plant garden and research facility, sought to get at those answers and others. 

Sam Hoadley is manager of Horticultural Research at Mt. Cuba, where he and the team trialed 70 different Carex over a four-year period, and Sam's report on the findings will be published on the Mt. Cuba website this week. 

Plus he's teaching a virtual class on February 1 on these important native plants, too. 

Before joining Mt. Cuba, Sam was Lead Horticulturist for Longwood Gardens’ hillside garden, and he received his degree in Sustainable Landscape Horticulture from University of Vermont. 

Have you started browsing the incoming seed catalogs yet or clicking around their websites, looking to see if the 2023 lineups have been unveiled?

Today's guest, Lane Selman is always on the lookout for exceptional varieties of edibles, particularly those with an Italian flair. I did some virtual seed shopping with her and learned about some distinctive edibles and unusual seed sources you may not have tried.  

Lane Selman, an agricultural researcher at Oregon State University, is founder of the Culinary Breeding Network , a collaborative community of plant breeders, seed growers, farmers, produce buyers, and chefs aiming together to improve quality in vegetables and grains by creating, identifying, and promoting more desirable cultivars, especially organic ones. She's got some suggestions for our 2023 gardens. 

It's that time of year when we look both ways. Not left and right, like we're crossing the road, but back and forward at the year just wound down, and ahead at the one coming into view. It's a moment of reflection, and perhaps resolutions for our gardens and our lives. 

I could think of no one I'd rather ponder that intersection with than Marc Hamer, a British writer and gardener whose work I greatly admire. Like many people, I came to know of English-born Marc Hamer in 2019 upon the publication of his first book, “How to Catch a Mole.”Marc has lived in Wales for more than 30 years, and worked at various things, including a long stint as a professional gardener that forms the backdrop of that first book, and of a more recent second one called “Seed to Dust.” His third book, called “Spring Rain,” is due early in 2023. I'm so pleased he's here today from his home in Cardiff to mark the cusp of the years together. 

When shorter, colder days have us indoors more, a bit of botanical company can make it all a lot brighter. This edition of the podcast has suggestions for some winter solstice decorating, for bringing a bit of nature indoors for the offseason to reconnect us with the garden and provide some cheer. And not just the obvious holiday centerpiece or wreath, but the right succulents for winter bloom and easy care, and some unexpected found goodies from outdoors to call into action, too, and how to make them last.

My guest is Kathy Tracey, co-owner with her husband, Chris, of Avant Gardens Nursery in Dartmouth, Mass., a source for exceptional plants in person and by mail. They're also known for their design services and popular how-to classes, including lots of botanical crafty ones.

Get her year-round tips for growing amaryllis and reblooming them; for making cut branches last indoors; and even some of her recommended houseplants that don't sulk in winter heating season.

I put out my first bird feeder of the season on Thanksgiving and got the party started. But there's more to feeding the birds than just filling the feeders, like how to keep them safe in the age of increased disease transmission, or how to provide essential water in the coldest months, and of course, much0needed tactics for outsmarting the squirrels. Smart bird feeding and more bird-related wisdom is our topic with Julie Zickefoose.

Julie is a wildlife rehabilitator and artist and author of various books, including a favorite of mine, "Saving Jemima: Life and Love with a Hard-Luck Jay.". She lives and gardens on an 80-acre wildlife sanctuary in Appalachian foothills of Ohio. 

If I say garden maintenance, you probably think of work—of getting out the pruners and hedge trimmers and such, and subduing any overenthusiastic plants, getting them back into bounds. But what if we thought of maintenance as an expression of creativity, instead of merely restraint—as part of the art of garden-making? What if we figured it into our design decisions right from the start? Particularly as our gardens shift in a more ecological direction and become more naturalistic, that adjustment and approach seems especially important.

Ongoing creative maintenance is our topic today with Noel Kingsbury and Annie Guilfoyle, hosts of the popular Garden Masterclass series of workshops and webinars.

Annie Guilfoyle is an award-winning garden designer and longtime teacher of design. Noel Kingsbury, with an astonishing 25 books to his credit, is a noted garden writer, teacher and consultant. Together, they have created gardenmasterclass.org, hosting both in-person workshops in the UK and online horticultural webinars for gardeners worldwide.

Winter cold has just finally descended here, and I am already missing the smells of the growing season—from the range of flowers to just brushing up against herbs out by the vegetable garden. Ken Druse is here today to encourage us to extend our season of scentual gardening – that’s S-C-E-N-T-ual as in fragrance, and as in the title of his book “The Scentual Garden.” He urges us to include extra-late and extra-early producers, and also some indoor stars for a year of fragrances. 

Longtime friend Ken, who gardens in New Jersey, is the author of 20 garden books, including “The Scentual Garden,” about the many fragrances the plant world can offer, our topic today. 

‘Tis the season when I'm making more applesauce to freeze and baking pears for dessert (or for breakfast), so what sweeter topic for today's episode than fruit? Lee Reich, who has written several books on the subject, is here with some fascinating history of the origins of the fruits we love, and some how-to growing advice, too.

Lee Reich, who gardens on his half-farm, half-garden—or farmden, as he calls it—in New Paltz, New York, is the author of many books, including the recent “Growing Figs In Cold Climates.” His latest is a juicy little book simply called “Fruit,” with 250 historic watercolors and some history of apples, pears, berries and more.

In his new book, Wild Plant Culture, restoration ecologist Jared Rosenbaum says something provocative about gardening with native plants. 

"It's time to expand our vision past supporting birds, butterflies, and bees, and fully integrate the most challenging animal of all, the human being, into our native plant gardens," he writes. 

So what all would that mean, and how do we do that? 

Jared Rosenbaum is a botanist and restoration ecologist, and he's also co-owner with his wife, Rachel Mackow, of Wild Ridge Plants mail-order nursery in New Jersey. His new book, “Wild Plant Culture: A Guide to Restoring Edible and Medicinal Native Plant Communities,” is out this month. 

We’ve all heard the environmentally conscious advice: The way we used to clean up our gardens – extra-tidy, but to within an inch of its life for every unseen beneficial creature out there trying to tuck in for winter – is not the best practice.

I’m learning and evolving my approach as I go the last few years, reading up about guidance like “leave the leaves” and cutback strategies like “chop and drop” and more. And asking experts for help, including today’s guest, Uli Lorimer, director of horticulture at Native Plant Trust. 

Uli, author of “The Northeast Native Plant Primer,” has made native plants his career. In 2019 became director of horticulture at Native Plant Trust, America’s oldest plant conservation organization, founded in 1900 as the New England Wild Flower Society, and before that he was longtime curator of the Native Flora Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. 

A new book I’m reading emphasizes the word watching in the expression bird watching. As in: Don’t be in such a hurry to merely note that you’ve seen a bird, but instead really have a close look at what it’s doing, and discover the facts of its life. The book is called "Slow Birding," and its author is here today to talk about how to be a slow birder, and about some of the species she profiles in the book.

Joan Strassman is a specialist in animal behavior who is a professor of biology at Washington University in St Louis. She is also now the author of "Slow Birding: The Art and Science of Enjoying the Birds in Your Own Backyard."

One thing that Ken Druse and I are certain about when it comes to plants: that they will often surprise you, Some grow bigger or stay smaller than the catalog promised, and some are better- or worse-behaved, or tougher or more tender than expected. Some plants that have surprised us over the years, for better or worse, was the subject of a recent conversation we had.

Ken, who gardens in New Jersey, is the author and photographer behind 20 garden books, and a longtime friend who grows lots of plants that definitely surprise me. We discussed plants that in one way or another weren't quite what we expected, as in: surprise!

If I say “English garden,” you probably conjure a mental picture of colorful mixed borders and garden rooms enclosed by hedging. But what's the essence of an American garden? That was what a new book called “American Roots” set out to explore, profiling 20 home gardens around the nation for design inspiration, and also for how-to advice geared to gardening success. 

Garden designer Nick McCullough and his wife, Allison, are the team behind an Ohio-based landscape design firm, and also behind the new book, “American Roots: Lessons and Inspiration from the Designers Reimagining our Home Gardens.” In our conversation, Nick shared some takeaways that he gleaned from the process of making the book. 

Since I took a walk with today’s guest about 10 years ago, I’ve adopted a whole different way of looking at what I might have once seen as imperfections in plants. Now when I spy a squiggle in a columbine leaf or what looks like a green Ping-Pong ball on an oak, instead of thinking “What’s wrong with my plant!” I instead think “I wonder who made that—and why?” 

Curiosity has replaced panic, thanks to naturalist Charley Eiseman, co-author of the field guide “Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates,” who’s here today to decode some of nature’s beautiful little mysteries for us. 

Charley Eiseman is a freelance naturalist, and when he’s not conducting biodiversity surveys for conservation groups and other clients, he devotes himself to learning more about the natural world—through an e-book he’s created on leafminers, and a North American leafminer project on iNaturalist.org he started that has some 50,000 sightings submitted, and more.  

Becoming a successful vegetable gardener involves a lot of trial and error. As the seasons pass we hopefully get better at it—harvesting not just food for the table, but food for thought too, insights gleaned along the way to guide us to improved outcomes in subsequent growing seasons.

I don't know many more passionate vegetable gardeners than Joe Lamp'l, who has gathered what he's learned in decades of growing his own food into a new book filled with advice for the rest of us. 

Joe Lamp'l is the creator of the long-running public television program, “Growing a Greener World,” and of the popular “Joe Gardener” podcast. Now he's also author of the new book called “The Vegetable Gardening Book: Your Complete Guide to Growing an Edible Organic Garden from Seed to Harvest.”

It covers all that he's learned from bountiful seasons, and from some tough ones, too, along the way.

A collection of historic apples that was threatened by disease is having a second act at the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill in Boylston, Mass., where a three-year-long restoration of their orchard of 119 antique varieties has just been completed. 

It's a story of going the distance to see those old varieties into the future in the age of climate change, and of what goes into making a successful forward-looking orchard—from smart watering methods to native underplantings and more. 

Mark Richardson, New England Botanic Garden’s director of horticulture, oversaw the recent apple orchard restoration project there, and he's to tell us more about what imperiled the collection of 119 antique varieties, what it took to save them, and lessons learned that can help gardeners who want to successfully grow fruit. 

In emails received from many parts of the country, I’m hearing gardeners say the same thing: This year has been really hard. Count me in on those voicing that sentiment. 

Gardeners know first-hand that climate change isn’t something in the future, but something right here, every day, right now. So I was fascinated to start reading about the Climate Change Demonstration Garden at the Cornell Botanic Gardens in Ithaca, New York, where since 2014 the team has been looking at the impacts of a shifting climate on gardens. What they’ve learned so far can help us prepare. 

Sonja Skelly is Director of Education for the Cornell Botanic Gardens and an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Horticulture. She gave me a virtual tour of the Climate Change Demonstration Garden, and we discussed how to make own gardens more resilient in the face of a shifting landscape. 

Maybe like I do, you always mean to be better at seed saving, and it gets away from you. Well, right now is the perfect time with pen and paper or your cell phone in hand for making a list to look around the garden for what potential yields are coming up that you might want to grab at just the right stage to make more plants. Ken Druse is here to tell us how.

You all know Ken, author of 20 garden books, old friend, and my cohost of the online Virtual Garden Club that resumes again in September. Twenty-ish years ago, he wrote a book called “Making More Plants” about all forms of propagation, including from seed. 

Ecological horticulturist Andy Brand can't help himself. He just has to look closely at everything outdoors: every plant, every insect, every process that's unfolding. And he has to take camera phone pictures, too—lots and lots of pictures. 

These up-close observations aren't just visually compelling, though. They also pull him down a rabbit hole of inquiry about who or what he's looking at, and what's going on anyhow, and why? Nature's endless fascinations and what they can teach us, if we allow ourselves the time to explore, is our topic today. 

Andy Brand, who worked for many years at the rare plant specialty nursery called Broken Arrow in Connecticut, has since 2018 been at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens, where he is director of horticulture, managing its big-picture garden scenes, while he also savors the tiny ones, which he shares on Instagram. He encourages us all to slow down and have a closer look and to share some of the ahas he's learned about nature along the way. 

I’ve never had a rock garden, I confess. But a new book about a modern and extreme form of the art caught my attention recently. 

It’s called “The Crevice Garden: How to Make the Perfect Home for Plants from Rocky Places,” and its authors are here today to talk about why you might want to make room for one, and the plants it can support.  

Colorado-based Kenton Seth and Paul Spriggs from British Columbia are garden designers with a particular specialty in rock gardens, and also co-authors of the new book “The Crevice Garden.” 

When they appeared this spring on the popular Garden Masterclass webinar series, British host Noel Kingsbury said this in the way of introducing them: “Rock gardening will no longer elicit a yawn, because this is the future.” I’m glad they’re here today to give us a peek into this brave new world.  

Hot and dry: That’s the lament of gardeners in most regions in high summer, and also of many plants in their flower gardens. The author of a new book called “The Ultimate Flower Gardener’s Guide” is here to suggest which perennials can stand up best to the test, plus give us some lavender-growing advice – speaking of plants adapted to hot and dry.  

Also on the agenda: a tip on a bulb you may not have grown before but could order to plant this fall, surprise lilies. 

Jenny Rose Carey is former senior director of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society’s Meadowbrook Farm, and taught in the department of landscape architecture and horticulture at Temple University, where she also directed the Ambler Arboretum. Her new book is “The Ultimate Flower Gardener’s Guide.” 

I call the phenomenon tomato troubles. You know, the yellow-spotted foliage that falls off, or the plant that produces all those misshapen fruits and yes, the attack of the hornworms, too, when you wake up to a lot of missing leaves one day. Or all of the above. Oops! 

 August is a perfect time to check in with the tomato man himself, Craig LeHoullier, author of the book “Epic Tomatoes,” and see what we can do even under such high-summer pressures to bring in that delicious harvest. 

I recently hosted a shade-gardening webinar featuring my friend, Ken Druse. The enthusiastic registration and the outpouring of audience questions that evening reminded me how popular a topic shade is, especially the challenge of dry shade, so I asked Ken to join me on the podcast to talk more about it. 

Ken is a familiar voice here at A Way To Garden, one of my longest gardening friendships. He is the author of 20 garden books, including “The New Shade Garden: Creating A Lush Oasis In The Age Of Climate Change.” He gardens in New Jersey, mostly in the shade, which is our subject today.

I’ve been undertaking more native-plant-focused garden transformations in recent years, as I know many of you listening have, too. Today’s guest is a naturalist with a background in landscape architecture who’s been making wildish gardens for decades, both at home and in his public-garden career. 

Alan Branhagen is here to talk about some of his own native plant adventures–and to highlight some native annuals for us that can play various key roles in our gardens as they do at his place, too.  

Alan Branhagen, a lifelong naturalist with a background in landscape architecture, is director of operations at the 1,200-acre Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in suburban Minneapolis. He is the former director of horticulture at Powell Gardens in Kansas City, and the author of two books on Midwestern native plants.

You know how the vegetable garden goes. One day, there are just two green beans ready to pick, and then there are 62 all at once. Famine and then feast. 

Some of that can be moderated by growing different varieties with different days to maturity or with smaller succession sowings of each crop. But no matter how much planning, it's not a predictable assembly line—and neither is what you'll get each week if you subscribe to a farm share or CSA...like hello, radishes every week plus more kale than I can keep up with. 

So what to do with whatever produce comes your way? Cookbook author and food writer Alexandra Stafford offered some tactical advice and also prepared us for the onslaught of zucchini with creative and delicious recipes. 

Ali creates the Alexandra's Kitchen website and companion e-newsletter from alexandracooks.com—and a whole extra, free, weekly seasonal email, too, called the Farm Share Newsletter, which is giving me more ideas each week for what to do with what the garden, the CSA, and the local farmstand have to offer. She's the author of the hit book “Bread Toast Crumbs.” 

If you think that managing invasive plants in a garden is a challenge, imagine that on a larger scale—a much larger scale, like Angela Sirois-Pitel faces in the name of supporting native habitat on Nature Conservancy land. 

From barberries and multiflora rose bushes to the nasty annual grass called stiltgrass, Angela and her team have faced them all. 

Angela is a conservation biologist who serves as stewardship manager for The Nature Conservancy in the Southern Berkshires of Massachusetts. Her role there ranges from tackling invasive species, to helping save endangered bog turtles.  We talked about the thinking that goes into managing invasives, and more. 

More than 20 years ago, artists Allyson Levy and Scott Serrano started a botanical garden in the backyard of their Hudson Valley, New York, home. Today, the Hortus Arboretum and Botanical Gardens has grown to 11 acres of diverse collections. One of the couple's passions is unusual edibles, and now they've written a book about their favorites.

“Cold-Hardy Fruits and Nuts” profiles 50 easy-to-grow selections. And they're here today to talk about a few of those that are also native plants. 

Allyson and Scott are both visual artists, and their garden that today is Hortus Arboretum in Stone Ridge got its start as the inspiration and source of raw materials for their creative efforts. It's grown into a non-profit organization that welcomes visitors and includes lots of unusual edibles, our topic today.  

The lecture that he's been giving for a number of years is not so subtly called “Kill our Lawn.” 

Ecological horticulturist Dan Wilder knows that starting over and creating an entire native habitat instead of a lawn isn't for everyone. But Dan just wants to grab our attention and get us to start to make some changes at least in the way we care for the turfgrass we do want in our landscapes. And maybe give up a little square footage of it to some other kind of more diverse planting, too. 

Alternative, more eco-focused styles of lawn care, along with some lawn alternatives is our topic today. 

Dan Jaffe Wilder is Director of Applied Ecology at Norcross Wildlife Foundation in Wales, Massachusetts, and its 8,000-acre sanctuary. He's also co-author with Mark Richardson of the book “Native Plants for New England Gardens

Today’s show is all about surprises—and the first one is my guest. He’s back: My old friend Ken Druse is here after too many months of absence, and our subject is the surprises our gardens have offered so far this spring, from extra-bountiful roses to not-so-welcome spongy moth caterpillars, aka gypsy moths. 

You all know Ken Druse, author of 20 garden books, keen propagator and plant collector. And for much of the last year he’s also been my colleague in our online Virtual Garden Club, the latest semester of which just ended. So I’ve been getting to talk to him all the time – but you haven’t heard from him in a bit, which is something we’ll correct today. 

While researching a story about the endangered status of native trillium in North America recently, I was happy to meet today’s guest, botanist Wesley Knapp. 

Our trillium conversations got me thinking about how headlines like the trillium one, highlighting reports of the accelerating threats of extinctions of plant or animal species, are so common in the news these days. 

But how are those predictions calculated, I wondered, and also: do we know what species are already gone? Wesley Knapp, a Ph.D. student at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is Chief Botanist at NatureServe, the authoritative source for biodiversity data in North America. He previously worked as a Botanist and Ecologist for the Maryland and North Carolina Natural Heritage Programs.

How are we doing in the effort to reduce tick encounters, and the diseases that ticks carry and can transmit to humans? The results from a multi-year study in Dutchess County, New York, one of the areas in the United States with the highest rates of Lyme disease, shed some light on that question. 

One of the study’s directors is here today to talk about the findings --- and about her advice for best practices that each of us gardeners can take for personal protection.  

 My guest to talk ticks is Dr. Felicia Keesing, a professor of biology at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, and one of the two directors of The Tick Project with Dr. Rick Ostfeld of Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook. 

Today's guest, author Sy Montgomery, writes that “we are on the cusp of either destroying the sweet green earth, or revolutionizing the way we understand the rest of animate creation. 

“It's an important time to be writing about the connections we share with our fellow creatures," she adds, saying, "It's a great time to be alive." 

In 33 books for adults and children, including her latest, “The Hawk's Way,” she's made connecting with our fellow creatures her life's work, and celebrated those connections. She has explored connections to a range of animals, not just obvious ones like dogs, but from tarantulas to octopuses, pigs, and more. 

In her just-out book “The Hawk's Way,” it's the birds that she calls “the tigers of the air,” raptors, the birds of prey that she explores.  

I get a lot of questions every year about mulch, about how to use it, when to use it, which kind to use. And today we'll talk about all that, but also even more important about what goes on in the soil beneath that mulch layer when you mulch with an organic material.

My guest today to explain all that is Bill Fonteno, Professor Emeritus of Horticultural Science at North Carolina State University and former technical advisor to the U.S. Mulch and Soil Council, the industry trade association. 

With the explosion of interest in native plants in recent years, I know I'm not alone among gardeners who are scouring catalogs and specialty nurseries, looking for the right native to match every garden purpose, from trees on down to groundcovers. A new book by Uli Lorimer, director of horticulture at Native Plant Trust, has added some plants to my wishlist, including some native annuals. And it even has me pondering diversifying my lawn with some violets and hunting down a few more native vines and...oh my goodness. 

Uli Lorimer, author of the just-published book “The Northeast Native Plant Primer,” has made a career of working with native plants. He was longtime curator of the native flora garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. And in 2019, became director of horticulture at Native Plant Trust, America's oldest plant conservation organization, which was founded in 1900 as New England Wildflower Society. 

Today, we're going to do some gravel gardening—not merely applying a thin mulch-like top dressing of gravel to a garden bed, but planting right into a deliberate foundation of 4 or 5 inches of gravel. My guest is Jeff Epping, director of horticulture at Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, Wisc., where he created his first gravel garden in 2009. We'll learn what makes gravel gardens so appealing and how to create one, too. 

That first gravel garden at Olbrich Botanical Gardens that Jeff Epping and his team created wasn't the last. There have been three more since, and gravel gardens created elsewhere for clients. Jeff, who lectures regularly to garden audiences around the country about his passion for gravel gardens, even transformed the front yard of his home to one in 2018, and he's here to tell us why and how.

Have you ever grown a carnivorous plant—a Venus flytrap or sundew or pitcher plant, perhaps? I bet even a lot of keen gardeners haven't. Today's guest is going to encourage us to change that and maybe, as a start, adopt one that you can cultivate on your windowsill even. 

All in time for International Carnivorous Plant Day on Wednesday, May 4th, we're also going to learn about the plight of carnivorous plants in the wild, where they're disproportionately endangered. 

Kenny Coogan is a board member and education director for the International Carnivorous Plant Society. Kenny's also author of the recent book “Florida's Carnivorous Plants,” and he operates a carnivorous plant nursery in Florida. 

I’m thinking about Trilliums – prompted not just because these treasured spring ephemerals are coming into their season, but by the disturbing news in a report just published that found that 32 percent of all North American Trillium species or varieties are threatened with extinction. My guest is Amy Highland, the Director of Collections and Conservation Lead at Mt. Cuba Center, a botanic garden and native plant conservation nonprofit in Delaware, one of three organizations behind the findings.  

As Mt. Cuba Center’s director of collections and conservation lead, Amy Highland, a graduate of Purdue University’s Public Horticulture program, has traveled throughout the temperate forests of North America to find rare plants in need of conservation. She’s here today to talk trilliums—and also how we as gardeners can be more involved in conservation of native plants over all. 

Finally, the first fresh flavors of spring are starting to show up at the farmer's markets, and before long in our gardens, with more to come every unfolding week. Chef and cookbook author Justin Chapple, who's also the “Food & Wine” culinary director at large, is here to help us with ideas to use the coming bounty, including easy but transformational DIY salad dressings and more. 

Justin is known for his energetic and very approachable style, creating what he calls “built-to-be-easy recipes." As part of his role at “Food & Wine,” he hosts their video series called “Mad Genius Tips,” the title of his first book, and he authored another called “Just Cook It.”

Even though I don't live anywhere near St. Louis, one of my most used and appreciated resources for plant information over many, many years has been the Missouri Botanical Garden, with its world-class offerings to gardeners both in person and online. One feature I look forward to each year is the garden's annual Plants of Merit list, and today we're going to talk about those standout varieties just in time to guide your springtime plant shopping. 

My guest today is Daria McKelvey, supervisor of the Kemper Center for Home Gardening at the Missouri Botanical Garden, where she oversees its extensive indoor and outdoor gardens, its Plant Doctor answer line, and a lot of the website features I mentioned that I rely on so much. 

Do I need a soil test? And what kind of amendments should I be adding to my vegetable beds or containers to get things off to a good start? And how can I fine tune my composting this year to optimize results? Those are some of the timely questions I covered with Annie Novak, manager of the Edible Academy at the New York Botanical Garden. 

Annie is also founder and director of Growing Chefs, a field-to-fork food education program, and co-founder of Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Plus, she wrote “The Rooftop Growing Guide.” 

Annie will be one of the expert presenters at the upcoming Workshop Experience Weekend, May 7th and 8th, in the Hudson Valley of New York that I'm helping organize. 

I thought my obsession with Angelica blooms was a serious one until recently, when I met Sam Keitch of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, who takes it one step further. Sam has a passion for various other garden-worthy, umbel-shaped flowers—not just various angelicas, but other plants in the family related to carrots and parsley. 

Sam Keitch is Project Manager for Public Landscapes at the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society in Philadelphia, where he creates ecologically driven designs, often in urban settings, enticing pollinators and other beneficials to enjoy the gardens as much as the many human visitors do.

What's your most important gardening tool? A new public television series reminds us that it's not a trowel or pruner or spade, but our body, which can also be stressed by gardening if we don't know how to look after it. "Taking care of your body while taking care of your garden, that's our mission," the creators of the GardenFit program say. 

Today's guests are the creators of the new GardenFit series on public television, a sort of reality show meets season long garden tour that takes us on visits to distinctive private gardens around the country. We visit not just the places, but meet the gardeners behind them and learn what ails them, so to speak, what they could do better to care for themselves, and to stay, as the title of the series says, garden fit. The prescription for that is provided by co-host Jeff Hughes, a fitness trainer who incorporates a cognitive slant into conventional training practices, who teamed with Madeline Hooper, a former public relations executive and passionate gardener,  to create the program. 

In late winter, we gardeners rev up around sowing those first seeds indoors under lights. But the promise of a bountiful vegetable garden that keeps on giving doesn't end there. Now is also the moment to make succession-sowing plans for the longer haul, too. 

A range of the smartest tactics to accomplish that is our topic today with Meg Cowden, author of a new book called “Plant Grow Harvest Repeat.”   Meg Cowden gardens in the Upper Midwest in Zone 4b Minnesota, but that doesn't deter her from eking out an extended harvest of a diversity of edibles that anyone, anywhere would envy. How she accomplished that is the subject of the new book.

Gardeners have increasingly heard the call to reduce or eliminate their use of peat moss, the most familiar ingredient in seed-starting mixes and potting soils—one that a lot of us have long relied on. But peat is not sustainable, and its harvest releases substantial CO2, a greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. So what to use instead? 

That's our topic today with North Carolina State University Professor Brian Jackson, an expert in soilless growing media or soilless substrates, as they are also called.   Brian Jackson is a professor in the Department of Horticultural Science at North Carolina State, and director of the university's Horticultural Substrate Laboratory. He's one of perhaps five U.S. scientists at public universities studying these materials and their role in horticulture and agriculture.

Sick of winter? What I find helps, besides the occasional warmish, sunny day, is thinking about tomatoes. And that's what we're going to do today with Craig LeHoullier, author of the hit 2014 book “Epic Tomatoes,” who has over the years grown some 3,000 varieties in his home garden and adds new ones to his list every year

Craig, who gardens in North Carolina, is a retired chemist with a longtime passion for tomatoes. He's the co-founder of the Dwarf Tomato Project, an advisor on tomatoes to Seed Savers Exchange, and the person who in 1990 named the popular heirloom Cherokee Purple from seed that had been passed down and eventually made its way to him. 

While most of us focus on keeping deer from browsing our gardens, Brad Roeller actually once managed what was called a Deer Browse Garden as part of a 10-year research study to learn more about what these big herbivores do, and don't do, when offered the opportunity—and how different strategies affect their behavior. Tips for gardening where deer are present is today's topic.  

Brad has held top horticultural positions at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, at the New York Botanical Garden, and on a private estate. He's currently a trustee at Innisfree Garden in Millbrook, where he'll give a virtual talk on Wednesday afternoon, February 23, on effective solutions for dealing with deer.

There's an old expression in gardening, a folksy piece of advice that states: "Don't fight the site." 

James Golden has been guided by a more nuanced version of that idea in creating a much praised garden, a wildish, unexpected landscape in New Jersey called Federal Twist. It was even featured on the hit BBC program “Gardeners' World" with Monty Don. I've been reading James's new book about Federal Twist, and just like that old garden adage, a lot of his philosophy of garden making is about acceptance, about letting the place tell you what it wants to be. 

James Golden came to garden making later in life, when he was preparing to retire from a writing job in the corporate world. His new book is “The View from Federal Twist: A New Way of Thinking About Gardens, Nature, and Ourselves.” 

It's hard to name another genus of shrub that's more beloved by gardeners than Hydrangea. But with the overwhelming popularity of Asian species, like the big blue mop heads and summer into fall Hydrangea paniculata types, where do hydrangeas fit in as more and more gardeners favor native plants, and especially ones that support pollinators and other beneficial insects?

The native plant experts at Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware have just released a report on the results of a five-year trial, that focused mostly on an important native species, Hydrangea arborescens, and what both gardeners and pollinators have to say about its range of cultivars. 

The last time Sam Hoadley visited the show, we compared the dizzying range of cultivars and species of echinacea. Today's topic is hydrangeas. Sam is the manager of horticultural research at Mt. Cuba Center, a long time native plant garden and research site, where he trialed 29 species in cultivars. Before joining Mt. Cuba, he was lead horticulturist for Longwood Gardens Hillside Garden, and he received his degree in sustainable horticulture from University of Vermont. 

When I saw news of an upcoming webinar about invasive plants listed on the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's website, I knew I wanted to sign up and listen in. And also that I wanted to talk to the presenter, who founded a business in 2016 to help private and public land owners with the remediation of Japanese knotweed, multiflora rose, Oriental bittersweet, and other thugs that are crowding out native plants and destroying wildlife habitat. Invasives are our topic today. 

Our guest is Christian Allyn, who founded Invasive Plant Solutions when he was still pursuing a double major in horticulture and economics at the University of Connecticut. Rather than just watch the continuing ravaging of natural habitats by invasive species in Connecticut and Massachusetts where he practices, he decided to do something, to make it his career path. 

"This does not have to be our reality," he says, "We can choose to restore nature." 

As regular readers and listeners know, I've had a longtime interest in the organic seed movement, especially farm-based companies that grow at least some of the seed they sell and are proud to tell you where they source the rest. I like to know where my seed comes from. 

Lately I've had the pleasure of getting to know a number of new-to-me companies, including Truelove Seeds of Philadelphia, whose website promises culturally important, open-pollinated seeds to people “longing for their taste of home.” Today's guest is Owen Taylor, one of its co-founders.

With Christopher Bolden-Newsome, Owen Taylor started Truelove Seeds, which offers a diversity of vegetable, flower and herb seed from more than 50 small-scale urban and rural farmers committed to community food sovereignty, cultural preservation, and sustainable agriculture, and who each share in the sales price of every seed packet sold.

The other night I hosted an online class about shade gardening, featuring Ken Druse, whom I met in 1992-ish, almost exactly 30 years ago to the day, when I interviewed him on the publication of his book “The Natural Shade Garden.” In 2015, Ken wrote a whole new shade book appropriately called “The New Shade Garden,” so I guess you can tell that shade gardening has been a consistent theme of his work in his own gardening efforts, and it's our topic today. 

You all know Ken, author and photographer of 20 garden books and a daring gardener and plant propagator. He spoke to me from his garden among the trees in New Jersey, to talk shade.  

Did you maybe get or give a cookbook or two for a holiday gift? Well, hopefully you can make room on the shelf for another couple of good ones. Our expert guide who's been browsing and cooking from the latest crop is Alexandra Stafford, aka Ali, who has some goodies to share—perfect fodder for another January of sticking close to home as I know a lot of us are again with cooking as one of our mainstays of comfort and creativity.  

Ali Stafford, author of the essential cookbook “Bread Toast Crumbs” and creator of the website alexandracooks.com, is here to highlight some of the recent cookbook titles that she's finding irresistible. They range from topics like cooking more vegetable-centric means, to creative use of grains, and yes, even more ideas for delicious cookies. 

Uh-oh, now I've learned that there's another plant I didn't think I could grow in my Northern garden, but it sounds like I can. Hello, Crinum lilies, you gorgeous size-XL bulbs that I thought were the domain of Southern gardeners only, and not for me. 

A new book about them by Jenks Farmer is teaching me otherwise, and making me want to order some bulbs.  

Augustus Jenkins Farmer, aka Jenks Farmer, is a longtime horticulturist and garden designer who's former director of Riverbank Botanical Garden in South Carolina and author of a couple of previous books. These days, he is, true to his surname, also a farmer specializing in growing and selling crinum lilies and a few other goodies from his organically managed 18th-century South Carolina farm. His new self-published book is called “Crinum: Unearthing the History and Cultivation of the World's Biggest Bulb.”   

"To discover and share knowledge about plants and their environment in order to preserve and enrich life." – Missouri Botanical Garden mission

Founded in 1859, the Missouri Botanical Garden is the nation's oldest botanical garden in continuous operation and a National Historic Landmark.

The Garden is a center for botanical research and science education, as well as an oasis in the city of St. Louis. The Garden offers 79 acres of beautiful horticultural display, including a 14-acre Japanese strolling garden, historic architecture, and one of the world's largest collections of rare and endangered flora.

For over 158 years, the Garden has been an oasis in the city, a place of beauty and family fun—and also a center for education, science, and conservation.

Being an ever-better gardener means staying open to change. As long as we've both been gardening, my friend Joe Lamp'l was saying to me the other day, we're still evolving, still learning lessons every single growing season. We were comparing notes on the phone about the season we just each put to bed, Joe in Atlanta and me up north in New York State, and decided to bring you into the conversation about what 2021 taught us and what we've got planned 2022, in case our aha's can help you be a better gardener too. 

Joe is the longtime creator and host of the public-television program “Growing A Greener World” and also of the “Joe Gardener Podcast.”

 As if he needed more to do, in recent years, he's created something else, the Joe Gardener Online Gardening Academy, a curriculum of virtual courses on topics from seeds to tomato, pests and weeds, to soil science and lots more. 

When Ken Druse and I talked on the program a couple of weeks ago about putting our tools away for the winter, all cleaned and oiled, one part we failed to mention: We're both eyeing some new tools, too, for the year ahead. 

All of them would make great gifts, we think, so that's today's topic: stuff we love or covet, for gifting or treating yourself to. 'Tis the season and all that, right? So ho, ho, ho.

I'm eyeing a vintage glass cookie jar I haven't used in years, and a big glass snifter, too, that's been sitting idle on a shelf in the sideboard for ages. And I'm thinking terrariums, and I'm thinking holiday centerpiece, or maybe a gift or two. Are you feeling crafty? Today's guest has expert how-to and design help for creating tiny landscapes under glass. 

Patricia Buzo started her terrarium design business, Doodle Bird Terrariums, in 2008, and sells her creations on Etsy. She's also author of the recent book, “A Family Guide to Terrariums for Kids,” which is suited to inspiring would-be terrarium makers of all ages—even me. 

Some of the most beautiful and intricate creatures in the garden are not plants at all. A diversity of lichens are showing off right now on tree bark and branches, on stones, on unpainted garden furniture and even soil, more visible since many of the garden's plants have quieted down visually for their dormant season. Let's go on a virtual lichen walk with lichenologist Jessica Allen, co-author of a new book on the subject.

Jessica Allen is an Assistant Professor of Integrative Plant Biology at Eastern Washington University. And before that she pursued her PhD at New York Botanical Garden in a joint program with the City University of New York. At NYBG she met lichenologist James Lendemer, and years later, when she conceived of creating the new book, “Urban Lichens: A Field Guide for Northeastern North America,” she invited him to collaborate, as they have continued to do on lichen research work over the years.

Author Marta McDowell, a gardener and landscape designer in contemporary New Jersey, has an enduring passion for digging into history, particularly into noted authors and their gardens—what she calls the “connection between the pen and the trowel.” She's written books from that vantage point on Emily Dickinson, Beatrix Potter and Laura Ingalls Wilder, and now her latest is on the prolific author Frances Hodgson Burnett, author of the classic “The Secret Garden.” 

Marta McDowell also lectures extensively, and teaches landscape history and horticulture at New York Botanical Garden. She's here today to talk about the subject of her latest book, “Unearthing The Secret Garden: The Plants And Places That Inspired Frances Hodgson Burnett.”

It's been a strangely mild fall so far in the Northeast, where Ken Druse and I both garden. But as some recent overnight freezes served as a reminder: Get the must-do chores done or else, because who knows when the weather will lower the boom for good. 

On our lists, still: collecting some seeds of natives to sow later and cleaning and preparing tools for storage; lifting tender bulbs and tubers to stash; where to overwinter the nursery pots of things we bought that never found their permanent home in the ground (oops).

Ken, author of 20 garden books and an old friend, is back today to help with the countdown, to getting the garden really tucked in for the winter ahead, and especially to remind himself and me and all of us not to get lulled into procrastination, even if it has been in the 60s some days here the last week. 

Designer David Culp sees the garden in layers, but not just the most obvious landscape ones most of us do—meaning the canopy, the shrub layer and ground-covering plants. His view of the garden is more like 3D chess and then some: layers of color, texture, shape, and even the layer of time. He's here to offer us advice for looking at our garden’s many aspects with an eye to strengthening the overall impact. 

David has been making his own 2-acre garden in Pennsylvania for about 30 growing seasons, yet he still looks to tweak it regularly, to continue to fine-tune. David, a longtime teacher at Longwood Gardens, is lately teaching online in popular monthly webinars, hosted by Jim Peterson, the publisher of “Garden Design,” with their next one coming up November 11th. 

He's the author of “The Layered Garden: Design Lessons for Year-Round Beauty from Brandywine Cottage,” and a follow-up book last year, “A Year at Brandywine Cottage: Six Seasons Of Beauty, Bounty and Blooms.”

When I saw news of a popular new garden book called “The Heirloom Gardener,” I thought it would be about growing vegetables or flowers of old-time, open-pollinated varieties maybe. You know: of heirlooms. But John Forti's latest book is about much more, about not just traditional plants, but traditional practices, too, that serve to connect us to the environment and to one another.  

John Forti is a garden historian and heirloom specialist and ethnobotanist, and a longtime leader in the slow-foods movement. He's currently the executive director of Bedrock Gardens landscape and sculpture garden in New Hampshire. 

What are the forward-looking steps in your fall garden routine—the most important tasks you take now to get your garden tucked in, that really focus on success next year? Over at the part-farm, par-garden of Lee Reich in the Hudson Valley of New York State, his emphasis is on building soil health, and also on stashing his tender potted figs, so they're primed for another productive fruiting season in the year to come.

Lee Reich has degrees in horticulture, soil science and chemistry, and is the author of many books, including the just out one called “Growing Figs in Cold Climates.” He's a long time no-till organic gardener, and an expert pruner, and a grower of many unusual fruits, and someone I've turned to for advice for my own garden countless times over many years. He offered some advice to help us tuck in smarter.

"What do you want to talk about when we tape our next podcast segment, I asked Ken Druse the other day, and his answer was succinct. 

"Monocots," he said. 

To which I said, "What?" 

"I want to talk about monocotyledons," he said, using the unabbreviated name of one of the two groups that all flowering plants fit into, the other being dicots. And so we will. And yes, it's geeky, but also a lot more revealing than you'd imagine. And also a hint that seemingly esoteric facts like the taxonomic relationships between plants can make for fun themes for a plant collection, or even a concept for a bed or border or display of grouped containers. 

Ken Druse is an old friend and a garden writer with 20 books to his credit, and most recently, one about fragrance called “The Scentual Garden,” and another called “The New Shade Garden.” He made a visit the other day to Wave Hill, the renowned public garden in New York City, where they have a whole monocot border that was in its glory, and hence our topic today: plants that are monocots and why to care. 

Have you made room in the compost heap for all that incoming organic material about to be created during your fall cleanup? Compost is today's topic with Associate Director Cary Oshins of the US Composting Council.

And we'll talk about everything from best how-to practices to improve your results, to all those claims about compostable plastic bags and devices promising to make instant compost. 

Cary Oshins is a life-long backyard composter, besides his day job at the composting industry group that was founded in 1990 to promote compost utilization and recycling of organic materials to benefit its members, society, and the environment.

He lent some of his insights at this key moment in our composting year.

I'm always looking for more places to tuck native plantings, and my current mission is along my property edges, where I'm adding a more complex layer of shrubs and small trees adjacent to the big old canopy-level ones to increase habitat for beneficial insects and birds, in particular. 

I've been turning to today's guest for suggestions, and now we want to share some of our ideas with you for garden-sized native woody plants to enhance the diversity of your landscape. 

Marc Wolf is director of Mountain Top Arboretum in the Catskills of New York, 178-acre public garden that's open every day of the year, and where managing native plant communities is the focus. Marc has a particular appreciation for small native trees that we too often overlook, and we'll talk about some of his favorites and also a palette of native shrubs to delight you and the bees and the birds. 

I've been scouting around in my garden for orphaned plants, ones that used to be in visually pleasing clumps or masses, but because of expanding shade or a naughty vole or who knows what, aren't looking as good as they used to. Over in New Jersey, Ken Druse has been digging and dividing some perennials, too, but for different reasons. 

And that's our topic today: what and when and why and how to dig and divide. 

Ken Druse is author of 20 garden books, and gardens on a small island in a river in New Jersey, which sometimes backfires as it did recently during Hurricane Ida, when the place flooded. He's no longer under water, and he's here to help us learn to dig and divide our way to a better garden. 

Today we're going to get a lesson in winter sowing, sowing seeds in fall and early winter outside in a protected spot, a sort of easy DIY home nursery for making more plants. What we'll learn to propagate that way are specifically seeds of native plants—both meadow perennials, like asters and Joe Pye weed, and also various shrubs and even trees. 

My guest is Heather McCargo, who founded the nonprofit Wild Seed Project in Maine in 2014 and has been growing natives from seed for 35 years.

Native plants’ wild populations have shrunk alarmingly in that time. The mission of Heather’s Wild Seed Project is to inspire and teach more of us to grow natives and use them to repopulate the landscape, whether our home gardens or maybe a community project, like at a park or school or beyond.

The days are getting shorter, and in my Northern garden, they're growing cooler, too. I know my houseplants will be screaming soon to come back inside, and then screaming all winter about the less-than-ideal conditions I'm offering, and how they'd like me to do better, please.

Darryl Cheng does better, using all the technical insights he can to make more than 100 houseplants feel at home in his Toronto condominium. But he also accepts that his place is not a conservatory or commercial greenhouse. It's not perfect. 

Darryl Cheng is better known on Instagram as @houseplantjournal, and as one of his 620,000 followers, I can say I enjoy being treated to his frequent posts, showing off his latest insights from ambitiously growing a condo-full of diverse houseplants. He began sharing his earliest houseplant adventures on Tumblr in 2013, and has grown his audience and more, more, more houseplants exponentially ever since. He's the author of the book “The New Plant Parent,” and creates the popular website, houseplantjournal.com.

Today's guest answers even more Urgent Garden Questions each year than I do, in her role as plant clinic manager at The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois—including lots each summer and fall about caterpillars galore, from bagworms to gypsy moths and fall webworms. 

Besides being an arboretum and public garden, The Morton is a world-class 1,700-acre research center, conservation and education organization, and it's preparing to mark its centennial in 2022.

Last year, 17,000 questions arrived by phone, email, or in person at the plant clinic, questions representing consumers from 48 states. Julie is a former landscape designer who has managed the arboretum's free plant clinic for three years, after volunteering there for five years before that. 

Julie and I talked about the most common questions we each get from gardeners, including ones about Magnolia scale and about all those hungry caterpillars and what to do to limit them next year.

Here's how my head, which is always lost in the garden, I guess, works: The first thing I thought about when the pandemic started—when we got news of a new pathogen in the world—was how many plant pathogens I've written about in my career, and the trajectories of each of them. 

Dr. Margaret McGrath is a longtime vegetable pathologist for Cornell University, whom I've turned to over and again to better understand many such plant diseases. Meg, in turn, turns to backyard gardeners, like us, to help her learn more about basil downy mildew and late blight in tomatoes and, now, cucurbit downy mildew too.

It's true, she wants to know what we're seeing in our backyards. We can help her and vice versa. 

Besides her role as a scientist at Cornell's Long Island Horticultural Research and Extension Center in Riverhead, New York, Meg McGrath is a keen gardener. Her applied research aims to improve the management of important vegetable diseases, and develop effective components for integrated pest management programs. 

Maybe you, like I do, have certain perennial beds that could use editing and some particular plants that need dividing in the process. That's just one focus of today's guest, Toshi Yano, in his role as director of horticulture at Wethersfield, a former private estate turned public garden in the Hudson Valley of New York, He'll tell us the how-to, and also about visiting this special place. 

Toshi is in his third year as director of horticulture at the former estate called Wethersfield garden in Dutchess County, New York, with its 3-acre formal gardens plus 7 acres of wilderness garden and commanding views of the Catskills and Berkshire Mountains. 

Toshi and his team are bringing the gardens back to life, and he told me about the place, and specifically about the tasks of editing and dividing that every perennial gardener needs to do, whatever their garden scale. 

Texture and Variegation With Ken Druse - A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach - August 16, 2021

Ken Druse called the other day to say that he and his garden have the August lulls. The sort of annual dog days experience when it's way past spring, and still way before fall color, when maybe even some of the annuals you potted up or put into your beds in May for summer color might be starting to look less perky, too. 

"What holds the garden together in such a moment?" he asked as we chatted, and as he looked out the window. 

Texture, primarily we agreed, and at Ken's, especially some refreshing splashes of variegation and definitely the freshness of some white flowers. Using all of those effectively is our topic today. 

You all know Ken Druse as a regular visitor to my podcast, and author of 20 garden books and longtime friend. When he's not managing the antics of two troublemaking but gorgeous canines, he manages his extensive garden in New Jersey.  

In a recent industry newsletter, I saw a link to a story about the herbicide called horticultural vinegar, and clicked on it. And then, realizing how little I knew about this product that I see prominently displayed in every garden center I visit, I wrote to the story’s authors at Montana State University to ask them to tell me more. 

In our subsequent series of conversations, I learned a lot about these high-concentration vinegars, and most of all about reading product labels to be a smarter, safer consumer. 

Noelle Orloff is the Weed and Invasive Plant Identification Diagnostician at Montana State's Schutter Diagnostic Lab, where she identifies plants submitted by growers, ranchers and homeowners, and provides management recommendations if needed. She's also a passionate home gardener, and I'm so glad to continue our conversation out loud here today with all of you listening. 

By the time we hit August, some plants in the garden are a little beat up—or have at least needed deadheading, or even wholesale cutting back, perhaps. 

As delicate as they might look texturally from the moment of their first emergence in spring, though, the ones that always startle me by their incredible toughness are the ferns. That's our topic today, ferns—and specifically native ones—with Uli Lorimer of Native Plant Trust, who will tell us some fern lore and some fern care, and even how they reproduce so we can propagate more of them ourselves. 

Uli Lorimer has made a career of working with native plants. He was longtime curator of the Native Flora Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. And in 2019 became Director of Horticulture at Native Plant Trust, the former New England Wild Flower Society, and America's oldest plant conservation organization, founded in 1900. 

Don't answer this question too quickly; take your time and think it over. How many mints are you growing in your garden? When Ken Druse suggested the other day to me that we talk about mints on the show. I thought, "Spearmint, peppermint, what?" 

But then I thought a moment longer and looked around and realized there were mint family relatives all over the garden, even unintentionally among the lawn weeds. So the many faces of mints is our topic today, but first these messages.

You all know Ken Druse, a regular visitor to the show and author of 20 garden books and also a longtime friend. When he's not managing the antics of two troublemaking but gorgeous canines, he manages his extensive garden in New Jersey. 

I was at the local garden center the other day, when a truck full of tropical plants was being unloaded. And in the heat of a summer day, they looked like just the right choice to bring home to liven up the place. But which ones among the many choices could become what Marianne Willburn calls “best friends,” and carry over year to year without too much fuss?

Marianne Willburn, author of the new book, “Tropical Plants and How to Love Them,” is a regular contributor to “Better Homes and Gardens” magazine, and to the popular multi-author garden website, Garden Rant dot com. She gardens in Northern Virginia and yes, a lot of the non-hardy things we call tropicals are among her faithful garden companions. 

How many bird species are there in the world and how many individual birds? And how do you even try to count? 

Do bird sweat, and how is their eyesight or sense of smell? What makes some eggs solid blue and others speckled brown, or are any two species’eggs the same size and shape and color? Well, these are just a tiny fraction of the disparate and fascinating questions answered in the new book called “Birdpedia” by today's guest, Christopher Leahy.  

Christopher Leahy retired in June 2017 from a 45-year career as a professional conservationist with the Massachusetts Audubon Society, and was for 16 years director of its Center for Biological Conservation. He's the author of numerous books, most recently, “Birdpedia: A Brief Compendium of Avian Lore,” our topic today. 

I've been looking forward to connecting with Patrick McMillan, who last October took over as director of the exceptional plant collection and astonishing landscape that is Heronswood Garden in Kingston, Washington. 

Besides wanting to know what's next there at a place that's been known for a long time for its influence on American gardeners, Patrick has a personal passion I'm very curious about. It's what he calls “natural community gardening,” as in taking our cues from habitats or plant communities in nature to guide how we design and care for our gardens.

Patrick came to Heronswood last fall from Clemson University in South Carolina, where he ran the South Carolina Botanical Garden and was a professor in the College of Agriculture, Forestry and Life Sciences. He also hosted a PBS series called “Expeditions with Patrick McMillan,” and led the development of the botanical garden’s Natural Heritage Garden. His motto, in his words: 

“No matter how large a garden space is, no matter what you're doing, you try to make your passion come to life on your piece of ground.”

I have a fascination for seeds of unusual edibles from around the world, and the other day on Instagram, I saw maybe the oddest one of all: What about growing a monkey puzzle tree from Chile from seed? And who even knew that tree produced edible nuts? 

O.K., so maybe that wasn't on the top of your list, but how about carrots that are gorgeous purple inside or a diversity of textural kales from far off places for your fall garden? Those and more to tempt you are our topic today, but first these messages.

It was Nate Kleinman who caught my attention with his social-media post about seed for that unusual conifer, the monkey puzzle tree. Nate is co-founder of Experimental Farm Network , a nonprofit cooperative of growers, whose mission includes the core belief that agriculture can and should be used to help build a better world. I love browsing their online seed catalog for its many distinctive possibilities, including some you can sow in these next weeks for late-season harvests. 

A story I wrote recently for my “New York Times” column took me on a fascinating, deep dive into the world of radicchio and put me back in touch with today's guest, organic seed farmer Brian Campbell of Uprising Seeds. 

Radicchio, with its long heritage in Northern Italy, isn't the only crop with Italian roots that the Uprising team is crazy about, so today we're going to meet leaf broccoli and cardoon, and some traditional Italian beans and beets, too, that would be just as at home in your vegetable garden. 

Brian Campbell, with his partner Crystine Goldberg, owns Uprising Seeds just north of Bellingham, Washington, which was the state's first certified organic seed company and features an assortment of exceptional vegetables and flowers. This year, they added the new Gusto Italiano Project to their lineup, a collection of radicchios and brassicas straight from Italy, and we talked about growing some of those selections and more. 

Today we're going to do some multiplication, as in: make more shrubs, thanks to a lesson in propagating favorites like Hydrangea or elderberry or Physocarpus and more, courtesy of our friend and regular guest, Ken Druse. Ready to learn the basics of shrub propagation and have plants to share or to repeat in your own garden?

You all know my old friend, Ken Druse, author of 20 garden books. So rather than repeat the rest of his bio, I'll share some news. Ken's being honored the evening of June 17th, 2021 by Rutgers Gardens, the botanical garden of Rutgers University in New Jersey. 

And I'll have information with the transcript of this show on awaytogarden.com on how to buy a ticket for that virtual event, which of course I would not miss. The celebratory evening includes a video tour of his garden at peak bloom, and also a live Q&A session. 

Looking around the garden as some of spring's show off shrubs and perennials fade, I realized how glad I am that I made room for some garden-sized trees too. Not too big and not too small, and the best of them are offering more than a single season of interest. Choice trees for the garden, and also some unexpected ways to use them is our topic today.

Here today to talk garden-sized trees and where at your place to make room for some to the best possible effect is Bruce Crawford,who from 2005 to 2020 was the director of Rutgers Gardens, the Botanical Garden for Rutgers University. He's currently the State Program Leader for Home and Public Horticulture with the New Jersey Agricultural Experiment Station, and a longtime instructor in the landscape architecture program at Rutgers.

Environmentalist and best-selling author, Jonathan Drori, says that for him, plant science is fascinating, but it's truly enlivened when it's entwined with human history and culture. In his new book, “Around the World in 80 Plants,” the followup to his hit “Around the World in 80 Trees,” he does just that. He enlivens plants both obscure and as familiar as the common potato.  

There are many plants we may not know at all, so everything about them is a surprise, of course, when we first come across them, but even commonplace plants like the dandelion have untold stories to share. Dandelions and 79 others are profiled in Jonathan Drori's new book, “Around the World in 80 Plants.” Jonathan, a former BBC documentarian who for nine years was a trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, is on the board of Cambridge University Botanic Garden, a trustee of the World Wildlife Fund, a fellow of the Linnaean Society and more.    

Ken Druse and I are putting a new spin on weeding by giving it a new name: treasure hunting. Maybe the incessant, relentless nature of all those naughty things that keep popping up around the garden beds will be softened if we focus instead on the fact that we might just come upon some real goodies as we seek to rogue out the bad. 

Discovering treasure while we ferret out the trash, the trash being the self-sowns and other desirable volunteers the garden wants to give us is our topic today. 

Today’s guest, Ken Druse, is not a guest, exactly, but a regular on the show, a longtime friend and the author of an astonishing 20 gorgeous books about gardening. I’m so glad he’s here at this moment—when I am frankly having a bad case of garden overwhelm—to just commiserate and talk about what he’s finding out there in his own garden as he makes his rounds. 

One dimension of my friendship with today's guest is a years-long ongoing barter. She shares her cooking expertise with me and my extended family, and I give Alexandra Stafford and her husband gardening advice. It's a pretty sweet deal, and today Ali, creator of the indispensable alexandracooks.com website, is here to swap asparagus wisdoms, because 'tis the season.

On her Alexandra's Kitchen website or her extremely popular Instagram account @AlexandraCooks, Ali Stafford is always teaching, whether a technique that provides the aha we need to unlock the secret to a recipe, or how to use the best of-the-moment recipe ingredients in inspired combinations, especially vegetables and herbs. And if you haven't tried her no-knead bread recipe that's the foundation of her cookbook, “Bread Toast Crumbs,” well, you need to. 

I just read a book that filled me with wonder and awe. Now, would it startle you to hear that it was a book about wasps? Don’t cringe and turn away; listen as I talk to entomologist Eric Eaton, author of the new book, “Wasps: The Astonishing Diversity of a Misunderstood Insect.” 

The world would be a much worse place without wasps, if it were a place at all, is what I came away thinking about after reading Eaton's new book. Eaton is previously lead author on the “Insects of North America” volume in the popular “Kaufman Field Guide” series. We talked about fear of wasps, yes, and what to do when they set up housekeeping by your back porch, but also about how much they contribute to the environment. 

It's Trillium Week the first week of May at Garden In The Woods, the headquarters of Native Plant Trust in Framingham, Massachusetts, the nation's oldest plant conservation organization with more than a century of history. Well, with a little help from today's guest, it can be Trillium Week in your garden, too, around this time each year.

Uli Lorimer has made a career of working with native plants, including a diversity of trillium species. He was longtime curator of the Native Flora Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and in 2019, became director of horticulture at Native Plant Trust, the former New England Wild Flower Society, which was founded in 1900.

I watched a Zoom lecture the other day that really put into words a lot of the ways my own deepening understanding of ecology is shaking up the way I practice horticulture—from spring cleanup, right on to the last chore of the active year. 

The speaker was today's guest, Rebecca McMackin, director of horticulture for Brooklyn Bridge Park, where she leads the team that manages 85 acres of diverse parkland with a central focus on habitat creation of woodlands, wetlands, and meadows to build soils and support birds, butterflies, and other organisms. We talked about the dynamic tactics they use and when and why. Rebecca has worked at Brooklyn Bridge Park in New York City for over a decade. She has two master's degrees, in landscape design and in biology, and has served on the board of the Ecological Landscape Alliance. She’s currently vice president of Metro Hort Group, a professional organization in the city. 

There's the so-called language of flowers, as in the symbolism or sentiment attributed to a rose versus a pansy or a daisy. And then there's the actual language of flowers in botany, as in what's a sepal or a tepal and a bract, or what's a perfect flower technically speaking? 

Those are some of the many eclectic lessons, both scientific historical and just plant fascinating, that I took away from a new little book with a big name, “Florapedia,” by Carol Gracie, with the subtitle “A Brief Compendium of Floral Lore.”

Carol is a naturalist and photographer and popular lecturer who has written several previous books on wildflowers, including “Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast” and “Summer Wildflowers of the Northeast,” two favorites in my cupboard here. 

They're among the most popular and good-for-you vegetables, but brassicas—broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts and the like—can also be a little tricky to grow unless you start with the right variety, get the timing right, and have a preemptive action plan to outsmart pests. 

I got advice on how to accomplish all that from Steve Bellavia, who joined Johnny's Selected Seeds in 1993, where today he's product manager in their research department for peppers, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and Chinese cabbage. 

Every time over the years that I've spoken to today's guest, one word comes up: oak. If entomologist and University of Delaware Professor Doug Tallamy sounds a little fixated on native oaks, it's because they are the most powerful plant there is, and he wants us to be very clear on that and plant them. 

In his new book, “The Nature of Oaks: The Rich Ecology of Our Most Essential Native Trees,” he makes the case more strongly than ever, with twists and turns and the tales of all the creatures we depend on, who depend on the genus Quercus. 

Doug Tallamy is well-known to most every gardener as a longtime leading voice speaking in the name of native plants. His 2007 book, "Bringing Nature Home,", was for many of us, an introduction into the entire subject of the unbreakable link between native plants and native wildlife. He followed up with the 2020 “New York Times” bestseller, “Nature's Best Hope,” and now just out, “The Nature of Oaks.” 

Roses are ancient plants with a 35-million-year history on planet earth, so maybe it's no surprise then that they have been a fixture in nearly every culture and many religions, too. In his recent book, “Rosa: The Story of the Rose,” rosarian Peter Kukielski tells lots of the stories of this beloved flower and our relationship to it, and its place in our cultural history. 

Peter Kukielski is former curator of New York Botanical Garden’s Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden, where in 2008 to 2014, he implemented a new mission: to plant and trial roses for disease resistance and less chemical usage. He's the author of an earlier book “Roses Without Chemicals,” and the designer of a recent garden at the Royal Botanical Gardens in Ontario, Canada, a chemical-free province. And these days Peter gardens in Maine.

I met today's guest, Helen O'Donnell, at a plant sale a couple of springs ago, before the pandemic scuttled most such big public events. Spring sales like that, where multiple small growers of unusual specialty plants gather, are my favorite place to shop because I get not just unexpected new things to bring home, but also I get to learn from the proprietors as I browse about what each goody is and how to grow it.

So second-best, I've been inviting some of them to the radio show and podcast this year to browse with us aloud, including Helen O'Donnell of Bunker Farm Plants in Vermont, who’s here to talk about special annuals and perennials we may want to seek out for our gardens.

Helen owns Bunker Farm Plants, part of a family farm operation in Vermont that produces meat and maple syrup, besides Helen's own selection of exceptional garden flowers that she raises mostly from seed. She's also a garden designer, so her choice of plants always includes their ability to perform. 

Do you remember your very earliest gardening books—the ones that transported you into the world of plants, whether that was last year or years ago? Or other books that have earned a permanent spot on your bookshelf as old trusted friends along the way? Ken Druse and I got to talking on the phone about our favorite formative volumes the other day, and decided we'd let you in on the conversation, too. 

My regular alter ego, Ken Druse, needs no introduction, but he is of course the author of not a small number of gardening books himself, 20 at last count, including some I know changed the way I look at plants. He's back today to take a stroll through our mutual garden bookshelves.

You've heard the expression “companion planting,” as in: What plants supposedly “love” growing alongside what other plants? But how many such pairings are folklore, and how many stand up to research? 

In her new book, “Plant Partners,” Jessica Walliser looks at the scientific evidence and shares pairings that can help us minimize weeds or improve soil or attract needed pollinators or other beneficial insects.  

Jessica is a horticulturist and self-described devoted bug lover who gardens near Pittsburgh. She's the author of the earlier books “Attracting Beneficial Bugs to your Garden,” and “Good Bug, Bad Bug,” and co-founder of the popular website savvygardening.com. 

Any gardener shopping at a local nursery or paging through perennial plant catalogs can't help but notice there are a lot of Echinacea, or coneflowers, on the market—more every year, including in unexpected colors and some with extra-showy double flowers. 

But how good are all these new cultivars as garden plants? And maybe more important, how good are they at supporting pollinators? The native plant experts at Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware have just released a report on the results of a multi-year trial of Echinacea, and their insights are our topic today. 

Today's guest, Sam Hoadley, is manager of horticultural research at Mt. Cuba Center, a longtime native plant garden and research site, where he trialed 75 different Echinacea. Before joining Mt. Cuba, Sam was lead horticulturist for Longwood Gardens Hillside Garden, and he received his degree in sustainable landscape horticulture from University of Vermont. 

On the website of Far Reaches Farm rare plant nursery, shoppers can filter the plant listings by the usual expected things, like shrub or fern, or shade or sun, or hardiness zone. But there's also a filter for “shop by plant origin,” as in: where in the world each of the goodies hails from. And that filter hints at the fact that the nursery's owners are longtime plant explorers, and also preservationists.

 Kelly Dodson, who's here with me today, and Sue Milliken are the proprietors of Far Reaches Farm in Port Townsend, Washington, and also of the nonprofit Far Reaches Botanical Conservancy, that seeks to acquire and conserve horticulturally and botanically important rare plants, many of them from Asia. 

The subtitle of Ellen Ecker Ogden's latest book, “The New Heirloom Garden,” tells it all. "Designs, Recipes, and Heirloom Plants for Cooks Who Love to Garden," is how it reads. Throughout her career of writing, and lecturing, and teaching about kitchen gardening, Ellen always reminds us, it's not just the literal harvest and what we can cook up from it, but also the opportunity for beauty and for intimate engagement that the vegetable garden can offer.  

Ellen Ecker Ogden, with several books on food and gardens to her credit, was co-founder of the breakthrough seed catalog called The Cook's Garden, which introduced U.S. gardeners to a whole new palette of possibilities that back then were more familiar perhaps in Europe, but not here. She lives and gardens in Vermont, and I'm glad she's back today.  

Facing a forecast of heaps of snow the other day, Ken Druse and I got to dreaming on the phone together of more colorful times ahead. Of the emergence, not so very long in the future, of spring's first woodland perennials, natives that do their thing early beneath trees and shrubs. 

“Hey, let's make it another edition of our Desert Island Plants series on the radio show and podcast,” we decided. And so favorite natives of spring are the topic.

Talking about our most loved spring native woodland perennials is a perfect fit for Ken Druse, whose books “The Natural Shade Garden” in 1992 and “The New Shade Garden,” published in 2015, each covered a choice selection of such plants. He's back today on Skype from his own snowbank, a few hours’ drive away from mine, to think spring and its fantastic native perennials. Attachments area

How do you build a better carrot for organic farms and gardens, and how do you grow one for the best results? I discussed those topics with longtime carrot breeder Dr. Phil Simon, who shared a fascinating little carrot history, too—like who knew that the modern carrot’s ancestors originated in Afghanistan? 

Phil Simon has been breeding carrots for more than 40 years. He holds a joint position with the USDA's Agricultural Research Service and the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Horticulture Department. More likely than not, you've eaten carrots with genetics that have come from his breeding work. 

It will come as no surprise to regular listeners that I'm mad about small farm-based companies that sell seed grown without chemicals and with a regional focus. Seed matched to a particular set of conditions for best results. Today's guest is the founder of one such company, High Desert Seed in Colorado and even though I don't garden in the high desert, I confess I'm very tempted by the unique offerings like toothache plant and a gorgeous eggplant from India, all with wonderful stories behind them.  

Before Laura Parker founded High Desert Seed, she had many other seed adventures including working in India with activist and seed saver, Vandana Shiva and later back in the US becoming Executive Director of the Organic Seed Growers and Trade Association. She's here today to talk about the importance of regionally adapted seed and showcase some goodies she's working on and also drop some names of other companies whose catalogs we ought to be browsing. 

I'm on my third generation of seed-starting lights, a journey that began back in the day when shop lights with so-called cool-white and warm-white fluorescent tubes combined were all we gardeners knew. Eventually I moved up to newer, high-output fluorescents, and now maybe the switch to LEDs beckons. 

But how does a person shopping for grow lights find his or her way through the array of possibilities out there? That's today's topic, with horticulturist Leslie Halleck, author of the book “Gardening Under Lights” to help simplify things.

Sufficient light is maybe the biggest factor in the equation of success with seedlings and grow light technology is evolving fast. I asked Leslie to return to the show for a 101 on shopping for seed-starting lights suited to us as home gardeners. 

Parsley that was bred not for its leaves, but as a root crop. Or a winter squash with vivid green flesh, instead of orange. And perennial onions called potato onions that multiply. These are just a few of the wonders of genetic diversity I've been poring over in the new 2021 listings from the nonprofit seed cooperative called Experimental Farm Network, whose founder is here today to officially kick off seed-shopping season with me.

Last year, during catalog season, I was introduced to Nate Kleinman, who's co-founder of Experimental Farm Network dot org, a non-profit cooperative of growers, whose mission includes the core belief that agriculture can and should be used to help build a better world. I asked Nate back to my public radio show and podcast to widen our palette of possibilities to try this year from seed. Besides unusual varieties you may wish to make room for, he also suggested some other unusual sources whose catalogs to browse. 

A neighbor with a new cold frame emailed me the other day, seeing colder weather finally in the forecast and wanting to know how to extend his season even longer inside the unit. Well, serendipitously, later that day I went to the post office and found a review copy of Niki Jabbour's new book, “Growing Under Cover,” waiting for me, and had some answers for my neighbor.  

Despite living in Nova Scotia, writer Niki Jabbour is a year-round vegetable gardener, coaxing harvests out of every manner of season-extending device imaginable, from cloche to full-on polytunnel. She's the award-winning author of books that include “Veggie Garden Remix” and “The Year-Round Vegetable Gardener.” And she returned to my podcast to talk cold frames, one of the tactical approaches in her newest book, Growing Under Cover, a book that helps us not just lengthen the season, but also outsmart pests and increase productivity. 

They're the garden's biggest residents, relative space-hogs who also dictate a lot of what goes on with the patterns of light and shade. I'm talking about trees. Today, Ken Druse and I are going to name some names of favorites, our desert-island trees, if you will—the ones we can't imagine gardening without. 

You probably knew it when you heard us try to narrow down our lists of desert-island shrubs a month or two ago on the podcast, that trees would be next. This time we tried to narrow down our list of must-have trees and explain why we can't live without each one. 

You all know Ken, great gardener, great friend of many years, and author and photographer of 20 great gardening books. 

I've spoken recently on the show about my personal war on certain groundcovers I planted years ago that have turned out to be hideous thugs. Many other gardeners I hear from have likewise come to lament their overly cooperative, spreading plant choices, like rambunctious vinca or pachysandra. 

We all want groundcovers to do weed-suppressing duty and tie the garden together aesthetically, but the wrong choices can definitely backfire. Native groundcovers are a smarter alternative that will provide those and other benefits and they're today's topic.

My guest to talk about making the change is Duncan Himmelman of Mt. Cuba Center, the noted native plant garden and research center in Delaware, where he's the education manager. A course on native groundcovers taught by Duncan is one of the half-dozen on-demand recorded online courses that Mt. Cuba is currently offering.

A “New York Times” column I did recently happily put me back in touch with organic farmer Kate Spring, who in our past conversations has always taught me how to think smarter about when to start seeds—like how to time succession sowings of vegetables for an extended harvest well into fall. This time she gave me a 101 on another kind of seed-sowing, but indoors, preferably under lights, and starting right now as winter descends. Today's topic is mastering microgreens. 

Kate Spring, and her husband, Edge Fuentes, founded Good Heart Farmstead in Vermont in 2013, which serves up to 100 customers each season who subscribe to their CSA share program. Their organic farming business is kind of a hybrid business structure called an L3C, a low-profit, limited-liability company, where part of the mission is to support Vermonters in need of food access. 

Kate's also a writer and the only person I know with her very own brand new yurt, which I can't wait to hear about after having seen it be constructed on Instagram. Attachments area

Heirloom tomatoes and pumpkins you've heard of, but why shouldn't heirloom collards get just as much love—and space in our gardens? Tell the truth: Have you ever even grown collards, whether an old-time variety or otherwise? You should, and to that end, National Collards Week begins December 14th, spearheaded by Seed Savers Exchange, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, the Utopian Seed Project and others, and that seemed reason enough to me to dig in and learn about this delicious green.  

To talk collards I called Chris Smith, a serious seed saver and permaculturist and writer. Though he was born in the U.K., Chris has a particular passion for traditional Southern crops. He's executive director of the Utopian Seed Project, a crop trialing nonprofit working to celebrate food and farming, and his book, “The Whole Okra,” which we talked about on the show when it came out, won a James Beard Foundation Award in 2020.Attachments area

Yes, apparently more people gardened in 2020 than ever. And even before the holiday season was upon us, as it suddenly is, everyone was baking more than ever in this oddball year, too—and it seems publishing baking cookbooks at a prodigious rate as well. So today we're going to virtually bake together, or at least talk baking—like whether you should blind-bake that pie crust before filling it, plus ideas for goodies from cookies to snacking cakes, too. 

When Alexandra Stafford, author of the book “Bread Toast Crumbs” and creator of the website alexandracooks.com, has visited the podcast before in recent years, we've usually talked vegetable cookery or soups, because we're both big soup-makers. But 2020 is no normal year. And so what the hell? Let's bake. 

You've heard of comfort food and oh boy, have we all been hungry for that non-stop this crazy year. But how about comfort books—whether to keep yourself company as winter takes hold or to consider for gifting? That's today's topic with my writerly friend, Katrina Kenison, to help curate a collection for various tastes.

You may know Katrina Kenison as author of several books, including “The Gift of an Ordinary Day,” and “Magical Journey” and “Moments of Seeing.” She's a former literary editor at Houghton Mifflin, where she was series editor for “The Best American Short Stories” for 16 years and co-edited, with John Updike, “The Best American Short Stories of the Century.” Katrina's also a yoga teacher and an increasingly keen gardener in her own New Hampshire backyard. 

What if I told you there's a new way to shop for seed where your purchase yields not just the packets, but also educational support, and the invitation to share your feedback—to participate in a virtual seed trial essentially, citizen-science style. 

Now I know that was a mouthful, but it's a brave new increasingly virtual world out there. And I want us to get in on the ground floor and learn more about the promise and potential of a newish entity called SeedLinked.com that a number of expert friends are part of. 

One who is participating tipped me off to a selection of curated seed collections that are part of the bigger digital undertaking. To learn more I called Bjorn Bergman, who curated the SeedLinked lettuce collection and is also part of the SeedLinked team. 

Wisconsin-based Bjorn is, like each of us, an avid gardener, and he's also a long-time participant in various Seed Savers Exchange programs. And he confessed to being positively mad for growing and eating salad. 

A Way to Garden with Margaret Roach - November 16, 2020 - Emma Greig on Feeder Birds

A flock of robins visited my garden recently for a three-day long field day. By the time they decamped, I was down about 40 mature winterberry holly shrubs-worth of fruit, but we had fun together while the frenzy lasted. I love feeding birds with help from the garden plants or with supplemental birdseed too. And I love keeping records of who visits when. 

The annual winter-long citizen-science event called Project FeederWatch, from Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is just getting under way this week, as it does each November. So what better time to talk about just that: the best practices, and also what all the data is telling scientists and can tell you, too.  

Dr. Emma Greig leads Project FeederWatch at Cornell, a citizen-science effort with more than 30 years of history and more than 20,000 participants in North America who don't just feed birds, but also share their observations. She joined me on the latest radio segment and podcast. [Carolina wren photo by Dan Pancamo, from Wikimedia.]

Shrubs: I think of them as the sort of human-sized plants, and they definitely are the backbone of the garden. Ken Druse and I each have a lot of different shrubs, and I asked him the other day, "If you could only have three, which ones would they be?" Well, that's our topic today—desert island shrubs.

You all know Ken, old friend, great gardener, and author and photographer of 20 award-winning garden books. He helped me try to narrow down our list of must-have shrubs to the real standouts, and explain why which ones made the cut.  

“There's always a weed out there, no matter when." That's what today's guest, education manager Duncan Himmelman of Mt. Cuba native plant center in Delaware, said the other day to me on the phone. And that means now, even as we approach the quiet season, weeds are lurking, and we need to know when and how to target our efforts to control them.

Duncan Himmelman, currently the education manager at Mt. Cuba Center, a renown native plant garden and research site, earned his doctorate in ornamental horticulture at Cornell before teaching college for 24 years. He's also managed a large private estate and designed gardens for private clients, so he knows from weeds and weeding. 

We talked about weed ID (and why it matters); about removal tactics and why skipping the chemicals makes the best sense, and more. Attachments area

In a recent conversation with Doug Tallamy about ecologically minded fall cleanup, he raised the name of Heather Holm, and how some of the pollinator research she's been part of lately is informing how he shifts his approach to garden maintenance this time of year, and again in spring. I wanted to hear more, so Heather's here today to talk about how we can each support pollinators in our gardens beyond the season of bloom, in the offseason, too.

Heather Holm is the award-winning author of the 2017 book “Bees,” and before that of “Pollinators of Native Plants.” Her expertise includes the interactions between native bees and native flora, and the bees' natural history and biology. She joined me on the podcast to tune us into their needs.  

What the word “groundcover” means has really changed in the years Ken Druse and I have been gardening. And I'll admit right here, some of the choices that I made to do the job of covering the ground under shrubs and trees at my place are now plants I want to be rid of. 

Last time Ken Druse, author of “The New Shade Garden” and 19 other books, was here with us, we promised to talk when he visited again about my groundcover eradication program, targeted at one rampant perennial and what might go there instead. 

And that's our topic today: groundcovers, out with the old, in with the new. Ken got me to detail what I am up to, and what I think are the next steps in turning large areas of mostly Asian plants into more desirable (and hopefully better-behaved) native ones. 

One of the ways many of us have been getting through the last few months is by taking comfort in the outdoors, in all that nature and the garden has to offer—by slowing down, looking around, and connecting. One person I know who does that as her 24/7/365 life practice is today's guest, wildlife rehabilitator and artist and author Julie Zickefoose. 

I have to admit to being a fangirl of Julie’s, and when I need a lift lately—and who doesn't in this most challenging year of all?—I often scroll through her Instagram to follow her latest wild bird rescue adventure, or her unfolding meadow showing off yet another sequence of bloom and beauty. Or frankly, sometimes just to enjoy the antics and videos and photos of the newest member of her family, a charismatic dog named Curtis, and their deepening bond. And I'm not even a dog person. 

Julie’s here to help us all focus, to keep an eye on the outdoors, and also to get ready for bird-feeding season. We talked about goings-on to have your eye on this fall, and also about getting ready for bird-feeding season. 

When I last talked to Doug Tallamy in February around the publication date of his latest book, “Nature's Best Hope,” I didn't want to go on and on about the advice in it about smart fall cleanup, which is one of the ways I know I've dramatically shifted the way I manage my own garden compared to 10 or even five years ago. But we were looking ahead to spring then, not fall. 

But now's the time, and I'm grateful that Doug is back on the show to do just that. Want to plan your most ecologically minded garden cleanup ever, and understand the consequences of each potential action you can take?  

The subtitle of University of Delaware professor Doug Tallamy's recent book “Nature's Best Hope” is “A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard.” Meaning: The choices we make all year round, including the very important one of how we clean up in fall and again in spring, can help counteract an overdeveloped, fragmented landscape that puts the food web to the test. You and I are nature's best hope, and I'm glad Doug joined me on the radio program and podcast to help us learn to support it. 

I think of them as investment plants, plants that might not be hardy where I garden, but that with a little extra work and the right strategy can be carried over year to year, even without a greenhouse or the perfect spot to do so. 

Nobody I know has more investment plants than the list of 1,600 unusual annuals and tropicals that Dennis Schrader and the team at Landcraft Environments propagates to sell wholesale to nurseries, landscapers, and botanical gardens. With his husband, Bill Smith, Dennis Schrader has since 1992 operated Landcraft Environments in Mattituck, Long Island—specialists in unusual plants that add seasonal color and texture, and the look of the tropics to the garden. 

He’d like to encourage us to start a collection, too, and offered tips on how to keep them happy—tactical advice on plants we should consider investing in.

The word “downsizing” was spoken more than once when Page Dickey and her husband were making plans a few years back to leave their beloved home and big old garden, called Duck Hill, in Westchester County, New York, for a new one.

Well, the new piece of land turned out to be bigger than the last, and it has fostered in Page a whole new relationship to gardening—especially, a more intimate connection to nature and the property's wild-ish areas.

Starting over, and the surprises along the way, are the subject of Page's new book, called “Uprooted: A Gardener Reflects on Beginning Again.”

Page is a popular garden writer and author of numerous books, including her newest called Uprooted. And she was the co-founder of the Garden Conservancy Open Days national garden-visiting program. I was so glad to welcome her back to the podcast to hear about what happens when a gardener transplants herself. 

Who are you going to tuck in with this fall and winter, as the garden starts to rest and we are all indoors more? Do you have any hand-me-down houseplants from a relative maybe, or plants that you bought that have been with you since college or your first apartment? Marc Hachadourian, Director of Glasshouse Horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden and I answer yes, to both of the above. And he's here to talk houseplants and which ones make the best longtime companions to grow and even share—and how to grow them to perfection. 

Marc is also Senior Curator of Orchids at the New York Botanical Garden’s 55,000-square-foot Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, and author of the recent book “Orchid Modern.” So no surprise that some of his suggestions are easy-to-grow orchids because, after all, he's, @orchidmarc on Instagram. 

I have a running joke with today's podcast guest, a joke I suspect thousands of other former customers just like me email him about regularly, too. Every spring cleanup I come up with more distinctive turquoise plastic labels in my garden that were the signature of Dan Hinkley's former mail order nursery called Heronswood. And I write to tell him so, or I send him photos of once-tiny plants he shipped me that are giants today in my yard—the plants named on those labels. 

Now Dan Hinkley has another treat for us all in the form of his new book called “Windcliff,” the story of the garden he has been making since leaving Heronswood, and where he now lives on Puget Sound in Washington. “A Story of People, Plants and Gardens” is the subheading the book, and it is rich with tales of all of the above that have influenced the making of the place. 

Learn about Dan’s insights into garden design—from avoiding beds of plants that are “as flat as a flounder,” to why to start with smaller plants than ones that fill the whole space right away. 

Maybe you can feel it where you garden, too. A slight shift in the weather, which combined with shortening days, means summer is loosening its grip. It's not fall yet. It's not cleanup time, but what time is it in the garden right now? Ken Druse and I are each under way on projects that are just perfect for this moment, for the in-between time. From sowing biennials, to collecting seed of some annuals, to eradication of enthusiastic groundcovers and more that we want to tell you about.

Author and photographer and old friend, Ken Druse—the guy who was laughing a second ago—joins us again today as he does each month to talk plants, and this time, he wants to tell us what he's sowing and more. 

A reader emailed me not long ago, asking if I'd ever written a story or done a podcast about dried flowers—which ones to grow and how to dry them and so on. And no, I hadn't, I had to admit, so I called Jenny Elliot of Tiny Hearts Farm, a farmer-florist friend. And that's what our topic is today: what you can dry that you're growing now—yes, even your marigolds and things to forage for and more.

Farmer-florist Jenny Elliott with partner, Luke Franco, owns Tiny Hearts Farm in the Hudson Valley of New York, where they grow flowers organically, both for the wholesale market, for subscribers to their weekly flower CSA, and also for events in a normal year, including weddings that she designs and more. 

I suspect that you each have several mail-order bulb catalogs on hand, and also that each catalog devotes page after page to gorgeous photos of Narcissus and tulips, often right up front. Don't get me wrong, I love both of those. But today with help from Matt Mattus, author of the book “Mastering the Art of Flower Gardening,” we're going to look past those pages at some fantastic but too-often-overlooked bulbs and bulb-like plants that deserve a try. 

Before I placed my bulb order, I called Matt, who blogs on the website Growing With Plants, and on the latest podcast we showcased some of his favorite bulbs, including the most lily-leaf beetle-resistant lilies, and also some of his favorite bulb sources. 

A new book came my way recently with a title that just said it all. “Lawns Into Meadows” is what it's called, and its author, landscape designer Owen Wormser, gave me a short course on meadow-making in a recent conversation we had.

“Lawns into Meadows: Growing a Regenerative Landscape” is his book’s full title, and its approach is focused on sustainability, regeneration, and beauty, says Owen, who owns Abound Design, a firm based in western Massachusetts. 

We talked about how to choose plants for a meadow or meadow garden; the steps required for proper preparation without chemical herbicides; aftercare tips and more. 

Today's show came out of a phone conversation that Ken Druse and I were having the other day, when I found myself confessing to him that I'd let things in my containers get, shall we say, a tad overgrown this season without the pressure of any visitors and tours to keep me in line. And how I was finally trying to get them back into shape for the rest of the season by pinching things. 

And just for fun, how I've been rooting some of the pinched-off bits in little jars of water. So all that's to say, Ken and I talked about a little midsummer rejuvenation—and also some of the less-obvious positive effects that can yield. Ken is author of 20 garden books, including one on plant propagation called “Making More Plants.” 

Years ago, a friend who founded a botanic garden in Massachusetts took me to visit a landscape that he had long loved and admired. It was not just beautiful, but a designated National Historic Landmark—and one that was also a cemetery, on land that was consecrated for the purpose in 1831.

Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts is still all those things—historic, beautiful and a place of burial—but in more recent years, its mission has also been one of environmental stewardship. Insights into how that has been, and continues to be, accomplished in an established landscape is our topic today.

David Barnett came to Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1993 as the cemetery's first director of horticulture. Today, he is its president and CEO, which he has been since 2008. Good thing Dave had not just a degree in horticulture, but also a PhD in ecology, since he has drawn on that background extensively in recent years to guide Mount Auburn, to see itself as an urban wildlife refuge, and a forward thinking model of sustainability.

A surprising number of people ask me about whether this plant or that plant in my garden or theirs is poisonous. And so when I saw news from the New York Botanical Garden about a just-published, fully-updated edition of a reference book on the subject, I thought, "Why don't I learn more about this?" (Meaning, why don't we learn more about this together?) To that end, I've invited one of its authors, Botanist Michael Balick, to talk poisonous plants with us.

In collaboration with Rutgers University medical toxicologist, Lewis S. Nelson, MD, today's guest, Dr. Michael J. Balick, who is vice president for botanical science and director of the Institute of Economic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden, has written the new Third Edition of the “Handbook of Poisonous and Injurious Plants.”

I asked him about plant chemistry—why some plants have the toxins they do, and what we've learned from, and about, those plants. 

Ken Druse and I both love leaves, and so do the naughty furbearing herbivores who have been visiting our gardens with a vengeance this season—but that's another story. Today's topic is leaves to love from the gardener's point of view, not the woodchucks’ or the rabbits.’

Ken Druse, friend of many years, and author and photographer of 20 garden books, including “The New Shade Garden” and “Making More Plants,” and most recently, “The Scentual Garden” about fragrance, is back to talk about what's getting our gardens through the midseason slump: leaves, whether big and bold or fine-textured, and in a range of colors, too. 

Season Extending with Niki Jabbour - A Way to Garden with Margaret Roach - July 13, 2020

Longtime gardeners and first-timers went all out in this craziest of years, bringing the expression “victory garden” back into the headlines. We all planted in spring like mad—in fact, so much so that seed companies were swamped, and even ran out. But planting season is not over, not even up North where I garden. For late-summer-into-fall harvest and even beyond into winter, I've asked year-round vegetable grower Niki Jabbour to coach us in the next steps of succession sowing, and in smart tactics for plant protection, too, to stretch the season. 

Niki is author of three books so far: “The Year-round Vegetable Gardener,” plus “Groundbreaking Food Gardens” and “Veggie Garden Remix.” She's also a contributor to the blog SavvyGardening.com. She creates the award-winning radio program, “The Weekend Gardener,” which is heard throughout Eastern Canada, and she gardens with a vengeance in Nova Scotia. So, if Niki can do it people, so can we.  

As more gardeners shop for native plants each year, more plant descriptions in catalogs and on nursery labels use the blanket phrase “pollinator-friendly” to catch our attention. But is that the whole story behind each plant that's so labeled, and how do we choose among the many named coneflowers or asters or heucheras, and figure out which one doesn't just look prettiest to us, but does the best ecological job? 

How can we each become more informed native plant consumers? I asked Uli Lorimer of Native Plant Trust, who has made a career of working with native plants. He was longtime curator of the Native Flora Garden at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, and in 2019, he became Director of Horticulture at Native Plant Trust, the former New England Wildflower Society and America's oldest plant conservation organization, founded in 1900. 

Summer: It's what I refer to as the season of dragging hoses, and for me at least this year, the fact that it seems to have stopped raining with any regularity or measurable impact is making it worse. This is the season when we must all pay strict attention to watering, but how, and how often, and what to give our attention to most and why?

I talked about watering best practices with New York Botanical Garden instructor Daryl Beyers, author of “The New Gardener's Handbook.” The popular course that Daryl teaches at NYBG is called Fundamentals of Gardening. And now Daryl, who has more than 25 years’ professional landscaping experience besides his teaching role, has put all the fundamentals into “The New Gardener's Handbook.”

The world is shifting focus again now toward opening up this time, several months after much shutting down. But as we do, I for one hope we won't turn too quickly away from awareness of the solace that the garden has provided and that it offers for us at all times, bad or good. 

Today's guest has been taking note of that in various ways in his columns for “The Washington Post” throughout the strangest and most chaotic of springs, exploring the garden as an anchor, a support. In his longtime role as gardening columnist there, Adrian Higgins always inspires readers to connect.  

I was so pleased to speak with Adrian, whose thoughtful work has inspired me for years. He delves beyond just horticulture and great plants—though always serving up plenty of both—regularly exploring stewardship of the environment, and even matters of the spirit.

Garden designer Bill Noble starts his new book with this promise, "I'm going to tell you a story of the pleasures and challenges, both aesthetic and practical, of creating a garden that feels genuinely rooted to its place." 

His book, called “Spirit of Place,” profiles the making of his own garden in New England, but at the same time teaches us to take contextual cues from where we are gardening, along with other guiding principles of good garden design for any place—like how to create distinct outdoor spaces and also a sense of privacy, something that we all struggle with in gardens large or small. 

Bill Noble is the former Director of Preservation for the Garden Conservancy, and has worked with individual homeowners and public and private organizations to create, restore and preserve gardens for many years. In our conversation, he offered some garden design wisdom as we talked about “Spirit of Place.” 

The beloved wildflowers of springtime—the trilliums, the mayapples, the Virginia bluebells—are probably gone till next year, but don't despair. Here comes the next cast of players, the wildflowers of summer. The acclaimed naturalist Carol Gracie looks beyond their surface beauty in her new book on the subject, into their life histories and even cultural uses of plants like cardinal flower, lupine, milkweed, asters, goldenrods, and more. 

Carol Gracie, a former longtime educator at the New York Botanical Garden who also worked for The Nature Conservancy, has followed her own intense curiosity to become a leading expert on wildflowers. Now her second book, “Summer Wildflowers of the Northeast: a Natural History,” from Princeton University Press, forms the companion to her earlier spring volume. 

I was crawling around weeding the other day and there it was, yet another turquoise colored plastic label I knew was from the original Heronswood Nursery near Seattle, which has been closed about 15 years. No plant, just a label. I found three such lonely turquoise labels that day, as I do each spring, reminders of plants I loved and lost. Yes, plants die, even in the care of experienced gardeners, and others just need to be gotten rid of. Plants we've known, but no longer grow for one reason or the other is the subject today with my friend, Ken Druse.

Ken Druse needs no introduction except to say he's the author and photographer of 20 garden books, including most recently “The Scentual Garden,” about S-C-E-N-T. He joined me via Skype to talk about all the plants we've loved before...and lost (like Ken's former Iris 'Summer Skies'). 

If you're a bird person, as I am, you may feel as if you know today's guest, because one of his field guides, illustrated with his artwork to help you figure out who's who, is probably within reach at all times alongside your binoculars. In recent weeks I've been keeping company with David Allen Sibley's latest book, which is not a traditional field guide at all, after my beloved local bookstore left my pre-ordered copy on their stoop out front for curbside pickup. It's called “What It's Like to Be a Bird: From Flying to Nesting, Eating to Singing--What Birds Are Doing, and Why,” and that was the subject of my conversation with David.

David Sibley is the author and illustrator of the series of nature guides bearing his name, and lives and birds in Massachusetts. We talked about how a bird is ingeniously built for flight (and no, I don't mean just the obvious wings); why pigeons and chickens bob their heads when they walk; how birds seem to know a storm is coming and go into a feeding frenzy ahead of it, and many more insights.

Tomato Success With Craig LeHoullier - A Way to Garden With Margaret Roach - May 21, 2020

Every gardener has his or her own tomato secrets, tips, and tricks they're sure will bring earliest fruit or the biggest harvest. Some of us swear by staking others by caging, some let their plants sprawl and then there's to feed or not to feed and what about preventing tomato troubles like blossom end rot or hornworm damage or yellowing leaves. 

And last week I wrote a tomato growing story as part of a garden series I've been doing in “The New York Times,” and this week I wanted to continue that tomato theme and talk about them with Mr. Tomato himself, Craig LeHoullier, a.k.a. NC Tomato Man and author of the classic book, “Epic Tomatoes.”  

Craig has gardened and grown tomatoes in areas of the U.S. as different as New England and Seattle, Pennsylvania and Raleigh, North Carolina, and lately in the mountains of Western North Carolina, too. He's one of the founders of the Dwarf Tomato Project that we've talked about on the show before, and generally just an all tomato all the time kind of guy. 

I'm grateful that when I began gardening, I fell in with a bunch of plant nerds who spoke not in common names but in botanical Latin, and turned me on to oddball mail-order nurseries whose entire lists were likewise written that way. Necessity was therefore the mother of invention. 

I absorbed at least a rudimentary command of the official language of plants, and my only regret is that I didn't learn even more. Now, thanks to the fun I've been having dipping over and again into the new book called “The Gardener's Botanical: An Encyclopedia of Latin Plant Names,” I'm further sharpening my skills, because botanical Latin opens up a world for gardeners willing to try learning some of it. 

What can a gardener learn from studying botanical Latin? Ross Bayton, a former editor of the BBC's “Gardeners World Magazine” created the “The Gardener's Botanical,” and when we spoke recently, he answered that question and more. 

A famous gardener Ken Druse and I know often says this one-liner: "Anyone can do spring." What he means is: and then what happens after that? 

What happens after the current tender colorful parade of beauty, with flowers everywhere and fresh green foliage expanding by the minute without our effort, is up to us gardeners—and that's the harder part. 

That's our topic today: What to do next to keep the garden going strong for the long haul: cutbacks and pinching and pruning and shearing and....

Ken Druse needs no introduction except to say he's been my go-to garden friend for decades, is the author of an amazing 20 books, all of which I have read, and he joins me once each month on my public-radio show and podcast. 

I'm mad for birds, so much so, that I've been looking expectantly lately at the interactive migration maps on the BirdCast website and browsing reports coming in from ares to the south of me on eBird.com, wondering when my fair-weather, feathered friends will be joining me in livening things up in this strangest of springs.

That got me thinking about the reunion I most look forward to: a bird who uses shed snakeskins when building its nest. Yes, it's true. And how seeing that bird collect a snakeskin in my yard led me to Brett DeGregorio, a wildlife biologist who studies, among other things, the interaction between birds and reptiles. I'm hoping this interview about what bird parents are up against, trying to keep their eggs and nestlings safe, will encourage you all to watch more closely and ask more questions this spring when you see nature doing its wild and crazy things.

Brett is at the University of Arkansas, where he's Fish and Wildlife Cooperative Research Unit Leader. His lab there studies wildlife behavior, interspecies interactions, and conservation biology. His special interest? Reptile and avian conservation and behavior.

We talked about all the things birds incorporate into their nests—as status symbols, or as protection against predators—and how A species nest style is so true to form, Brett says, that, “You don’t even have to see the bird that built the nest to know what species it belongs to."

Cook With What You've Got with Lukas Volger - A Way to Garden with Margaret Roach - April 20, 2020 

Just before things shifted in our world, I bought a new vegetarian cookbook called “Start Simple,” by Lukas Volger. Little did I know that just weeks later, its promise of “an uncomplicated approach to cooking that allows you to use what you already have on hand to make great meals you didn't think were possible” would sound not just appealing, but really the order of the day.  

Lukas Volger is the author of three previous cookbooks, and the co-founder and editorial director of “Jarry” magazine, an award-winning biannual publication that explores where food and queer culture intersect. I called Lukas to talk about dependable, versatile ingredients and how to use them, about how to cook better no matter what ingredients we have on hand, and also how to make vegetables last.

One of my favorite books by our friend Ken Druse is called “Making More Plants,” and though it's about all kinds of propagation, Ken and I talked the other day about what is maybe the easiest way of all to make more plants, which is by dividing them.

In most of the country this spring 2020, we're not out shopping at garden centers, browsing for new adoptees the way we usually would be. But maybe you, like Ken Druse and I, are ready to do some shopping in your own garden, looking for divisions of favorite things that would work elsewhere, or simply keeping that bee balm from overrunning everything else that shares the same bed with it. We discussed dividing plants—the how, the when, the why, and how even certain shrubs (not just herbaceous perennials) can be divided, too.

Yes, yes, I know; you plan to grow the usual rows of zinnias, but what other among organic flower farmer Jenny Elliott's must-grow list of cutting varieties do you have lined up and ready to sow, or have a source of starts for? I asked Jenny for her list of flowers you shouldn't garden without.

Copake, New York-based Jenny is a farmer-florist with partner Luke Franco and their crew. They’re my beloved neighbors and friends, growing flowers organically both for the wholesale market, for subscribers to her weekly flower CSA, and also for events including weddings.

Because of the prospect of forced shop closures throughout spring 2020, Jenny and Luke will sell their favorite dahlia tubers by mail-order (or for local curbside pickup by pre-order behind her Hillsdale, New York, shop)—and Jenny will give an online class in how to succeed with dahlias, too, via Zoom. More on all that at TinyHeartsFarm.com. 

Seeds and Sunflowers: Before the weeks got darker, Ken Greene and I had planned a chat about a sunny subject: sunflowers. Ken is co-founder of Hudson Valley Seed Company and also of the nonprofit called Seedshed, and though he and I did get to do some sunflower dreaming, we first veered into how seeds figure into such tough moments as we are currently facing, offering resiliency. And then the talk turned to Helianthus, including the silverleaf species I adore called H. argophyllus (below)—about which the birds and beneficial insects emphatically agree.

On the Hudson Valley Seed homepage this late March 2020 and at other seed sellers, you'll probably see a notice like this: "Please be aware that, because we are currently experiencing an increased demand for seeds, you may see a slight delay in receiving your orders." I asked Ken about that, too.

Besides being a seed person, Ken Greene is my across-the-Hudson River neighbor. We connected remotely from his home to mine, cell phone to Skype, to talk about the power of seeds and also the literal bright spot that sunflowers can provide. 

Garden as Refuge: It's Thursday, March 19th, 2020, as Ken Druse and I are taping this show from our respective homes via Skype. In my weekly newsletter last Sunday, I said I didn't know just what to say, or how to begin, since nothing seemed the same as it had a mere seven days prior to that.

All I came up with was this thought, and it's how we'll start today's show, too:

Maybe more than ever before in my life, I'm grateful today to have a garden. What a blessing it feels like. I can't imagine the weeks and months ahead without the refuge it will provide. Perhaps you all feel the same way.

So Ken and I wanted to talk about what our gardens mean to us, and especially what they can mean to all of us gardeners in this unusual year.  

Fellow garden author Ken Druse and I have known each other through many gardening seasons, like about 30. And we've each been gardening longer than that. But this year already feels different, of course, and we wanted to talk about that, and what plans we have to take full advantage of the refuge aspect of our own backyards—and also of our indoor companions, our longtime houseplants, like Ken’s beloved hoyas and more.

Compost Smart: What's your composting setup? Bin, tumbler or open pile—or maybe even an ingenious set of three pits in the ground? And most important, how is it working? More effective composting tactics, along with other timely advice to prepare for spring, was the subject of my conversation  with New York Botanical Garden instructor Daryl Beyers.

The popular course that Daryl Beyers teaches at NYBG in New York City is called Fundamentals of Gardening. And now Daryl, who has more than 25 years of professional landscaping experience besides his teaching role, has put all the fundamentals into a new book, “The New Gardener's Handbook.” 

It was in its pages that I picked up some new-to-me tips on better composting and more—including the right way to water as you plant trees and shrubs; how to choose which limbs to prune off or keep when shaping and thinning; and how to rejuvenate overgrown shrubs (all at once, or in stages?). 

Pollinator Gardens: One of the most common questions that garden centers and other garden professionals are asked these days: How can I add more pollinator plants? Kim Eierman designs ecological gardens with such beneficial insects in mind, and is the author of the new book “The Pollinator Victory Garden,” and I got some advice from her on subjects ranging from wildlife-supporting spring cleanup tactics and timing, to how much of each plant is “enough” to make a difference, and which plants are native, anyway.

Kim is also founder of the garden business called EcoBeneficial, consulting on ecological landscaping and design, based in Westchester County, New York. She speaks nationwide to spread her passion for habitat-style plantings, and creates an occasional podcast series on the subject.

Women and Plants: I'm a woman who's made a good portion of her career in the field of horticulture, specifically in the journalism end of the plant world. But until I read the new book “The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants,” I hadn't really visualized myself as part of something quite the way that I see in its pages.

A lot of gardening, and especially writing, is done on one’s own as a solitary pursuit, but the book brings to life a sense of community and common purpose among the woman portrayed, despite their different career choices—from research scientist to floral designer to operating a seed company and more—and despite the fact that they hail from around the globe.

Jennifer Jewell is author of "The Earth in Her Hands" and is also the creator of the popular "Cultivating Place" podcast, produced with North State Public Radio in Chico, California. We talked about some of the women profiled in it, from seed experts Renee Shepherd and Ira Wallace, to Annie Hayes of Annie's Annuals mail-order plant nursery, to activists like Vandana Shiva and in a different way, Debra Prinzing.

When I got my copy of the new “Peterson Reference Guide to Woodpeckers of North America,” I tracked down the author’s email address at once, and sent him a message: “I’m mad for woodpeckers,” I wrote, and Stephen Shunk wrote back: “Mad for woodpeckers is a very good thing.”

I suspect if you are not already, that by the end of this story and podcast, you’ll be mad for them, too, and positively amazed at their physical capabilities and their critical role in our ecosystems. Until I read his author bio, I felt lucky to live with six hardworking and highly entertaining woodpecker species here in my rural Northeastern garden. But Stephen, a longtime conservationist who also leads international bird tours lives across the continent, on the eastern slopes of the Cascade Mountains in Bend, Oregon, in a spot that’s home to 11 breeding species. Jealous!

I welcomed Stephen Shunk to my weekly public-radio show and podcast in June 2016 to talk woodpeckers. Learn why most species are mainly black and white, and how they have evolved their anatomies to withstand all that hammering (which has been researched for insights to design football helmets, for instance).