Growing Greener

Ecological gardening leader Larry Weaner details how you can get all the benefits of conventional mulch, plus boosting biodiversity and wildlife, with a well-designed and beautiful groundcover of nat…

Maya K. van Rossum discusses Green Amendments for the Generations, the movement she founded to bring an amendment to every state constitution guaranteeing residents’ basic human right to clean air an…

John Walker, a horticulturist who trained at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and a multi award winner environmental writer, shares advice on Veganic Gardening, an approach that combines organic practic…

Buying topsoil is a quick and popular fix for many garden problems – but buyer beware says Dawn Pettinelli, Director of the University of Connecticut’s Soil & Nutrient Analysis Lab.  There are no ind…

“Gardeners are the worst threat to native plants.”  Hostility toward horticulturists is common within the ecological restoration community. But, John Gedraitis of Van Berkum Nursery says, it’s an imp…

Elizabeth Licata, a passionate promoter of Garden Walk Buffalo, the nation’s largest free open garden tour, and a longtime contributor to the popular blog “Garden Rant” takes on gardener anthropomorp…

Landscape architects Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden electrified the gardening world in 1975 when they introduced a new horticultural richness and a concern for sustainability with their “New Ame…

Dr. Douglas Tallamy, the University of Delaware entomologist who has been awakening homeowners to the need to plant natives and join our plots together in a giant “homegrown national park,” has foun…

Founded in 2013 by internationally acclaimed garden designer Edwina von Gal, the Perfect Earth Project seeks to introduce landscape professionals to toxin-free, sustainable approaches to their craft…

Jeff Lorenz, founder of the acclaimed Refugia Design Build, explains why the pandemic was a boom time for a landscaper committed to native plants, and how his firm’s “Ecological Greenway Network” is…

Nebraskan Benjamin Vogt, a leader in nature-based gardening, has just published Prairie Up, a book that is sure to become a go-to tool for those designing and installing landscapes rooted in our nat…

My quest for tomatoes that will bear in my cool, cloudy climate led me to Dr. James Myers of Oregon State University.  He shared with me the cultivars he had bred for that purpose, then described a p…

Horticultural Educator Carol Reese explains why feeding your garden in springtime with a “complete” fertilizer can be a mistake, and describes a “lazy” style of gardening that can help heal the envir…

Plant explorers, once the rock stars of the horticultural world, have suffered a loss of status as gardeners turn to native plants.  Listen to plant explorer extraordinaire Panayoti Kelaidis of the …

Gratify your Indiana Jones fantasies by joining the Plant Conservation Volunteers.   Your work will have you hiking into overlooked corners of the wild to monitor surviving populations of rare and en…

Are your beloved native plants actually “noxious weeds”?  Too often town or homeowner association officers say yes and invoke anti-weed ordinances to force gardeners back to old-fashioned lawns and f…

Starting plants from seed is economical and opens up a world of species and cultivars you’ll never find in the garden center.  Seed starting is also easy and fun if you use the winter-sowing techniqu…

Since 1827, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society has been leading the way in American gardening.  Listen this week as its Vice President of Horticulture, Andrew Bunting, describes the trends to loo…

Michael Starkey understands that not everyone shares his enthusiasm for snakes, but as founder and Executive Director of Save the Snakes he believes that humans and snakes, even venomous snakes, can …

In the early years of the 20th century an introduced fungal blight killed an estimated 4 billion American chestnut trees, effectively eliminating what had been a foundational species of eastern North…