The “Naturalistic” Garden is popular these days, but what is it and how does it differ from a truly natural landscape? Duncan Brine, principal with his wife Julia of Garden Large, a garden design firm in Pawling, New York, is an acknowledged master of the naturalistic. Listen as he discusses this style of design, how it informs his work, and how it is illustrated in the remarkable six-acre garden that he and Julia have created around their home.

Struggling with a wet spot in your yard? Join John Courtney of Kind Earth Growers to learn how to turn this difficulty into an asset. John has more than 20 years of experience in growing native plants adapted to wet soils. From collecting seed in the wild to mixing special soil blends, he understands wetland natives’ special cultural needs, and savors their special beauty. Let John help you transform that wet spot into an ecological opportunity and beauty spot.

The flowers in your garden are not, as gardeners often suppose, aesthetic statements, they are more or less blatant invitations for sex. Ranging from plant incest to the brutality of dragonfly sex, Carol Reese, distinguished horticultural educator at the University of Tennessee, shares insights on the curious aspects of sexual relations between plants and the role that wildlife plays in promoting it.

Sam Hoadley, Mount Cuba Center’s Director of Horticultural Research deliberately neglects his plants. His responsibility is to conduct the trials by which this renowned botanical garden in Hockessin, Delaware tests native plants to see which are garden stars – and attractive to pollinators – and which are garden and pollination duds. After selecting a popular genus, Sam and his crew collect all the types they find available in nurseries, establish them side-by-side in the test plots, and leave them to fend for themselves. The results he collects into detailed, comprehensive reports, an invaluable resource that Mount Cuba makes available to gardeners for free.

Based in Decorah, Iowa, the Seed Savers Exchange was founded in 1975 by Diane and Kent Whealy to share and preserve seeds of heirloom plants such as the morning glory and tomato that Diane’s great grandparents had brought with them when they immigrated from Bavaria in 1884. Today, the exchange boasts some 13,000 members and preserves 20,000 vegetable and fruit cultivars. Join our conversation with Dr. Philip Kauth, the Exchange’s Director of Preservation, to learn about what is new with the preservation of historic seeds.

Native plants enthusiasts Kristen Nicholson, Britt Drews, and Jasmin Callahan were frustrated by the lack of nearby sources on biodiverse, locally adapted plants. So they started their own nursery, growing the plants from locally collected seeds. Today Blue Stem Natives is a horticultural phenomenon and a haven for ecological gardeners in southeastern Massachusetts.

One from the archives (first broadcast on June 5th, 2019): Dr. Jared Westbrook of the American Chestnut Foundation explores a controversial subject: the use of genetic engineering by his foundation to create blight-resistant American chestnut trees and return this once iconic species to the eastern woodlands. Called “the redwood of the East” chestnuts grew to a diameter of a dozen feet or more, and their nuts were an essential food for wildlife and an important source of income to rural people. One of the most plentiful hardwoods of the eastern forest, American chestnuts were nearly extirpated by an imported blight, but the American Chestnut Foundation is dedicated to their re-introduction.

How to introduce Sefra Alexandra, “the Seed Huntress”? She’s an agroecological educator with a masters degree from Cornell University and she’s worked as an ethnobotanist all around the world, including in her home town of Southport, Connecticut. Sefra’s a “BOATanist” who plants seed-grown natives along riparian corridors by canoe, and she’s a member of The Explorers Club. Currently Sefra is also the coordinator of the Northeast Organic Farming Association’s program to restore pollinator habitat, the Ecotype Project. For this project she’s supervising and assisting in the sustainable collection of wild type, locally adapted seed, and facilitating their cultivation so that these plants’ seeds can be harvested, processed, and delivered to local nurseries to be grown on and returned to the wild or gardens. A Seed Huntress, it appears, is a person of many skills.

Eric Fleisher of F2 Environmental Design has been breaking new ground – literally ­– ever since he first began converting New York public landscapes to organic management 30 years ago. By building up and managing the soil, and treating the landscape as a holistic system, he eliminates the needs for chemical inputs and turns garden wastes into an environmental resource. In this way he has transformed landscapes all over the country, from the Harvard University campus to the Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden.

Being in the moment is a challenge in our busy, too-connected age, yet it is essential for appreciating and understanding the garden. Poet Susan Brearley shares her practice for mindfulness: the on-the-spot composition of garden haiku. Brearley, who has been teaching haiku workshops at the great Innisfree garden in Millbrook, New York, shares the basics of this classic Japanese poetic form, along with a look at the sensibility that traditionally informs it.

Do you hate the noise and stink of gasoline-powered blowers and mowers rampaging through your neighborhood? Matthew Benzie of Indigenous Ingenuities in Doylestown, Pennsylvania is doing something about that. He’s switched his maintenance crew to zero-emission, quiet, battery-powered equipment transported on a bicycle-powered cart. He’s designing his landscapes for greener, sustainable maintenance too. Learn about this revolutionary rethinking of the landscape business on this week’s episode.

One of the first designed public landscapes in the United States, Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery was a favorite resort of New Yorkers throughout the 19th century, rivaling Niagara Falls as a tourist destination. Director of Horticulture Joseph Charap tells how Green-Wood has re-discovered its heritage as green-space for the community, re-inventing itself as an arboretum and as a center for environmental research to serve the living as well as dead.

It’s a ritual of autumn – clearing all the fallen leaves from your yard and garden, and cutting back the dead flower stems. It’s familiar, but also highly destructive to the wildlife that serves as a foundation for the local ecosystem. Join Matthew Shepherd of the Xerces Society as he outlines a wildlife-friendly treatment for putting the garden to bed for winter – one that also saves you work.

If you want a garden that is fruitful as well as beautiful, and chemical free, you need Robert Kourik’s new book “Sustainable Food Gardens: Myths and Solutions.” In our conversation, Robert details the exhaustive research in the garden and in the library that went into the writing of this invaluable guide. We focus in particular on “food forests,” a central concept of the widely popular Permaculture school of gardening. Robert describes how he has corrected this for the North American landscape, and where the Permaculture model goes wrong. Just one of the many myths and solutions this must-have book addresses.

If you think you need to travel to somewhere rural and remote to enjoy Nature, you’ve never visited Brooklyn Bridge Park. Built on a series of concrete shipping piers on the Brooklyn shore of New York’s East River, this 85-acre landscape has reworked salvaged materials into a series of thriving, vibrant ecosystems. The park’s Director of Horticulture, Rebecca McMackin, details the process of inviting wildlife into a built environment, and how this organically maintained landscape recycles everything, including stormwater, to keep the landscape sustainable as well as green and lush. Join us for the conversation.

A leading researcher on Asian Jumping Worms, Dr. Josef Gorres of the University of Vermont has been tracking this invader’s impact on northern forests and seeking methods for controlling their numbers. In this conversation he discusses how Asian Jumping Worms can impoverish the vegetation of the forest floor and lead the deer to fall back on browsing maple saplings, over time transforming the forest flora as a whole. He describes different techniques for controlling the worms’ numbers in the wild and in the garden, and those he believes have the most promise for the future.

As a volunteer forest steward, Adrian Ayres Fisher manages restoration activities in a 53-acre tract of Cook County, Illinois’ forest preserve. A devoted gardener, Adrian has seen the devastating effect that whitetail deer can have on domestic landscapes; as a forest steward, she finds herself confronting the same animals in a different context. Lacking any effective predators, the deer population has exploded, and its voracious appetite for greenery is having a transformative impact on the woodlands. Wildflowers and undergrowth are disappearing from the forest floor, and native trees that the deer favor as browse are giving way to invasive species, setting off a cascade of effects throughout the ecosystem. Learn the details of the deer’s ecological toll.

When Carol Bouska and her siblings (three sisters and a brother) inherited the family farm in northeastern Iowa in 2009, they decided to keep it true to their parents’ community- and conservation-minded spirit. Working slowly and deliberately, the new generation developed a joint vision of a farm that would sequester carbon in the soil, reduce water pollution and soil erosion, and foster wildlife – while also promoting family harmony and serving the local community. Eight years into the siblings’ program to convert the farm to regenerative agriculture, they planted 4,500 trees this spring. The farm continues to be a center of family life, drawing the far-flung siblings, their children, and grandchildren back for reunions and projects and maintaining their ties to their neighbors. Feeding the public, it turns out, can also feed the soul and the earth.

Lawns of the traditional sort are notoriously greedy for inputs of resources such as water and fertilizer, and inhospitable to pollinators and other wildlife. Dr. Eric Watkins, a professor in the Dept of Horticultural Science at the University of Minnesota, has been working to change this. He has been mixing different grasses with flowers to create lawns that require far less inputs, much less mowing, and which attract and feed native bees and other pollinators. Learn about Dr. Watkins’ innovative lawns and a Minnesota state program to promote bee-friendly lawns on this week’s Growing Greener.

A passionate gardener and prolific author, Ginny Stibolt has written countless articles about the joys – and challenges – of gardening sustainably and organically with native plants in her adopted home in northeast Florida. She’s also authored or co-authored five books, and today will discuss an invaluable guide she co-wrote with Massachusetts landscape architect Sue Reed, Climate-Wise Landscaping. This book will prepare your personal landscape to flourish in the challenging situations that are emerging across the United States with the onset of climate change. With Ginny’s advice, you will be part of the solution.