Growing Greener

American gardeners typically turn to England when looking for inspiration abroad, but they'll find a far more imaginative approach to integrating nature with human needs in contemporary Dutch gardening.  Carrie Preston, an American designer who has made a career there, takes us for a tour.

Gardeners are busy now planting Dutch bulbs for a spring show, but there is an environmentally more beneficial alternative: native spring ephemerals.  Neil Diboll, founder and president of Prairie Nursery, shares how to use these early blooming natives to create truly perennial early spring color while also benefiting pollinators and other wildlife.

Too often environmentally conscious gardeners look for the "silver bullet" for our sustainability and resource issues, rather than contenting ourselves with what Kathy Connolly describes as "two percent solutions."  Kathy, an in-demand natural garden designer and educator, is referring to small changes that cumulatively can have a big impact.  Listen to her describe her use of rain barrels as a co...

Late summer through early fall, according to Shay Lunseth, is the ideal time to put your lawn on a more environmentally friendly path.  Shay's got advice about boosting the health of your grass without chemicals, reducing or ending inputs of fertilizer and water, and even making your lawn pollinator friendly

Biochar has been touted as a valuable soil amendment that fosters better plant growth and stretches fertilizer budgets.  Will Hessert and Javaughn Henry have also found in it a means to sequester carbon and confront global climate change.  Listen as Will describes how they are putting in place a project to convert municipal landscape waste into biochar on a grand scale

Starting native plants from locally sourced seed is the most economical and ecologically advantageous way to rewild domestic landscapes. In the past, though, this has been perceived as tricky and demanding, a process only for experts.  Anna Fialkoff, Ecological Programs Manager of the Wild Seed Project in North Yarmouth, Maine, describes how her organization makes starting native plants from seed...

Admirers of exotic garden plants have taken to claiming that their foreign-born treasures are just as good nutritionally for our North American pollinators.  Proponents of native plants insist that their flora supplies a better diet.  We ask Dr. Harland Patch of Pennsylvania State University for the facts

Managing water is the crucial task of the summertime garden, especially as climate change boosts the heat and the frequency of droughts.  Join Nancy DuBrule-Clemente, founder of the pioneering woman-owned landscape company and garden center, Natureworks, as she brings her organic gardening sensibility to bear on ways to reduce watering while weathering our warming summers.

Looking at plants is one thing; learning to truly see them is another.  Carrie Roy, Acting Curator of Art, introduces us to one of the world's great collections of plant portraits, the Hunt Institute For Botanical Documentation in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and shares how the artist's vision can delight and inform gardeners, changing the very way we see

Rebecca McMackin, a visionary horticulturist, has spent the last decade supervising the transformation of Brooklyn Bridge Park, 85 acres of abandoned shipping piers, into a complex of functioning ecosystems that serve as havens for wildlife and an accessible means for city dwellers to reconnect with nature.  Now she's moving on to new adventures.  In our conversation she reflects on the accomplish...

Born in North America in the 1980's, "Rewilding" has taken off in Europe, where it's inspiring a return of broad tracts of marginal farmlands to functioning wild ecosystems.  In this episode Canadian journalists Kat Tancock and Domini Clark discuss their new online magazine, "Rewilding," which introduces readers to the basics of this fascinating worldwide movement, while helping them to apply its...

Krissy Boys, Natural Areas Horticulturist of the Cornell Botanic Gardens, describes her chance encounter with a naturally compact grass native across North America, and how that led her to create a biodiverse, wildlife friendly, and largely self-sustaining lawn of native grasses and perennials

Veteran investigative journalist Carey Gillam introduces her award-winning book, "Whitewash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science," sharing its account of the collaboration between chemical manufacturer Monsanto and governmental agencies to cover up the disastrous health hazards of the omnipresent weed killer, Roundup

Dan Mabe, founder of AGZA, the American Green Zone Alliance, has taken on one of the bitterest impasses of contemporary suburbia.  So many residents hate the noise and fumes of gas-powered landscape equipment, and its unsustainable thirst for fossil fuels.  Landscape maintenance contractors reply that they cannot provide the services their customers demand at a price they will pay without it.  AGZ...

#NoMowMay is an international movement that has been gaining widespread popularity in the United States.  Its goal is to persuade gardeners to stop mowing their grass during the month of May so that lawn weeds such as dandelions and white clover may flower and provide early spring pollen and nectar for insect pollinators. A laudable impulse, but Dr. Sheila Colla of York University and her colleagu...

If each of us enriched our personal landscape with native plants, making it hospitable to pollinators, birds, and other wildlife, what an immense cumulative impact we would have!  In Saving Nature One Yard At A Time , veteran naturalists and gardeners David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth show us just how we can accomplish that, while also joining together to boost the ecological health of our com...

Colleen Murphy-Dunning, director of the Urban Resources Initiative, describes how Yale University's School of the Environment partnered with the New Haven community to design and implement a very successful program to enhance the urban ecosystem in a way that directly benefits residents while also educating students. 

Director of Horticulture at the Native Plant Trust in Framingham, Massachusetts, and former Curator of Native Flora at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Uli Lorimer has written a new book, The Northeast Native Plant Primer, 235 Plants for an Earth-Friendly Garden .  An outstanding introduction to gardening with native plants, it is especially relevant for residents of the northeastern United States but...

Dr. Toni DiTommaso of Cornell University explains how familiarity with the ecology of weeds can help a gardener control their impact on the garden without resorting to toxic chemicals, and shares the web address of a free book-length guide to the subject

With roots in traditional Korean agriculture, Bokashi composting has much to offer the contemporary gardener.  Conway School graduate Boris Kerzner describes the process, explaining how you can pursue this process for recycling kitchen wastes – including meat scraps and dairy – to enrich your garden's soil in just weeks. 

Water is a resource plants cannot do without, and maintaining the right level of moisture in your soil – not too little and not too much – is critical to gardening success.  That's why pioneering horticulturist Robert Kourik holds irrigation to be one of the gardener's most powerful tools.  Join him for details about the techniques he has found most precise and efficient, methods of irrigation tha...

For 40 years, Larry Weaner, founder of Larry Weaner Landscape Associates, has been exploring the intersection of ecology with landscape and garden design, creating a style of planning, planting, and management that is founded in the natural dynamics of the site. One of the most powerful of these dynamics is succession, the inherent tendency of landscapes and their flora to evolve and change.  By l...

Share my discovery of a Nebraska treasure: the Prairie Plains Resource Institute.  For more than 40 years this organization has been perfecting low-tech methods of wild grassland restoration while reconnecting people with the richness of their prairie heritage.  Join us for a visit with executive director Amy Jones

To trace the impact of climate change on the plants and animals of Massachusetts, Dr. Richard Primack of Boston University turned to an unconventional source: the journals of 19th century philosopher Henry David Thoreau.  In these documents, Dr. Primack discovered a wealth of relevant, closely observed data.  Learn about this and Dr. Primack's other intriguing discoveries in this week's Growing Gr...

Gardening can be a prime source of aches and pains, from a bad back to tendonitis – now "GardenFit," the new public television series, combines inspiring visits to extraordinary gardens with professional advice on how to keep your gardening healthy.  Join hosts Madeline Hooper and Jeff Hughes in their project to make your gardening more rewarding horticulturally and physically.