The Garden Mixer

Parking lot plants. The ones growing between the cart return and the McDonald’s drive-through. The ones shaved into meatballs and meatloaf and shapes that can’t be easily defined in meat terms. The ones that ask for nothing more than hard pan, cigarette butts & exhaust fumes — and deliver anyway.

These plants have a reputation problem. Not because they aren’t good plants, but because they’ve been used badly, repeated endlessly, and associated with the worst design instincts of the last fifty years. And yet: there is a reason they keep showing up. They work. They survive. A...

In this latest Barrel-Aged episode of One More Sip of The Garden Mixer, Marianne and Leslie talk about all of their worst gardening boo-boos over the years. The format is interesting-- this is a LIVE Substack video that took place a year ago. They bring up mistakes that range from planting the wrong thing to just plain planting wrong and one story involves the explosion of a rear window. Who knew gardening could get so violent? At least it's never boring when you listen to Marianne Willburn and Leslie Harris of The Garden Mixer.

If you are...

Last December, Leslie and Marianne talked deer fences on the podcast — and Marianne’s imminent enclosure and ironic freedom. Somewhere in the middle of that episode, Founding Mixer and friend Erin Schanen, The Impatient Gardener, decided she’d had enough.

Not of the podcast. (uh, obvs!) Of the deer.

So she did what any reasonable person does when pushed past the breaking point by a herd of four-legged garden criminals: she went all in. Not with one kind of fence. With four. Simultaneously. On a suburban property with ordinances, a neighbor with opinions, a driveway that n...

What makes a good garden path? Gravel? Grass? Pavers? Wood chips? Flagstone? And why does something that looks gorgeous in one garden become a maintenance nightmare in another?In this Barrel Aged One More Sip, Leslie and Marianne head down the garden path—quite literally—to talk about the materials they’ve used, loved, regretted and sworn never to use again.Marianne is preparing to replace nearly 100 feet of struggling turf path with gravel, which leads to a conversation about pea gravel, stone dust, stepping stones, wood-chip paths, flagstone, edging and even those beautiful slices of tree trunk that look w...

With some surprise and not a little relief, the garden is hurtling towards late middle age by mid-September. The promise of spring and the relentless drive of summer have departed, and with them the cultural expectation that the garden needs to look good in a crop top and pretend that it’s still May.

There are some big bonuses to late middle age. With lowered expectations now the norm for those around you who don’t garden, your plot is well positioned to surprise and delight visitors with color, texture & not a little sass. It may be the...

Gardeners in cold climates dabbling with tropical and subtropical plants in their summer gardens are about to come to a hard stop: First Frost.

If you’re a gardener who loves these plants outside, but doesn’t particularly want them rubbing shoulders with you over the winter, you may be interested in which ones Marianne terms “Best Friends” in her last book, Tropical Plants and How To Love Them — plants that can be stored in dark, dormant conditions in a frost-free location.

Today on One More Sip the girls discuss the plants that can take this kind of...

It’s planting season once again for many of us in the Northern Hemisphere – which of course means buying season, and splurging season, and did-I-really-need-that-many-clearance-plants season.

Need a strategy? Today we welcome Louisa Zimmermann Roberts, co-owner of Thanksgiving Farms in Frederick, Maryland who’s been watching the buying habits of customers for decades, and has more than a little insight on what you should be doing when you fill that cart.

She’ll have you examining that root system, squinting at plant tags, rethinking your potting soil, and generally becoming the smartest gardener on the block. T...

On this Barrel Aged and decanted episode of One More Sip of The Garden Mixer, Leslie and Marianne go full listicle and shelve the “Do!” for the “Better If You Don’t Do” on a range of issues in the garden — from design considerations, to maintenance considerations, to yes…psychological considerations.

While gardening is a creative, subjective exercise, we can definitely make it harder on ourselves than it needs to be — and the girls try their best to help you learn from their mistakes (…and the mistakes of others). Join them as they put together the gardener’s ultimate Honey Don

Each year, millions of gardeners prowl the globe seeking ‘aha!’ moments that they can bring back to their own gardens at home. Are you one of them?

Leslie has been visiting gardens abroad for decades, and over the last two years, Marianne has built a company dedicated to bringing great gardens to great groups of people. Together they’re heading to Normandy next week to see gardens such as Giverny, Jardins d’Etretat, Chateau de Boutemont, Le Jardin Plume, and Chateau Champ de Bataille. And they want to do it right.

So what is the BEST way...

This week, Leslie & Marianne dive into the sticky world of beekeeping as a gardener.

Leslie is buzzing with questions (and incredibly bad puns) and mercilessly questions Marianne who kept bees for over 15 years and can’t let go of the possibility to do so again (just as soon as she gets her resident bear problem under control and/or moves out of her valley). Is she delusional or just in love?

Whether you’re thinking about plunging into this fascinating world — or simply need motivation to keep harvesting those 50 pound supers in the heat of summer...

In the heat of August, it’s not just gardeners that want to check out — it’s their plants. But there’s a lot plants can tell us about the conditions we’re all navigating, so it’s worth paying attention when the temperatures soar.

To channel those thoughts, Leslie and Marianne welcome Carol Reese — horticulturist, writer, humorist, retired University of Tennessee extension specialist, and keeper of approximately three to four hundred dogs — though not all at once.

Carol gardens on 118 acres in West Tennessee, where the heat index routinely clears 105°F and the garden operates on somet...

Botanical Names: Those complicated, two-part, dead language elements of tongue- torture that every gardener looking for a special plant will face at some point in their horticultural journey.

Should you embrace the challenge, and feel vulnerable? Or dismiss the challenge and [possibly still] feel vulnerable?

This week on One More Sip of The Garden Mixer, Leslie and Marianne discuss the third option — studying with curiosity, speaking with confidence, and ignoring those who use botanical nomenclature as a weapon in conversation.

Bet you can think of a few peeps that fit THAT bill.

...

Every gardener has a tchotchke threshold — the point at which a garden stops being a garden and starts being a yard sale with better plants. But where exactly is that line, and who gets to draw it?

After decades of embracing, avoiding, judging, and occasionally defending their own questionable choices, Leslie and Marianne weigh in on the art of garden ornamentation — how to use it well, when to put the hedgehog down, and why Fergus Garrett's favorite garden in Hastings has hardly any plants in it at all.

Toads or total chaos? Today on The Gard...

It’s mid summer and if you haven’t been staking your floppiest floppers, the chance is you haven’t quite gotten away with it. Some plants stand tall on their own. Others need a little help.

In this Barrel Aged One More Sip of The Garden MIxer Leslie Harris and Marianne Willburn tackle one of gardening's most practical—and most overlooked—skills: staking. They discuss which plants are worth staking, which ones are better left alone, how to make supports nearly invisible, and why choosing the right plants in the first place can save you a lot of wor...

Every gardener has them. The plant that ate the house, the catalog seduction that ended in tears, the tree you loved that didn’t love you. Regrets are how gardeners learn — or in Marianne’s case, how they beat themselves up while learning. Leslie chose the topic. Marianne suffered through it. Both of them had more material than an hour could possibly cover.

Welcome to a guided tour through the taxonomy of gardening mistakes — organized by category, confessed to with varying degrees of shame, and occasionally still present in the garden because nobody could bring th...

Deadheading, do we or don't we? The answer, as you expected, is complicated. And Leslie and Marianne want to dive into the nuance on this week’s One More Sip.

In fact they’re going to discuss a lot of heinous herbaceous amputations in the name of beauty, such as Chelsea chopping, tiered pruning, and post-pruning.

Why does it work? And when doesn’t it? And do you really have the patience to snip 235 cornflower heads into a basket when you can simply rip it out and let the Verbena bonariensis take over?

All this...

America has a hydrangea problem. In the best possible way. They’re consistently among the best-selling flowering shrubs in the country, they colonize every garden center and big box supercenter from May to August, and, if you don’t have a deer problem, you’re likely to succumb to the latest plump, end-of-aisle offering every time you go out to buy some milk. Erin Schanen, The Impatient Gardener, and Founding Mixer, describes what has happened to us in one word: Hydrangification.

Marianne did not want to do a hydrangea episode — Hydrangement is real, Leslie’s got a ba...

Alliums are more than just big purple lollipops — though those are magnificent and need no apologies. This episode covers the full arc of the genus: from the early-season small species to the big June globes, through the alien-landed wonders of late spring and early summer, into the summer-blooming perennial types that changed how many gardeners think about late-season color.

Whether or not Leslie and Marianne can do a 24/7 Allium channel based on the amount of species in this cool genus (970), they can certainly do a dive deep into the allium rabbit hole.

The Allium Channel. 24/7…. hmm…...

HACK YOUR POTS: SMART PLANTS. PERFECT PLACEMENT

It’s prime container gardening season, and everywhere gardeners are spending more than they should to achieve the dream of pots that stop people in their tracks and make their neighbors slightly jealous. But as anyone who has watched a lovingly assembled pot turn into a crispy disappointment knows — it’s not quite as simple as thriller, spiller, filler.

(Those words. So useful. So annoying.)

Today on The Garden Mixer, Leslie and Marianne are getting into the real business of containers: placement, proporti...

Before “microclimates” became a gardening buzzword, Leslie and Marianne were already having hot flashes in the garden. 🔥🌿

In this vintage One More Sip episode of The Garden Mixer, we talk about:
• hot vs cool pockets in the garden
• why some plants fry in summer and freeze in spring
• raised beds, slopes, walls, and heat traps
• tropicals, hostas, wisteria heartbreak, and elephant ears
• Thomas Jefferson’s surprisingly clever vegetable garden design
• and how understanding your own garden is the real gardening superpower

Also included:
🍸 Marianne’s legendary goddess dress
🍸 Leslie comparing gardeni...

HIGH IMPACT, LOW EFFORT FLOWERS THAT DO THE WORK FOR YOU

When the growing season is moving at breakneck speed, an easy win in the form of copious, gorgeous, hey-I-forgot-about-THOSE! flowers is not only cherished, but longed for. Even gardeners who insist on making things more difficult for themselves (ahem…Marianne?) can enjoy the guilty pleasure of high impact, low effort blooms that do a disproportional amount of the work, and make you look like you know what you’re doing.

In this week’s episode of The Garden Mixer, Leslie and Mari...

Flamboyant, sophisticated, blousy and beautiful - the peony tops the favorites chart of so many gardeners (and non-gardeners), that we had to devote a spring episode to them.

They are delicate, but tough, and can live for up to a century -– so it makes sense to figure out what you want and where you want it before you plant one. Leslie & Marianne start that conversation with their favorites today, on The Garden Mixer.

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Leslie and Marianne have ground to cover today. And possibly, so do you.

Spring hits, everything wakes up and suddenly your garden looks like it’s got a bad case of bedhead. Bare spots and awkward tendrils abound. What can pull everything together and literally connect the dots? Our suggestion is a strategic toupee in the form of a good ground cover that also protects the soil, cools the roots, & pampers the wildlife.

But which ones? Some ground covers don’t just fill in, they take over. And what makes a ground cover anyway? It’s time...

Just when you thought winter would never end, spring comes and clobbers you with seeds, weeds, and a list that just won’t quit. Cue the panic. There is a TON to do — so how do we prioritize what’s important, what’s inconvenient, and what’s seriously not getting touched for a couple months?

Leslie and Marianne thought that the best person to tell them was friend and Founding Mixer Erin Schanen, The Impatient Gardener. With her down-to-earth Wisconsin wisdom and general smart-assery, she’ll get us all in good shape — or at least slap us around a littl...

Absolute certainties make Marianne’s Spidey senses start to tingle; Leslie simply ignores absolutes and does her own thing. Which means Leslie would have been much more fun in high school. But where do they come down on the native/non-native debate?

Bouncing off a recent article in GardenRant, where Marianne laid out the development of a powerful movement in US horticulture, the girls dig into the tension -- and once or twice, into each other.

In an industry where plants are happily termed ‘good’ and ‘bad’, invasive plants have now b...

It’s that time of year when we put blade to wood and help our shrubs and trees to become the best versions of themselves.  Pruning is a big job and many gardeners are right in the middle of it by the beginning of March. Some of us are excited by the challenge. Others are dreading the many decisions still in front of them.

Leslie and Marianne aim to channel that excitement, alleviate any anxiety, and set you loose on another pruning season. It’s not rocket science. It’s not even weird science. It’s working...

Compost: it’s so misunderstood. Vilified by HOAs, and loved by gardeners, it’s been ignored, worshiped, blamed, blessed, and then quietly banished to the far corner of the yard. Yet this magical garden process keeps working anyway, taking our scraps, our weeds, our gardening mistakes, and even items that we should have cleaned out of the fridge last month and turning them back into organically rich soil.

What are the issues? What are the joys? What are the things that make the whole process easier? Leslie and Marianne don’t want you to overthink it, they just w...

They’re BAAAAAAAK!

Season II kicks off today — WELCOME if you’re new and welcome back if you’re not! Even Leslie and Marianne have been missing the weekly mix of seasonal relevance and irreverence — and a chance to raise a glass in support of our gardening audience all over the world who are dedicated to the proposition that gardening shouldn’t be boring.

The Garden Mixer is bringing you one of those gardeners today — Rochelle Greayer, the new editor of The American Horticultural Society’s American Gardener Magazine.

Are you an AHS member? We hope...

In the beginning, social media and gardening seemed meant for each other. After all, how better to teach than to show?

But it does feel like we might have lost our way in the last few years. Now we’re pushed towards viral moments, not moments of true discovery. Now we watch sexy six packs selling six packs; and find ourselves navigating a manufactured reality that makes everyday gardeners feel inferior, not empowered.

Are we doing more following than we’re actually doing gardening? We’re talking to gardener and garden influencer Amanda Nadeau of The Ev...

Deer Damage. Few things crush a gardener’s spirit faster than to stroll outside and see that Bambi has invited himself for dinner.

Coincidentally, few things crush Marianne’s spirit more than referring to these four-legged agents of the Devil in cute terms such as ‘Bambi’.

What’s on their perfectly curated menu? Pretty much all of your favorite garden plants. Sprays, granular applications, and motion sensors can keep those deer at bay, for a minute or two. But what about the ultimate solution?

No, the other ultimate solution — a fence. Leslie’s been there, an...

Promises, promises. We all make them at the beginning of each year. And — made desperate by the cold claws of winter — gardeners make even bigger ones at the beginning of each growing season.

Today on The Garden Mixer, Leslie and Marianne take journalistic integrity to a new level and actually follow up with the promises made, the products they loved, and the season they foretold back in February when they hosted Erin Schanen, The Impatient Gardener.

They’re catching up with this popular Midwestern gardener and social media star over large cocktails and la...

Let’s be honest and dispense with the illusion of carefree, perfectly decaying, infinitely Instagrammable, late fall gardens.

In reality, the leaves have blown off the trees, the decorative pumpkins are getting soft spots, and there’s a whole lot of flattened, crushed, eaten, and dejected going on where you had envisioned majestic seed heads, trusses of berries, and full-on fall splendor to welcome friends and family home for Thanksgiving.

Today, Leslie and Marianne have some tips for successfully curating the reality of that garden. How do we uncover the good, downplay the bad, and plan...

How better to take advantage of the experience, skill, and time of others than to buy and plant a plumped-up, pumped-up, ready-to-bloom-for-you bulb?

Or maybe two hundred.

When perennials need a couple years, shrubs insist on commitment, and trees require a selfless gift to future generations; bulbs are all about YOU — and it’s time to indulge. Granted, it’s the you of six months from now — but where else in life can you successfully pull off a surprise party for yourself? And afford the florist?

Today, Leslie and Marianne explore all the options...

Cool air and warm soils mean that it’s a great time to divide and multiply the plants that you love, and Leslie and Marianne want to help you do it easily, efficiently, and with the least amount of plant pain as possible.

What are they dividing in their gardens and how are they doing it? And why is it so good for the plants to rip them from happy homes just when they were thinking of taking a well-earned nap? For that matter, why aren’t the girls sipping pumpkin lattes and waiting ‘till spring?

Set...

Today, The Garden Mixer is highjacked by two jetlagged women drinking way too much coffee and trying to pull themselves together to adequately describe the many sights, tastes, and eureka moments of nine days visiting gardens in Cornwall and the Southwest of England.

From new naturalism and earthworks at Wildside, to the breathtaking views across Tresco Island, to extraordinary fairy tale hotels, the girls discuss special moments and numerous takeaways — both for their gardens at home, and for future visits to this very special area of the UK, often under-visited by American garden-trippers looking for “The Big Five...

September has snuck up on most of us and cold weather is right around the corner.

Suddenly it’s time to walk through your garden and decide who’s making the travel team and who’s sitting out this season in the great hereafter. Can you set aside sentiment and choose the strongest and healthiest to make winter a joy instead of a chore? Do you know when to bring them in? (And what you can get away with?)

From bathing them, to babying them, Leslie and Marianne share personal anecdotes and practical tips for managi...

Pumpkin spice may have snuck itself onto the shelves (and into Leslie’s cheesy introduction), but that doesn’t mean that the pollinating insects in your garden have stopped searching for pollen to store and nectar to sip. On today’s episode, Leslie and Marianne discuss some late blooming species you can grow to keep those pollinators healthy and gearing up for winter — and which will also make you smile as the garden moves from summer-sizzle to autumn-fizzle.

Soil is warm, bugs are low, temps are cool, rains are coming, and nurseries are selling. Time to give that har...

As a gardener, you are not just creative, you are a creative. Your job is to go out there and create your tail off. But the other job you must strive to do well is that of an editor, tightening the voice of your garden with strategic cuts that help it shine and become the garden you envisioned (even when those cuts seem counterintuitive).

This means that cruel things are going to happen. Cruel, and perhaps unusual.

In this episode, Leslie and Marianne talk about everything from volunteer seedling...

You’re tired. You’re hot. You’re yearning for autumn to set you free. But how your garden looks right now has everything to do with the choices you made in past planting seasons and a lot to do with foliage.

Have you capitalized on the resilient summer foliage options that keep working when the lobelia has melted and the poppies are so over?

This week on The Garden Mixer, Leslie and Marianne explore six of their favorite foliage plants for summer — each choosing a perennial, a shrub, and a tender perennial (aka ‘temperennial’) — and then choos...

They’re deer resistant, drought resistant, and boredom-resistant — and they’re not without controversy. Ornamental grasses might be the magic texture your garden has been missing all these years.

Whether you want to ‘blur and merge’ as per Grasses for Gardens and Landscapes author Neil Lucas, or ‘punch and soften’ as per the more violent of your two co-hosts, Marianne Willburn — using ornamental grasses strategically can help your garden relax and sway into summer, filling gaps, feathering edges, and giving you three-season architecture without the bagworms.

Join Leslie and Marianne as they share with listeners their top ten or...