Growing Greener

Everything that grows on your property – its "biomass" – should remain there even after death, says this award-winning garden designer and founder of the Perfect Earth Project.  Fallen branches, leaves, even tree trunks as they decay reactivate a cycle essential to Nature's health, and are an opportunity for a different kind of beauty.

Overlooked by many gardeners, moths are actually more efficient as pollinators than bees and are the basis of the food chain for everything from bats and songbirds to grizzly bears

Expert tracker Jason Knight shares how to develop the ability to read animal tracks and signs to keep current with wildlife visits and to resolve wildlife problems peacefully and effectively.

Richard Hayden, senior director of horticulture for the High Line, describes how plants and gardeners collaborate in this ever-changing urban paradise

Beth Ginter, executive Director of the Chesapeake Conservation Landscaping Council, describes her organization's successful program to enlist an often-resistant profession as advocates for environmental activism.

How Village and Wilderness fosters diverse local solutions to a global problem

John Pitroff chose composting when his daughter's birth sparked dreams of leaving her a better world – and now he's addressing environmental problems while making a living helping local gardeners and farmers. 

Peter Del Tredici, Senior Research Scientist Emeritus of Arnold Arboretum and Visiting Lecturer of Applied Ecology and Planning at MIT explains the history of these garden pests why they can play an essential role in this era of climate change.

An accomplished and progressive garden designer, Pam Penick, author of "Gardens of Texas," shares ideas for ideas for using native plants in traditional and formal gardens garnered from her reporting on private landscapes of the Lone Star State

Leader of the Ecological Gardening movement Rebecca McMackin shares reasons why in a time of discouragement, gardening can restore optimism.

Last May Growing Greener featured the challenge that Plan it Wild, a rewilding design and installation firm, posed to American homeowners: to replace 25 square feet of lawn with locally indigenous plants.  Today we hear how nearly 10,000 people in 49 states committed to this 12-week online program, how backyard biodiversity flourished as a result, and how the challenge is expanding through neighborhoods to reach people who hadn't previously considered devoting their landscapes to reinforcing the regional ecosystem.

Nancy DuBrule-Clemente, a pioneer of organic land care, extolls the outstanding aesthetic and ecological contributions of goldenrods, a genus of native flowers too seldom seen in our gardens.

Edwina Von Gal, founder and president of the Perfect Earth Project, completes her interview of Growing Greener host, Tom Christopher, exploring his path to ecological gardening, the hope he finds in the remarkable contributions of young colleagues, and the most effective ways to reach out to the broader gardening public.

Edwina Von Gal, founder and president of the Perfect Earth Project, interviews Growing Greener host, Tom Christopher, about what led him from an education steeped in traditional gardening to helping found ecological gardening in the United States

Andrea Hurd of Oakland, California describes the way she structured Mariposa Gardening and Design Cooperative, Inc. to provide employee equitability and management experience for women breaking into the field, and the firm's commitment to celebrating the local landscape by enhancing habitat and working with indigenous materials.

Switching to more environmentally friendly practices is too often resisted by landscape professionals afraid to stray from familiar routines.  Mariah Whitmore and Tony Piazza, both prominent landscape business owners in the eastern end of Long Island, New York, discuss how they are increasing profits by adding Nature friendly land care to their repertoire.

Claire Chambers, founder of Meadow Lab, describes the roll-out sod her company is producing that can transform a landscape into a blooming, mature meadow of native flowers and grasses in a single growing season

A replay of a conversation from April of 2021 with Pollinator Conservationist Heather Holm about her multi-award-winning book, Wasps, Their Biology, Diversity, and Role as Beneficial Insects and Pollinators of Native Plants.

Jenica Allen and Matt Fertakos of Northeast RISCC describe the invaluable free online guide they helped to create that provides all a gardener needs to know about selecting native plants that will flourish not only today but also persist as the local climate changes

Julia Cavicchi and Tatiana Schreiber of the Rich Earth Institute talk of curbing water pollution by removing human urine from the waste stream, and how you can repurpose it to feed your plants

Michael Bone, Curator of the Steppe Collection at Denver Botanic Gardens, relates Denver's native flora to similar grasslands around the world and explains how this knowledge can inspire and enrich the local gardening.

Understanding this concept provides the foundation for creating a high functioning, stable, and resilient landscape – anywhere you garden

When a freak tornado swept through Ambler Arboretum, the staff and university administration took the opportunity to turn its recovery into an exploration of natural resilience in the face of climate change

Dr. Eve Beaury's research reveals the outsize role American gardeners still play in supporting the propagation and spread of plants that are known to be invasive.

Plan it Wild's "Less Lawn More Life" challenge offers a fun, easy, and free initiation into natural gardening that's exploding across the country, drawing thousands of ecosystem novices young and old

Alicia Houk, natural garden designer and educator, describes how native, reseeding annuals can make your plantings self-renewing, weed resistant, and resilient in the face of disturbance

Co-founder of Pollinator Pathway, Louise Washer saw this project go viral, spreading from one Connecticut community to nationwide in just 8 years.  Listen as she shares the approach that has made her other environmental activism so effective.

Jennifer Campbell, a sustainable landscape designer in New Hampshire, built herself a natural swimming pool that saves energy, nurtures native plants, serves wildlife, and cost her only $10,000 to install.

Assisted migration, helping native plants move to escape the effects of a rapidly changing climate, is a controversial topic among ecologists.  Thomas Nuhfer of the University of Massachusetts Amherst shares a new understanding of how to make these moves without destabilizing existing ecosystems.

Award-winning landscape designer Edwina von Gal describes her Perfect Earth Project's dual approach to changing the culture of land care in the United States: building a constituency among land owners and gardeners for ecologically-based, toxin-free design and maintenance while educating landscapers in how to serve this new market.

The National Plant Germplasm System has protected U.S. farmers against crop diseases and now climate change for over a century; DOGE has defunded its $40 million annual budget, imperiling our $1.5 trillion food system

Award-winning landscape architect Michael Geffel describes how he used precisely targeted and timed mowing to convert a brownfield into a flowering grassland and a vibrant public recreation area.

Slugs are the Rodney Dangerfield of garden wildlife – our only interest is in exterminating them.  Yet as Dr. Jann Vendetti of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum explains, they lead fascinating and, in many ways, very useful lives

Gardeners complain about clay soils, but Benjamin Vogt, a leading designer of natural gardens and landscapes notes that they offer many advantages for the ecologically based gardener

Shannon Currey, head of education and outreach for Izel Native Plants, shares how that transformative plant clearinghouse is as committed to the education of its customers as to providing them with biodiverse bargains

Molly Moore, master gardener and master naturalist, shares the online program she co-wrote with Marlene Smith which can set you on the path to success in starting plants from locally collected seeds without harming the wild populations

Brandon Carbary's pre-designed garden templates, shipped complete with plants, makes creating a locally adapted, aesthetically attractive display of native plants almost effortless

Ethan Kauffman, Director of Stoneleigh, describes the 9-year process his team has pursued, enriching a classic Philadelphia Mainline estate with thousands of species of native plants, to transform it into a model for how to honor traditional landscape aesthetics while boosting biodiversity and serving the local ecosystem

Starting vegetable and annual seedlings indoors is a skill every gardener needs to master and Dr. Steve Reiners of Cornell University shares tricks of the trade.  Grow your own locally adapted, disease-resistant cultivars for bigger harvests, better flavors, and a more resilient garden.

Judge's Farm Nursery is the newest venture in the Griswold family's 385-year association with their homestead at the mouth of the Connecticut River.  Co-founder Matt Griswold describes the nursery's program of growing native plants sustainably from locally collected seeds.