Cathy Ludden epitomizes the role individual gardeners can play in transforming their local landscapes to meet our current environmental challenges. An avid student of native plants and wildlife, she has worked with great success at a personal, neighborhood, and county level to make her community biologically richer, ecologically healthier –and more beautiful.

Inheritor of a century-old family tradition of supplying the best spring-flowering bulbs to American gardeners, Brent Heath details the important role that they can play in today’s sustainable gardens. Flourishing without the use of chemicals, these plants furnish reliable early spring color and food for early season pollinators; follow Brent’s growing tips and your bulbs will return year after year as the toughest of perennials.

Fostering wildlife and native plants – making our landscapes contributors to the local ecosystem – has become a goal of so many gardeners. In her new book, “Wild By Design: The Rise of Ecological Restoration,” Laura J. Martin traces how this became so. Introducing a remarkable band of ecologically minded pioneers, many of them women, Martin describes how this consciousness spread through the land preservation and gardening communities, how the understanding of restoration has changed over time, and what the future may hold with climate change.

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 convenient, inexpensive way to conserve drinking water, reduce energy usage, and make gardening more fun.

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 affordable and easy, even for novices

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 accomplishments of Brooklyn Bridge Park’s remarkable horticultural staff, the acute need for such landscapes in a rapidly urbanizing world, and how gardening can influence not only our relationship with the natural world but also with each other.

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 dynamics to their own back yards

With some 40 million acres of lawn in the continental United States, transforming that feature of our landscapes presents the greatest opportunity for an environmental up-grade in our gardens. Krissy Boys, the Natural Areas Horticulturist of the Cornell Botanical Gardens in Ithaca, New York, has shown how to do that. She’s replanted an area of conventional turf, replacing the European-descended lawn grasses with naturally compact native grass species and a complex of low-growing perennial flowers to support pollinators. Krissy has dramatically reduced the need for mowing, eliminated lawn watering and fertilization, and made her re-designed turf into a richly functioning part of the local ecosystem. Join our conversation to hear the details of how she accomplished this

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. AGZA has developed analytical tools that can help owners reduce the carbon footprint of their landscape by a half or even more. It also works with landscape industry professionals to help them explore alternate tool systems, cleaner burning or battery powered, that can enable them to accomplish maintenance goals at less environmental cost and typically far more quietly. Listen to Dan describe how AGZA resolves the conflicting dynamics.

#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 colleagues biologist Heather Holm and native plants stalwart Lorraine Johnson have published an article in Rewilding Magazine detailing why this isn’t the best means of fostering native pollinators in North America

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 communities as well. Framed as a series of stories profiling individual animals and plants, this book is as entertaining as it is informative, and is thoughtfully designed to apply no matter where in the continental United States you happen to garden

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.