As our climates grow warmer and frequently drier, gardeners need the drought and heat tolerance, and innate sustainability of our native grassland plants more than ever.  In their new book, The Gardener’s Guide to Prairie Plants, Neil Diboll and Hilary Cox have combined their decades of experience to produce an indispensable tool for beginners and veterans alike, with invaluable advice about how to create functioning grassland ecosystems inside and outside the prairie states.

“Grow Your Own” is a cornerstone of sustainability, but our vegetable gardens are being challenged by increasingly erratic weather as the climate changes.  John Traunfeld, Program Director at the University of Maryland’s Home & Garden Information Center shares his experiences in making food gardens more climate resilient, and how this can even draw our communities closer together.

Lead contamination is common in soils of many residential neighborhoods in urban, suburban, and even rural settings.  Soil scientist Clay Robinson – “Dr. Dirt” – details where this problem is most likely, how to test your soil, and how appropriate gardening can provide protection.

Artist Robert Adzema discusses his history of creating ingenious and innovative sundials, and what sundials can teach the gardener about plants’ primary fuel.

Dan Jaffe Wilder’s response to the polluting sterility of the traditional lawn?  Plant strawberries.  And that’s only one of many intriguing – and tested - proposals made by this talented native plants pioneer. 

Gardening revolution or cult?  Permaculture, an Australian movement that aims at creating a more sustainable relationship with the landscape has attracted more than 100,000 followers in the United States.  Sustainable pioneer Robert Kourik critiques its methods based on his 43 years of experience

Will the “volcano mulch” the landscaper piled around the bases of your trees kill them?  And is a mulch made of ground-up shipping pallets really beneficial for your plants?  You may be surprised by the science-based insights about common organic mulches that Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott of Washington State University shares in the most recent “Growing Greener.”

Ecological gardening leader Larry Weaner details how you can get all the benefits of conventional mulch, plus boosting biodiversity and wildlife, with a well-designed and beautiful groundcover of native plants

Maya K. van Rossum discusses Green Amendments for the Generations, the movement she founded to bring an amendment to every state constitution guaranteeing residents’ basic human right to clean air and water, and a healthy environment

John Walker, a horticulturist who trained at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and a multi award winning environmental writer, shares advice on Veganic Gardening, an approach that combines organic practices with plant-based nurturing of the soil with resources found or grown on-site for maximum sustainability.

Let the buyer beware, says Dawn Pettinelli, Director of the University of Connecticut’s Soil & Nutrient Analysis Lab, when it comes to topsoil.  There’s no legal definition and what you get can range from good to very bed – unless you use Dawn’s shopping tips

“Gardeners are the worst threat to native plants.”  Hostility toward horticulturists is common within the ecological restoration community. But, John Gedraitis of Van Berkum Nursery says, it’s an impediment to growers such as him who want to expand the availability of local ecotype plants, genetically adapted natives grown from locally collected wild seed.

Elizabeth Licata, a passionate promoter of Garden Walk Buffalo, the nation’s largest free open garden tour, and a longtime contributor to the popular blog “Garden Rant” takes on gardener anthropomorphism, our appealing but destructive habit of ascribing human emotions and characteristics to plants.

Landscape architects Wolfgang Oehme and James van Sweden electrified the gardening world in 1975 when they introduced a new horticultural richness and a concern for sustainability with their “New American Garden Style.”  Eric Groft, current CEO of Oehme, van Sweden discusses the firm’s new book, “Beyond Bold,” describing how the successor generation has remained true to that legacy while pursuing new avenues of environmental sensitivity.

Dr. Douglas Tallamy, the University of Delaware entomologist who has been awakening homeowners to the need to plant natives and join our plots together in a giant “homegrown national park,” has found a new audience.  He has just released a young readers’ edition of his best-selling book, “Nature’s Best Hope.”  Learn how you can enlist your children in the campaign to save our ecosystems.

Founded in 2013 by internationally acclaimed garden designer Edwina von Gal, the Perfect Earth Project seeks to introduce landscape professionals to toxin-free, sustainable approaches to their craft, while reaching out to their customers to create a market for these skills.  Listen to the Project’s new Executive Director Matt Jeffery discuss the many new programs the organization is pursuing.

Jeff Lorenz, founder of the acclaimed Refugia Design Build, explains why the pandemic was a boom time for a landscaper committed to native plants, and how his firm’s “Ecological Greenway Network” is transforming neighborhoods

Nebraskan Benjamin Vogt, a leader in nature-based gardening, has just published Prairie Up, a book that is sure to become a go-to tool for those designing and installing landscapes rooted in our native grassland flora.  With its many insights how the dynamics of native plants will shape a native landscape, Prairie Up offers invaluable lessons to nature-based gardeners everywhere

My quest for tomatoes that will bear in my cool, cloudy climate led me to Dr. James Myers of Oregon State University.  He shared with me the cultivars he had bred for that purpose, then described a program to produce vegetables better adapted to organic cultivation, and his collaboration with chefs

Horticultural Educator Carol Reese explains why feeding your garden in springtime with a “complete” fertilizer can be a mistake, and describes a “lazy” style of gardening that can help heal the environment while drastically reducing your work.