Growing Greener

When it was founded in 1900, the Native Plant Trust was the first plant conservation organization in the United States. Its new CEO, Tim Johnson describes how, more than a century later, the Trust continues to break new ground, defining how an organization such as this can rise to meet the challenges currently facing our native flora.

Too often we regard snow as merely an annoyance, but Kim Eierman, ecological garden designer and educator, makes the case for snow as a natural source of great and sometimes surprising benefits for the garden.

Hybrid fruit and vegetable seeds are like thoroughbred horses – extraordinary performers but not resilient or good at coping with adverse conditions. When they didn't succeed in Joseph Lofthouse's Utah garden, he created his own "landraces", biodiverse crop strains that "promiscuously pollinate" and speedily evolve to thrive in local conditions and adapt to the gardener's style of cultivation.

Why are invasive plants so effective in muscling out native species? Research by Dr. Susan Kalisz of the University of Tennessee Knoxville details how the invaders commonly release chemicals into the soil that disrupt the functioning of native plants and even the soil fungi and bacteria that help them grow.

Jim Sirch of Yale University's Peabody Museum shares gardener-friendly resources and an easy, nearly foolproof method for starting natives from seeds, together with tips for finding locally collected seeds wherever you garden in the United States.

Brooklyn's Prospect Park, one of Frederick Law Olmsted's greatest masterpieces, was failing by 1989 when Joseph Doccola signed on to restore its tree canopy. Over the next decade he replanted lost trees, matching adapted native species to each site, helping to turn Prospect Park into a pioneering example for urban parks across the United States.

There are thousands, millions of weed seeds lying dormant in your garden soil – the "weed seed bank" – waiting for a chance to emerge and invade your plantings. Listen as Dr. Bryan Brown of Cornell University shares strategies for drawing down the account before those seeds become a problem.

Robert Kourik, a pioneering gardener in Santa Rosa, California shares a new understanding of roots and how gardeners can better foster these hidden but foundational elements of their plants

As Director of Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park, Rebecca McMackin played a leading role in transforming 85 acres of abandoned piers and pavement into a series of vibrant ecosystems that are a model of what an urban park can be. We talk with her about her subsequent year of study at Harvard and her new endeavors to make ecological landscaping the mainstream.

Invasive plants flourish in part because in their transition to North America they leave behind the co-evolved pests that help keep them in check in their homelands. Dr. Lisa Tewksbury, Director of the University of Rhode Island Biocontrol Laboratory, describes the painstaking process of introducing to our landscape organisms that can control the invasive plants without harming our native species.