Growing Greener

Ned Friedman, Director of Harvard's Arnold Arboretum discusses that institution's programs to preserve the DNA of tree species and populations threatened with extinction by climate change, helping trees flourish in an increasingly challenging environment, and how you can share in his passion for these extraordinary organisms by bonding with one tree.

Amy Free, rabbit-lover and anthrozoologist, awakens Tom Christopher to the beauties and ecological importance of rabbits and shares how to host them without sacrificing your garden.

Theresa Crimmins, Director of the USA National Phenology Network, explains why knowing the timing of natural events such as the annual bloom of different flowers and the emergences of their insect pollinators is essential to good gardening and shares how climate climate change is disrupting natural collaborations that stretch back over millennia.

Horatio Joyce, the Garden Conservancy's Director of Public Programs & Education details the rich opportunities his organization provides to tour remarkable gardens in every region of the United States, and the innovative opportunities for gardening education it provides both in person and online.

Rutger Myers of Eco-Cycle, a leader in promoting community composting programs for 50 years, discusses studies that indicate microplastics may be finding their way into the finished product and what you can do to prevent that.

A school of European and English garden designers, and now American ones too, claim their "designed ecosystems" of plants gathered from all over the world provide similar benefits to natural plant communities of locally co-evolved species. Peter Adler, a plant ecologist at Utah State University, helps us explore the potential of such a practice.

Texan Ben Pfeiffer discusses his personal crusade for fireflies and the remarkable facts about their strange and colorful life cycles in this return visit to a conversation from July 2020

Sara Weaner Cooper describes how New Directions in the American Landscape is incorporating indigenous American approaches into Ecological Gardening and how by adjusting the growing conditions in her lawn she caused it to transform itself into a meadow of native grasses and wildflowers without the use of herbicides or other unsustainable practices. A replay of a July, 2024 conversation.

By storing excess heat from sunny days in the soil below his greenhouses, Tim Clymer keeps them warm on winter nights for a fraction the cost of conventional propane heat.

Dr. Rick Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies shares thirty years of research on the ecology of tick-borne diseases in North America, detailing why landscape treatments such as pesticide sprays are unproductive as well as environmentally destructive, and outlines a very different approach to this public health threat.