Growing Greener

How to introduce Sefra Alexandra, "the Seed Huntress"? She's an agroecological educator with a masters degree from Cornell University and she's worked as an ethnobotanist all around the world, including in her home town of Southport, Connecticut. Sefra's a "BOATanist" who plants seed-grown natives along riparian corridors by canoe, and she's a member of The Explorers Club. Currently Sefra is also the coordinator of the Northeast Organic Farming Association's program to restore pollinator habitat, the EcoType Project. For this project she's supervising and assisting in the sustainable collection of wild type, locally adapted seed, and facilitating their cultivation so that these plants' seeds can be harvested, processed, and delivered to local nurseries to be grown on and returned to the wild or gardens. A Seed Huntress, it appears, is a person of many skills.

Eric Fleisher of F2 Environmental Design has been breaking new ground – literally ­– ever since he first began converting New York public landscapes to organic management 30 years ago. By building up and managing the soil, and treating the landscape as a holistic system, he eliminates the needs for chemical inputs and turns garden wastes into an environmental resource. In this way he has transformed landscapes all over the country, from the Harvard University campus to the Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden.

Being in the moment is a challenge in our busy, too-connected age, yet it is essential for appreciating and understanding the garden. Poet Susan Brearley shares her practice for mindfulness: the on-the-spot composition of garden haiku. Brearley, who has been teaching haiku workshops at the great Innisfree garden in Millbrook, New York, shares the basics of this classic Japanese poetic form, along with a look at the sensibility that traditionally informs it.

Do you hate the noise and stink of gasoline-powered blowers and mowers rampaging through your neighborhood? Matthew Benzie of Indigenous Ingenuities in Doylestown, Pennsylvania is doing something about that. He's switched his maintenance crew to zero-emission, quiet, battery-powered equipment transported on a bicycle-powered cart. He's designing his landscapes for greener, sustainable maintenance too. Learn about this revolutionary rethinking of the landscape business on this week's episode.

Brooklyn's famous cemetery builds on its heritage, becoming a community green space, an arboretum, and a center for environmental research

Matthew Shepherd of the Xerces Society details ways to get the garden ready for winter without harming over-wintering insects and other foundational wildlife

"Food Forests" are a central concept of Permaculture – in our discussion of his must-have new book, Sustainable Food Gardens, Robert Kourik details where Permaculture goes wrong, and explains how his book corrects the food forest for the North American landscape.

Looking to reconnect with nature? Try Brooklyn Bridge Park, six concrete shipping piers on New York's East River transformed into a series of vibrant ecosystems rich with native wildlife. Director of Horticulture Rebecca McMackin describes how salvaged materials make this 85-acre, organically maintained landscape sustainable as well as beautiful.

Dr. Josef Gorres of the University of Vermont discusses the environmental threat posed by invasive Asian Jumping Worms and the methods he is exploring for their control in our forests and gardens

Forest steward Adrian Ayres Fisher describes the profound impact that uncontrolled deer populations have on native woodlands and their ecology