The Garden Mixer: A Gardening Podcast

In the heat of August, it’s not just gardeners that want to check out — it’s their plants. But there’s a lot plants can tell us about the conditions we’re all navigating, so it’s worth paying attention when the temperatures soar.

To channel those thoughts, Leslie and Marianne welcome Carol Reese — horticulturist, writer, humorist, retired University of Tennessee extension specialist, and keeper of approximately three to four hundred dogs — though not all at once.

Carol gardens on 118 acres in West Tennessee, where the heat index routinely clears 105°F and the garden operates on something close to feral principles. So does she, and she’s ready to dish on what survives in serious heat, why it’s hard to watch Europeans complain about their new normal, and why giving people plants you know they should be growing is a public service — even if you have to grab a shovel and plant them yourself.

You might want to pull up a chair somewhere shady — it’s time for a long cool drink with The Garden Mixer.

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Botanical Names: Those complicated, two-part, dead language elements of tongue- torture that every gardener looking for a special plant will face at some point in their horticultural journey.

Should you embrace the challenge, and feel vulnerable? Or dismiss the challenge and [possibly still] feel vulnerable?

This week on One More Sip of The Garden Mixer, Leslie and Marianne discuss the third option — studying with curiosity, speaking with confidence, and ignoring those who use botanical nomenclature as a weapon in conversation.

Bet you can think of a few peeps that fit THAT bill.

If you find yourself mumbling botanical names in horticultural circles in the profound hope that no one hears you; or vainly sifting through seven types of ‘wood fern,’ searching for the one you want, it’s time to get resources, get confident, and get communicating better in this discipline that you love!

Every gardener has a tchotchke threshold — the point at which a garden stops being a garden and starts being a yard sale with better plants. But where exactly is that line, and who gets to draw it?

After decades of embracing, avoiding, judging, and occasionally defending their own questionable choices, Leslie and Marianne weigh in on the art of garden ornamentation — how to use it well, when to put the hedgehog down, and why Fergus Garrett's favorite garden in Hastings has hardly any plants in it at all.

Toads or total chaos? Today on The Garden Mixer.

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It’s mid summer and if you haven’t been staking your floppiest floppers, the chance is you haven’t quite gotten away with it. Some plants stand tall on their own. Others need a little help.

In this Barrel Aged One More Sip of The Garden MIxer Leslie Harris and Marianne Willburn tackle one of gardening's most practical—and most overlooked—skills: staking. They discuss which plants are worth staking, which ones are better left alone, how to make supports nearly invisible, and why choosing the right plants in the first place can save you a lot of work.

Along the way they share techniques learned at Great Dixter, the beauty of traditional pea-sticking, why timing matters, and a few confessions about staking jobs that never quite happened.

Whether you're growing peonies, delphiniums, dahlias, grasses, or other tall perennials, this conversation will help you keep your garden looking natural instead of looking like a tomato patch.

Gardening shouldn't be boring.

Every gardener has them. The plant that ate the house, the catalog seduction that ended in tears, the tree you loved that didn’t love you. Regrets are how gardeners learn — or in Marianne’s case, how they beat themselves up while learning. Leslie chose the topic. Marianne suffered through it. Both of them had more material than an hour could possibly cover.

Welcome to a guided tour through the taxonomy of gardening mistakes — organized by category, confessed to with varying degrees of shame, and occasionally still present in the garden because nobody could bring themselves to finish the job. The girls are drinking deep from the well of regrets, and they’re fairly sure you’re going to relate. Today on The Garden Mixer.

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Deadheading, do we or don't we? The answer, as you expected, is complicated. And Leslie and Marianne want to dive into the nuance on this barrel aged edition of One More Sip.

In fact they’re going to discuss a lot of heinous herbaceous amputations in the name of beauty, such as Chelsea chopping, tiered pruning, and post-pruning.

Why does it work? And when doesn’t it? And do you really have the patience to snip 235 cornflower heads into a basket when you can simply rip it out and let the Verbena bonariensis take over?

All this and baby stealing on this Barrel Aged version of One More Sip of The Garden Mixer.

This episode is celebrating its first birthday. If you would like to stay current with the latest One More Sip episodes, join us on The Garden Mixer on Substack to be a One More Sip paid subscriber.

America has a hydrangea problem. In the best possible way. They’re consistently among the best-selling flowering shrubs in the country, they colonize every garden center and big box supercenter from May to August, and, if you don’t have a deer problem, you’re likely to succumb to the latest plump, end-of-aisle offering every time you go out to buy some milk. Erin Schanen, The Impatient Gardener, and Founding Mixer, describes what has happened to us in one word: Hydrangification.

Marianne did not want to do a hydrangea episode — Hydrangement is real, Leslie’s got a bad case, and how much more can possibly be said? But Leslie disagreed and drafted in Scott Beuerlein — radio host, horticulturist at the Cincinnati Botanical Zoo and Botanical Garden, and Marianne’s nemesis at GardenRant — to prove it.

He had analogies. He had opinions. He had been thinking about hydrangeas all day.

And Marianne was wrong. It turns out there is quite a lot left to say. Join them as they delve deep into the hydrangea addiction sweeping the country.

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Alliums are more than just big purple lollipops — though those are magnificent and need no apologies. This episode covers the full arc of the genus: from the early-season small species to the big June globes, through the alien-landed wonders of late spring and early summer, into the summer-blooming perennial types that changed how many gardeners think about late-season color.

Whether or not Leslie and Marianne can do a 24/7 Allium channel based on the amount of species in this cool genus (970), they can certainly do a dive deep into the allium rabbit hole.

The Allium Channel. 24/7…. hmm… bears thinking about.

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HACK YOUR POTS: SMART PLANTS. PERFECT PLACEMENT

It’s prime container gardening season, and everywhere gardeners are spending more than they should to achieve the dream of pots that stop people in their tracks and make their neighbors slightly jealous. But as anyone who has watched a lovingly assembled pot turn into a crispy disappointment knows — it’s not quite as simple as thriller, spiller, filler.

(Those words. So useful. So annoying.)

Today on The Garden Mixer, Leslie and Marianne are getting into the real business of containers: placement, proportion, pairing, and the hacks that professional container gardeners actually use — the ones they learned the hard way, so you don’t have to.

There will be opinions about sweet potato vine. There will be strong feelings about saucers. And somewhere in there, a 95-year-old gardener named Donna is going to redefine your potting vocabulary. If Leslie can remember what she said.

Grab your trowel. And maybe a dark and stormy.

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Before “microclimates” became a gardening buzzword, Leslie and Marianne were already having hot flashes in the garden. 🔥🌿

In this vintage One More Sip episode of The Garden Mixer, we talk about:
• hot vs cool pockets in the garden
• why some plants fry in summer and freeze in spring
• raised beds, slopes, walls, and heat traps
• tropicals, hostas, wisteria heartbreak, and elephant ears
• Thomas Jefferson’s surprisingly clever vegetable garden design
• and how understanding your own garden is the real gardening superpower

Also included:
🍸 Marianne’s legendary goddess dress
🍸 Leslie comparing gardening to golf bunker shots
🍸 Hot Girl Summer Gardening™
🍸 More botanical pronunciation adventures than anyone asked for

This episode originally aired for paid One More Sip subscribers and is now being released publicly one year later.

#gardening #gardenpodcast #microclimates #gardeningtips #plants #thegardenmixer #horticulture #gardendesign