In this roundtable, we talk about drafting and drawing with Lisa Nunamaker, of Paper Garden Workshop, and Amy Fedele, of Pretty Purple Door, two fabulous garden educators who offer online courses in landscape graphics. Leah took courses from both instructors this year -- Lisa's Garden Graphics Toolkit and Amy's Great at Procreate. 

We discuss why the fundamentals of hand-drafting remain so valuable to the design process; the role of digital design programs like AutoCAD; and how tablet apps provide a new, hybrid avenue of digital hand-drafting. 

Then we turn to to the subject of emotional baggage: Why is drawing so scary for so many adults? How can we gain confidence as creatives and develop our own unique visual style? 

Mentioned in this episode: the tablet apps (Procreate, Adobe Fresco, Morpholio Trace, Concepts); The Creative Habit by Twila Tharp (2006).

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A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but some of the common names we use for plants downright stink! In this episode, we're diving into problematic colloquial names. Some common names are geographically misleading (“Jerusalem artichoke”); others are xenophobic, racist, or antisemitic ("wandering Jew"); while still others are an unfortunate combination of both (“Turk’s cap”). 

While it's probably too much to expect everyone to start using Latin names for plants, we can adapt new common names that are more culturally sensitive and accurate. Like the plants themselves, common names are organic, living things that need to evolve over time. 

First up, some armadillo drama and an update on Colleen's super-low-maintenance front yard renovation inspired by the writing of Roy Diblik (here's our original episode about that.)

Mentioned: 

Great at Procreate, an online digital drawing course from instructor Amy Fedele; "Problematic Common Names" (House Plant Hobbyist, 2021); How Plants Get Their Names by L.H. Bailey (Macmillian, 1933); Native Flora of Texas by the Texas Highway Department (undated, ca. 1960); The Better Common Names Project of the Entomological Society of America; and Potentially Problematic Common Names, a study by the American Public Gardens Association (2021). 

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Attention plant lovers! Central Texas Seed Savers is hosting a Seed Swap at the Austin Central Library (710 W. Cesar Chavez St) on Saturday, October 29 from 11-1pm. This event is free and open to the public.  Bring seeds to share! Or just come get some seeds! For more info, visit https://www.centexseedsavers.org and https://library.austintexas.libguides.com/seedsandsustainability

In this episode, Colleen unearths as much as she can about the largely unwritten history of plant pots. When did humans start growing plants in containers? How did innovations in materials and technology lead to the domestication of plants, plant collecting, and the growth of the nursery industry? Why are plant pots so overlooked as a facet of industrial design? (We can rattle off several iconic chair designs, but flowerpots? Not so much.) Why don’t the standardized names of nursery pot sizes correspond to their actual volume in the US?  

We have more questions than answers, folks. 

First up, Leah is practicing her drawings. And we need an alternative name for the tricky season that comes between summer and fall in Texas. 

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Mentioned in this episode:

Rain lilies (Cooperia drummondii); Paper Garden Workshop; “Elevation to Plan” technique; Plan to Elevation (Leah’s sketch); The Artist’s Way (1992) by Julia Cameron; Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain (1979) by Betty Edwards; Willy Guhl designs on Artnet; a bio of Guhl; history of flowerpots from the Salem Maritime National Historic Site; “Plastic Pots and the Nursery Industry: Production, Use, Disposal, and Environmental Impacts” (2020) by the APLD; Eric Soderholtz.

We're back with a salute to Monty Don, beloved British gardening expert, author, and fashion icon, whose infectious passion for plants is boosting our spirits through this bummer summer. 

Though little known in the US, jaunty Monty is a big celebrity across the pond, as the host of the BBC's Gardener's World, Big Dreams, Small Spaces, and Around The World in 80 Gardens. With his soothing temperament and sharp insights, he's a bit like a cross between Anthony Bourdain and Mr Rogers. 

We discuss differing approaches to horticulture and land stewardship in the US and the UK and how Big Dreams, Small Spaces has informed our thinking about the role of the landscape designer as consultant. Then we follow Monty's 80 Gardens journey to Mexico City to visit perhaps the oldest perennial flowering gardens in the world: the floating chinampas of Xochimilco. 

(Where to watch these shows in the US? Gardener's World and Big Dreams are currently available on Amazon Prime. The full 80 Gardens series is on Youtube.)

Mentioned in this episode: 

Around The World in 80 Gardens (book) by Monty Don. 

The Horticulturati is cohosted by Leah Churner and Colleen Dieter. Want more? Please join our Patreon to hear our bonus podcast, "In the Weeds," and early access to episodes! 

On this episode, we dive into ecologist Douglas Tallamy's books Nature's Best Hope (2019) and The Living Landscape (2014, with Rick Darke). Tallamy's work takes native plant gardening and wildlife gardening to another level by focusing not just on species diversity, but on diversity of species interaction to promote ecological conservation. According to Tallamy, "native" plants are those which have "evolved in a given place over a period of time sufficient to develop complex and essential relationships with a diversity of animals." Native plants, then, are organisms that have interacted with insects, birds, and mammals for thousands, if not millions, of years. We discuss Tallamy's perspective and the how we might tackle the challenge of implementing a conservation design -- and convincing homeowners to think of themselves as land stewards.

Up first: It's hot here in Austin, so we are talking about what early triple-digit temps mean for gardeners. Leah is looking for her niche, taking inspiration from specialist insects. 

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Mentioned in this episode: National Wildlife Federation's Native Plant Finder web tool; The Know Maintenance Perennial Garden (2014) by Roy Diblik; Planting in a Post-Wild World (2015) by Claudia West and Thomas Rainer.

Also - after recording, we found this article from the NWF about yucca moths. (Their caterpillars eat the yucca seeds and flowers, not the leaves! Then the moths pollinate the yuccas in return!)

Here's a preview of our bonus segment. To hear the full bonus epsidode, subscribe to our Patreon!  Compost is a mysterious product. Gardeners prize it as “black gold,” but few of us know how it is manufactured on an industrial scale. In this bonus, John Hart Asher breaks down the difference between traditional compost (the kind we might make at home) and the kind that you can buy by the bag or the yard. Commercial compost is a waste byproduct defined by the US Composting Council. Manufacturers don’t have to tell you precisely what’s in it, and in fact they’re legally prohibited from doing so due to the way compost is regulated in Texas. As John Hart explains, this lack of transparency, along with the “windrow” form of manufacturing, can be a real problem for large-scale ecological restoration projects. He describes his work on Mission Reach, an 8-mile stretch of the San Antonio River restored by the city of San Antonio from 2002-2012. Rehabilitating the degraded riparian soil on this site required 35,000 cubic yards of compost – roughly the equivalent of 2,500 dump trucks– and a lot of trial and error. John Hart shares his findings about the shortcomings of commercial compost production and offers up some practical solutions. 

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We sat down at the picnic table with John Hart Asher, host of Central Texas Gardener and Cofounder/Senior Environmental Designer at Blackland Collaborative to talk about pocket prairies. What’s a pocket prairie? It’s a very small prairie. What’s a prairie? It’s a community of native grasses and forbs wildflowers that have evolved along with microbes, plants, and animals over millennia. This "disturbance-driven ecology" historically relied on periodic fire and low-frequency, high-intensity grazing to function. John Hart sees the "millions-year-old technology" of the American prairie as a replicable system that we can borrow in our own yards to sequester carbon, manage stormwater runoff, and support the essential interconnections between life forms that make up the food-soil web. As Douglas Tallamy writes in his book Nature's Best Hope, "If each American landowner made it a goal to convert half of his or her lawn to native plant communities...[we] could collectively restore some semblance of ecosystem function to more than twenty million acres of what is now ecological wasteland."   

We discuss the role of wildfires and buffalo grazing in Texas before European settlement, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center's research on prescribed burning, and how to prepare, install, and maintain a pocket prairie. 

John Hart insists that we must rethink our approach to landscape design, gardening, land ownership, and even our concept of "nature" if we are to sustain life on earth. He describes prairie restoration as "a trajectory, not an intervention" -- a process, rather than a product -- which can help us reconnect with the web of life, reduce climate anxiety, and make our homes more beautiful to boot. 

Mentioned in this episode: 

Nature's Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation that Starts in Your Yard by Douglas Tallamy; the USDA Web Soil Survey; Black Owl Biochar; KR Bluestem.

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Tropical milkweed...Monarchs' friend or foe? We dip a toe into contested territory with a look at Asclepias curassavica, the most controversial milkweed of all. 

Up first: we chat about the spring rush and a secondhand ringtail cat sighting.  

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Mentioned in this episode: 

"For the Monarch Butterfly, A Long Road Back," New York Times (2014); "Tropical Milkweed: A No-Grow," Xerces Society (2018); Flight of the Butterflies (2012); "Tropical Milkweed OK for Monarch Butterflies, Just Cut the Dang Stuff Down" (2015). 

We're back at Colleen's picnic table to reflect on what we've learned (horticulturally and emotionally) in the year since Uri, the crippling 2021 snow-and-ice storm that plunged Texas into single-digit temperatures and left 40% of Austin residents without power and/or water for days. Last year we recorded a few episodes about the immediate aftermath of the Snowpocalypse; now we're examining the storm's lingering effects on local gardeners, growers, and plants. Which species fared the best and worst? How has the storm changed our approach to landscape design? And what are we expecting for the coming spring? Just in time for yet another cold snap, join us for a chat about "marginally hardy" plants, the role of microclimates and eco-regions, and every Texan's favorite topic: the weather.  

Mentioned in this episode: 

Central Texas Seed Savers; TreeFolks.