This week on the Down the Garden Path podcast, landscape designers Joanne Shaw and Matthew Dressing speak with author Marianne Willburn about her new book Tropical Plants and How to Love Them.

About Marianne Willburn

Marianne Willburn is a gardening columnist, speaker and author of Big Dreams, Small Garden, and one of the six-person writing team at GardenRant. A regular contributor to Better Homes and Gardens, The American Gardener, and other national gardening magazines, Marianne has also been a weekly newspaper columnist for over a decade and is the recipient of several Gold and Silver Media Awards from Garden Communicators International (formerly GWA).

She believes strongly that you should never wait for the 'perfect space' to create a restful garden oasis for yourself and your family; and she has spent much of her gardening life in small city and suburban gardens in places as diverse as California, England and the Mid-Atlantic. In 2013, she began gardening intensively and exhaustively on ten acres in a rural corner of Northern Virginia and shares her gardening life each week on her blog, smalltowngardener.com.

Don't miss Joanne and Matt's conversation with Marianne Willburn.

Some of the questions and topics covered:

• How do you define a tropical plant?
• Why should we grow them?
• Summer romances
• Frugal gardens
• Bringing houseplants inside

You can find Marianne online here, as well as on Facebook and Instagram.

Each week on Down The Garden Path, professional landscape designers Joanne Shaw and Matthew Dressing discuss down-to-earth tips and advice for your plants, gardens and landscapes.

As the owner of Down2Earth Landscape Design, Joanne Shaw has been designing beautiful gardens for homeowners east of Toronto for over a decade.

Matthew Dressing is a horticulturist and landscape designer. He owns Natural Affinity Garden Design, a landscape design and garden maintenance firm servicing Toronto and the Eastern GTA. Together, Joanne and Matthew do their best to bring you interesting, relevant and helpful topics. Their goal is to help you keep your garden as low maintenance as possible.