Shubber Ali, CEO of Garden for Wildlife, a new venture of the National Wildlife Federation, describes how his company makes it almost effortless to order site-adapted, locally native plants that provide the maximum benefits for wildlife.  ..read more

Lady Bird Johnson put native plants on the map with her program to plant wildflowers alongside our nation’s highways in the 1960’s.  Her legacy, the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, continues to play a key role by providing gardeners with extraordinary and free online resources about selecting and growing native plants in every U.S. state ..read more

As the first Executive Director of Homegrown National Park, Brandon Hough talks about his unconventional journey to conservation, and how this non-profit makes it easy for homeowners to find plants that give the maximum boost to the local ecosystem while also, at least in Brandon’s case, relieving eco-grief ..read more

Annuals offer unique advantages for the ecological gardener, growing fast to stabilize disturbed soils, and providing quick color for new plantings.  In this conversation, master plantsman Ethan Dropkin of Larry Weaner Landscape Associates shares his pick of the best native annuals native to eastern North America ..read more

In 2015 landscape architect Thomas Rainer and his professional partner Claudia West stirred the gardening world with their best-selling book, “Planting in a Post-Wild World.”  Now Rainer shares his arguments for thoughtful optimism regarding gardening and its potential impact on our ecological challenges ..read more

The American chestnut was a foundational species of eastern forests until an imported blight killed virtually all mature specimens back to stumps in the early 20th century.  Jared Westbrook, Science Director of the American Chestnut Foundation discusses how a project to genetically engineer a blight-resistant American chestnut has revealed the complexity of applying this process to tree species ..read more

When it was founded in 1900, the Native Plant Trust was the first plant conservation organization in the United States.  Its new CEO, Tim Johnson describes how, more than a century later, the Trust continues to break new ground, defining how an organization such as this can rise to meet the challenges currently facing our native flora ..read more

Too often we regard snow as merely an annoyance, but Kim Eierman, ecological garden designer and educator, makes the case for snow as a natural source of great and sometimes surprising benefits for the garden ..read more

Hybrid fruit and vegetable seeds are like thoroughbred horses –  extraordinary performers but not resilient or good at coping with adverse conditions.  When they didn’t succeed in Joseph Lofthouse’s Utah garden, he created his own “landraces”, biodiverse crop strains that “promiscuously pollinate” and speedily evolve to thrive in local conditions and adapt to the gardener’s style of cultivation ..read more

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