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Growing Greener

Tom Christopher

Your weekly half-hour program about environmentally informed gardening. Each week we bring you a different expert, a leading voice on gardening in partnership with Nature. Our goal is to make your landscape healthier, more beautiful, more sustainable, and more fun.

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35 episodes
weekly
Avg 29 min
English

Episodes 35

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#388
Yesterday · 29 min
"Still Life: A Photographer's Journey through Grief and Gardening"
Growing Greener speaks to photographer Jane Fulton Alt about her new book, a gallery of stunning images taken in her late husband's native plant garden, and how this immersion reconnected her with nature, its cycle of life and death, and with the gardener as well. With essays by Douglas Tallamy, James Baraz, and W. M. Hunt.
#387
November 4 · 29 min
Native Lawn 2.0
For twenty years Cornell University horticulturists have been working on a blend of short-growing native grasses and wildflowers that could replace introduced turf grasses as the American lawn. Today Todd Bittner, Director of Natural Areas at the Cornell Botanic Gardens details how his team is preparing to release onto the market a mix that flourishes without irrigation after establishment, without fertilizer, and pesticides, which requires mowing just once or twice a year, and can be installed by seeding or as sod.
#386
October 28 · 29 min
A Franciscan Brother Finds his Ministry in Ecological Restoration
Can our personal spirituality provide a path to a different, more positive relationship with Nature? In this conversation, first broadcast in December of 2024, Brother James Lockman of the Catholic Church's Franciscan Order describes how the beauty of Nature inspired his spiritual journey and how that led him to a life dedicated to restoring damaged ecosystems.
#385
October 21 · 29 min
Updating Our Attitude Toward Insects
Gardeners habitually distinguish between "bad bugs" who feed on their plants and the "good bugs," the predators who feed on those herbivores. As Aaron Anderson of the Xerces Society points out, you can't have one without the other and the goal should be encouraging a functioning, well-rounded insect community in your landscape.
#384
October 14 · 29 min
My Neighbor's 1/4-Acre Garden Takes the Title for Insect Biodiversity
Many British garden designers, and their admirers in the United States claim that plant biodiversity is the key to supporting the most diverse insect populations, and that introduced plant species are as effective or better than locally native ones. A garden up the block from me in Connecticut suggests the fallacy of that claim.
#383
October 7 · 29 min
Declaring Peace with Pocket Gophers
Shawn Maestretti, principal of Studio Petrichor, a celebrated landscape design and installation firm in Altadena, California, describes his "conversation" with pocket gophers, generally reviled as a pest in western gardens, and how he has come to respect not only this native creature's right to share the landscape but also the invaluable role it can play as a soil engineer.
#382
September 30 · 29 min
Sustainable Color that Mixes Natives with Exotic Favorites
"Rewilding (with Dahlias)" was the irresistible title that Jessica Williams chose for the Digging Deeper garden tour and talk she gave for the Garden Conservancy. On this week's Growing Greener Jessica shares how she does not fertilize, mulch, or irrigate her lush, colorful, and wildlife-rich garden, and how she enlisted the bees in her program to breed the black-leaved dahlias whose blossoms make her Odd Duck Farm a living jewel box.
#381
September 23 · 29 min
A sustainable supply chain for plants that are truly native
Ecological gardeners and restorationists have long relied on seed collected from wild populations to supply the need for locally adapted, genetically diverse planting material. As the enthusiasm for native plants has exploded, though, this practice has begun to threaten the continued vitality of those wild populations. In this episode of Growing Greener, Uli Lorimer, Director of Horticulture at the Native Plant Trust describes Restoration Accelerator, that organization's initiative to coordinate a new and sustainable supply chain.
#380
September 16 · 29 min
Garden Journaling 2.0
That classic horticultural memoir, the published journal of a gardener's daily activities, has taken on a new life with the advent of online media; Claire Davis, a very talented ecological gardener, discusses how Instagram has become her favored platform for communicating her experiences and reflections, and its unique capabilities.
#379
September 9 · 29 min
How to Make Wood Chips a Basis for Soil Health
Brian Vagg of the Compost Academy discusses how wood chips, if properly managed, can be a cheap and reliable means for supplying the organic matter – and microbes – that most garden soils are lacking.
#378
September 2 · 29 min
Creating Microenvironments to Boost Your Garden's Biodiversity and Resilience
Tom Wessels, professor emeritus at Antioch University New England and a celebrated ecologist, author, and educator explains how gardeners can enrich their landscapes with microenvironments to hugely boost their biodiversity and resilience.
#377
August 26 · 29 min
Ground-Breaking New Takes on Trees from the Oldest Arboretum in the United States
Ned Friedman, Director of Harvard's Arnold Arboretum discusses that institution's programs to preserve the DNA of tree species and populations threatened with extinction by climate change, helping trees flourish in an increasingly challenging environment, and how you can share in his passion for these extraordinary organisms by bonding with one tree.
#376
August 19 · 29 min
Welcoming Peter Rabbit back into the Garden
Amy Free, rabbit-lover and anthrozoologist, awakens Tom Christopher to the beauties and ecological importance of rabbits and shares how to host them without sacrificing your garden.
#375
August 12 · 29 min
Exploring – and Updating – Nature's Calendar
Theresa Crimmins, Director of the USA National Phenology Network, explains why knowing the timing of natural events such as the annual bloom of different flowers and the emergences of their insect pollinators is essential to good gardening and shares how climate climate change is disrupting natural collaborations that stretch back over millennia.
#374
August 5 · 29 min
The Garden Conservancy: Your Passport to Garden Visits and Education Nationwide
Horatio Joyce, the Garden Conservancy's Director of Public Programs & Education details the rich opportunities his organization provides to tour remarkable gardens in every region of the United States, and the innovative opportunities for gardening education it provides both in person and online.
#373
July 29 · 29 min
Are There Microplastics in the Compost You've been Buying?
Rutger Myers of Eco-Cycle, a leader in promoting community composting programs for 50 years, discusses studies that indicate microplastics may be finding their way into the finished product and what you can do to prevent that.
#372
July 22 · 29 min
Do "Designed Ecosystems" Function Like Natural Plant Communities?
A school of European and English garden designers, and now American ones too, claim their "designed ecosystems" of plants gathered from all over the world provide similar benefits to natural plant communities of locally co-evolved species. Peter Adler, a plant ecologist at Utah State University, helps us explore the potential of such a practice.
#371
July 15 · 29 min
The Facts about Fireflies
Texan Ben Pfeiffer discusses his personal crusade for fireflies and the remarkable facts about their strange and colorful life cycles in this return visit to a conversation from July 2020
#370
July 8 · 29 min
New Cultural Perspectives on Ecological Gardening and How Your Lawn Can Transform Itself into a Native Meadow
Sara Weaner Cooper describes how New Directions in the American Landscape is incorporating indigenous American approaches into Ecological Gardening and how by adjusting the growing conditions in her lawn she caused it to transform itself into a meadow of native grasses and wildflowers without the use of herbicides or other unsustainable practices. A replay of a July, 2024 conversation.
#369
July 1 · 29 min
Tim Clymer Uses Climate Battery Greenhouses to Farm Sub-Tropical Fruits in Pennsylvania
By storing excess heat from sunny days in the soil below his greenhouses, Tim Clymer keeps them warm on winter nights for a fraction the cost of conventional propane heat.

Showing 1–20 of 35 episodes