Growing Greener

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.

Pollinators of the Night

Overlooked by many gardeners, moths are actually more efficient as pollinators than bees and are the basis of the food chain for everything from bats and songbirds to grizzly bears

10-29
29:01

Reading the Wildlife Stories in Your Garden

Expert tracker Jason Knight shares how to develop the ability to read animal tracks and signs to keep current with wildlife visits and to resolve wildlife problems peacefully and effectively.

10-22
29:01

A Garden Masterpiece Designed to Evolve

Richard Hayden, senior director of horticulture for the High Line, describes how plants and gardeners collaborate in this ever-changing urban paradise

10-15
29:01

Converting Landscape Professionals to Environmental Activists

Beth Ginter, executive Director of the Chesapeake Conservation Landscaping Council, describes her organization's successful program to enlist an often-resistant profession as advocates for environmental activism.

10-08
29:01

Fighting Climate Change from the Bottom Up

How Village and Wilderness fosters diverse local solutions to a global problem

10-01
29:01

Second Chance Composting

John Pitroff chose composting when his daughter's birth sparked dreams of leaving her a better world – and now he's addressing environmental problems while making a living helping local gardeners and farmers. 

09-24
29:01

How We Created Weeds and Why We Need Them

Peter Del Tredici, Senior Research Scientist Emeritus of Arnold Arboretum and Visiting Lecturer of Applied Ecology and Planning at MIT explains the history of these garden pests why they can play an essential role in this era of climate change.

09-17
29:01

Texan Pam Penick Shares Ideas for Integrating Native Plants into Traditional Gardens in Beautiful New Book

An accomplished and progressive garden designer, Pam Penick, author of "Gardens of Texas," shares ideas for ideas for using native plants in traditional and formal gardens garnered from her reporting on private landscapes of the Lone Star State

09-10
29:01

Finding Hope in Ecological Gardening

Leader of the Ecological Gardening movement Rebecca McMackin shares reasons why in a time of discouragement, gardening can restore optimism.

09-03
29:01

This Year's "Less Lawn More Life Challenge" Goes Viral

Last May Growing Greener featured the challenge that Plan it Wild, a rewilding design and installation firm, posed to American homeowners: to replace 25 square feet of lawn with locally indigenous plants.  Today we hear how nearly 10,000 people in 49 states committed to this 12-week online program, how backyard biodiversity flourished as a result, and how the challenge is expanding through neighborhoods to reach people who hadn't previously considered devoting their landscapes to reinforcing the regional ecosystem.

08-27
29:01

America's most beautiful neglected genus of keystone plants

Nancy DuBrule-Clemente, a pioneer of organic land care, extolls the outstanding aesthetic and ecological contributions of goldenrods, a genus of native flowers too seldom seen in our gardens.

08-20
29:01

The Path from Traditional Horticulture to Ecological Gardening – Part Two

Edwina Von Gal, founder and president of the Perfect Earth Project, completes her interview of Growing Greener host, Tom Christopher, exploring his path to ecological gardening, the hope he finds in the remarkable contributions of young colleagues, and the most effective ways to reach out to the broader gardening public.

08-13
29:01

The Path from Traditional Horticulture to Ecological Gardening – Part One

Edwina Von Gal, founder and president of the Perfect Earth Project, interviews Growing Greener host, Tom Christopher, about what led him from an education steeped in traditional gardening to helping found ecological gardening in the United States

08-06
29:01

A Female-Owned and Operated Gardening Cooperative Creates a New Business Model With Nature as "our foremost collaborator"

Andrea Hurd of Oakland, California describes the way she structured Mariposa Gardening and Design Cooperative, Inc. to provide employee equitability and management experience for women breaking into the field, and the firm's commitment to celebrating the local landscape by enhancing habitat and working with indigenous materials.

07-30
29:01

Finding Opportunity in a Common Landscape Roadblock

Switching to more environmentally friendly practices is too often resisted by landscape professionals afraid to stray from familiar routines.  Mariah Whitmore and Tony Piazza, both prominent landscape business owners in the eastern end of Long Island, New York, discuss how they are increasing profits by adding Nature friendly land care to their repertoire.

07-23
29:01

A Game-Changing Shortcut to Creating a Native Meadow

Claire Chambers, founder of Meadow Lab, describes the roll-out sod her company is producing that can transform a landscape into a blooming, mature meadow of native flowers and grasses in a single growing season

07-16
29:01

The Overlooked Beauty and Garden Services of Wasps

A replay of a conversation from April of 2021 with Pollinator Conservationist Heather Holm about her multi-award-winning book, Wasps, Their Biology, Diversity, and Role as Beneficial Insects and Pollinators of Native Plants.

07-09
29:01

A New Guide for Helping Your Native Plant Garden Adapt to a Changing Climate

Jenica Allen and Matt Fertakos of Northeast RISCC describe the invaluable free online guide they helped to create that provides all a gardener needs to know about selecting native plants that will flourish not only today but also persist as the local climate changes

07-02
29:01

Pee-Cycling: Taking the Waste Out of Our Waterways by Fertilizing the Garden

Julia Cavicchi and Tatiana Schreiber of the Rich Earth Institute talk of curbing water pollution by removing human urine from the waste stream, and how you can repurpose it to feed your plants

06-25
29:01

Steppe Gardening in Colorado

Michael Bone, Curator of the Steppe Collection at Denver Botanic Gardens, relates Denver's native flora to similar grasslands around the world and explains how this knowledge can inspire and enrich the local gardening.

06-18
29:01

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