MARGARET ROACH A WAY TO GARDEN

We gardeners all know the experience of loss: of plants that don’t make it, for one reason or another—from a tomato felled by disease in a too-humid summer to a venerable old tree taken out by a nasty winter storm. There are losses every year, no matter how expert a gardener you are...but some of them really stand out in memory, indelible. Plants we have loved and lost, but never forgotten: That’s our topic today with my friend Ken Druse. You all know Ken, who gardens in New Jersey, and is the author of an impressive 20 garden books.

Succulents: You probably already grow some perennial ones in your garden, and perhaps others that aren’t hardy are among your favorite houseplants. But what if some of those indoor types started playing seasonal roles in the garden, too? That’s what Harnek Singh, a longtime gardener at Wave Hill in New York City, has been thinking about and experimenting with lately, to pretty stunning effect.  It helps if you have a spare garden area to experiment in like they do at Wave Hill, where what’s called the Paisley Bed – because it’s shaped like a giant paisley -- is planted in a whole new theme each year. This year, until sometime in October, it’s all about succulents, and the design includes many of the plants in the cacti and succulent collection that Harnek cares for in Wave Hill’s conservatory, just one part of his overall horticultural role there.   He’s here to recommend some favorite succulents for indoors and outdoors, with tips on how to grow them, and use them, and even which ones are easy to propagate more of. 

Can a historic formal space become the home to a forward-thinking landscape of native plants? The team at Stoneleigh, a five-year-old public garden on an old estate in Villanova, Pennsylvania, says the answer is an emphatic yes, and their horticultural experiments seem to prove that’s true.  Its director, Ethan Kauffman, is here today to talk about how he and his team are reinterpreting the grand old landscape with a natives-only ethos handed down to them by the non-profit called Natural Lands that conserved the place.     Two-dozen kinds of native vines now climb the majestic century-old stone pergola at Stoneleigh, and space-defining hedges of white pine and American arborvitae, or dwarf Magnolia grandiflora and among those redefining the 42-acre landscape. There are lots of other lessons for home gardeners, too.  

No doubt all of you who are listening, all you gardeners, would agree that interacting with plants, and with nature, has a restorative benefit—that it has the undeniable power to lift us up and make us feel better.  That idea—that working with plants is therapeutic—is the foundation of the field of horticultural therapy. Today’s guest, Erik Keller, has practiced horticultural therapy for more than 20 years, using plants and nature to help clients, from cancer patients to special-needs children and disabled seniors, to cope, and to make positive life changes. He’s also author of  “The Therapist’s Garden: Using Plants to Revitalize Your Spirit.”  Erik is a master gardener, and manages the gardens and horticultural therapy program at Ann’s Place in Danbury, CT, an organization assisting cancer patients and their families.  We don’t need to be in a formal horticultural therapy program, though: Erik wants to remind each of us of the positive power of what we’re doing outside, and give us some advice on how to maximize its benefit. 

Summer has just officially arrived ... and with it a whole new to-do list of tasks aimed at keeping the garden going in the best possible shape all season long. We’re succession sowing vegetables, of course, as the spinach and early salads face, and probably already pulled the pansies in favor of summer annuals in the pots – but there is always more, more, more to do in other parts of the garden, too.  On the list: some strategic summer pruning, and a likewise strategic plan for deadheading or otherwise reducing self-sowers so there’s not too much of a good thing, for instance ... plus there are perennials in need of haircuts and more. My friend Ken Druse, author of 20 garden books and a longtime gardener in New Jersey, calls a lot of it not full-scale cleanup, exactly, but “editing,” and that’s our topic today, with his help. 

How well do you really know the piece of land on which you live and garden, or the bigger landscape context it sits within—that forms your neighborhood, perhaps? A new book I’ve been reading called “These Trees Tell a Story: The Art of Reading Landscapes” takes the reader along on explorations through a diversity of places, looking for hints on how to “know thy land,” as its author Noah Charney suggests.   Noah is an assistant professor of conservation biology at the University of Maine and coauthor with Charley Eiseman of the award-winning field guide “Tracks and Sign of Insects and Other Invertebrates” – one of my much-used favorites.  On the website of the publisher of Noah’s latest book, Yale University Press, it describes it as a “deeply personal master class on how to read a natural landscape and unravel the clues to its unique ecological history.”  I’m glad to welcome Noah Charney as my guest today and learn more. 

When I spoke to naturalist and nature writer Nancy Lawson recently about her adventures in wildscaping at her Maryland garden, there was one topic in particular that I wanted to double back to, and dig in deeper: her tactics for fighting unwanted weeds and invasives as we loosen up parts of our landscapes with more native plants. That’s our topic today: how to give the desired plants the edge – including some of the native perennials that have proven to be her allies in outcompeting the undesirables. Nancy Lawson is author of The Humane Gardener and more recently of Wildscape, In it, she stresses that we are not alone out there, and promotes animal-friendly planting and maintenance strategies. She helps us tune in to everyone whose home it is through a mix of findings from scientific research papers and her own intimate moments making her own wildscape. 

I was remarking to my friend Ken Druse earlier this spring about a garden I’d just visited, and how the stands of primulas in it made me jealous, and crave more more more. But only a few primrose varieties are even sold in local garden centers, and if you really want to create a dramatic swath of the diminutive plants ... well, that would add up to quite an investment.  As I was ranting my text buzzed to alert me there was a message, and there was a photo from Ken of a flat of his just-emerged primula seedlings—hundreds of them, that he’d successfully winter-sown outdoors. All for the price of a couple of seed packets. Learn how he did it and other things you can sow that way.  

I am crazy about pineapple lilies – bulbs in the genus Eucomis – and though in my Zone 5 garden they aren’t hardy, I can’t imagine a growing season without pots full of them. In his South Carolina garden and the ones he makes for design clients, today’s guest can use them even more lavishly, as perennials, in beds and even meadows. Eucomis, no matter where you garden, are today’s topic with Jenks Farmer, a longtime horticulturist and garden designer. He is also a writer, with several books to his credit and more to come, and founder of Jenks Farmer, Plantsman, which makes gardens for clients and is also a mail-order nursery specializing in unusual bulbs.