A Few of My Favorite Things
When days are dark (Winter is coming!), I often find myself rereading, rewatching, and relistening to those foraging a path of knowledge the rest of us humble gardeners and designers are lucky enough to follow and learn from. If you’re interested in sustainable garden and landscape design, or just in making your little spot on earth more inviting to pollinators and other wildlife, I think you’ll consume the list below ferociously. I know I do.
In no particular order and all free:
Read Rebecca McMackin’s newsletter, Grow Like Wild! Every issue is packed filled with so much goodness. A roundup of must-know news of what’s happening in the world of ecological gardening and Rebecca’s thoughts on the season or issues she’s deeply invested in. Trust me on this one.
Watch Greater Dixter’s Head Gardener Fergus Garrett speaking on the biodiversity audit carried out from 2017-2019 at Christopher Lloyd’s former home-turned-charitable trust, botanical garden and educational hub extraordinaire for gardeners. This report (free to download) has helped shape the way I integrate a mix of natives and non-natives to boost the ecological function of the gardens I design.
Keep watching all of the wonderful speakers at the Beth Chatto Symposium, 'Rewilding the Mind' held in 2022 and in 2018. The full playlist for 2022 is here and 2018 here. Some of my favorite landscape and garden designers like Dan Pearson and Peter Korn share their thoughts on how we can help make the planet more healthy and beautiful.
Read Dan Pearson’s soul-sharing, seasonal-focused, online magazine Dig Delve, filled with beautiful photographs of Hillside’s garden by his partner Huw Morgan, and compelling thoughts on our roles as stewards of the land. Plus, there’s even recipes!
Watch all of Access Nature Forum’s informative Meetings and consider how you can design more inclusively and accessiblely. After watching the conversation with Craig Ismaili, a staff attorney with Disability Rights NJ, and his colleague Regina Smith, my view of public and private spaces changed forever.
Listen and learn about a nature project created as a safe and welcoming space for autistic families on Maci Nelson’s thought-provoking The Landscape Nerd Podcast Episode on the Autism Nature Trail located in Letchworth State Park in Castile, NY.
Listen to the A Way to Garden podcast by Margate Roach, a gardening columnist for the NY Times. She interviews everybody! A few of my favorites are Doug Tallamy, James Golden, Ethan Kauffman, Nancy Lawson, Piet Oudolf, and Thomas Rainer with Claudia West.
Watch Claudia West’s fantastic talk on rain gardens at a Sacred Grounds Workshop. I send this to anyone I know thinking of putting one in. Invaluable and demystifies the process while pointing out the pitfalls many make when building a rain garden.
Read Nancy Lawson’s The Humane Gardner post on How to Fight Plants with Plants. Her in-depth post even comes with a free handout in case you too are battling invasives.
Listen and catch up on all the past fantastic Native Plant Podcasts. Approachable deep dives into not only native plants but ecology and all kinds of goodness. It’s a fun and masterful education on its own.
Watch Flock. Start at Episode 001 and go on a multi-year journey with Summer Rayne Oates and her friends as they reclaim a neglected plant nursery, private home, and the surrounding land and turn it into a thriving ecological-focused landscape, gardens, meadow, and forest. This New York-based horticulturalist shares knowledge as diverse as rebuilding a forest devastated by deer pressure to heirloom tulips to building a meadow. My favorite video is when Summer travels to the Mt. Cuba Center and tours their reforestation trials. I take lessons from that video into every woodland garden I design.