A Way to Garden

WHAT’S IN A NAME—specifically when it’s the common name of a plant that includes the word “weed”? When you hear of plants like jewelweed or pokeweed or clearweed, to name a few, what does it make you think? All of those are native plants, but they’re also often treated more like that suffix in their names—like weeds, something gardeners are inclined to cast out. I read recent...

I’VE NEVER HAD a rock garden, I confess, but a book about a modern and extreme form of the art caught my attention when it was published. It’s called “The Crevice Garden: How to Make the Perfect Home for Plants from Rocky Places,” and its authors joined me in a conversation in this reprise edition of the podcast about why you might want to make room for one, and the plants it...

THERE’S POWER in numbers. That’s what the horticulture team at Stoneleigh, the historic estate turned native-focused public garden in Villanova, Pa., seems to be demonstrating time and again with its highly creative approach to using woody plants. Yes, planting a sumac or a viburnum shrub will attract hungry birds in fall. But what if you combined 10 carefully selected specie...

‘WE’RE SO GOOD at pretending the things around us are known and boring, or imagining that the worthwhile things are far away,” says Sam Jaffe, at the start of the documentary film “The Extraordinary Caterpillar.” Sam begs to differ, however, and in the film, as in his work as founder of The Caterpillar Lab, a non-profit educational and research organization, he shows us just ...

ONE LATE-AUGUST DAY, Nancy Lawson—or “The Humane Gardener,” as she is perhaps better known—was making a video about a spicebush swallowtail butterfly when something just beyond it in her Maryland yard caught her eye. A green heron was visiting a small pond Nancy had created not long ago—her first such encounter with the bird.  (That’s one of her backyard ponds, above.) When I...