IT WAS 1 DEGREE Fahrenheit outside when I looked at my electronic weather station readout the other morning, a perfect time for some winter-defying tactics like talking tomatoes. Organic seed farmer and breeder Don Tipping of Siskiyou Seeds in Oregon joined me for a colorful, warming conversation, because after trialing 55 tomato varieties last season, Don has some goodies to...

UNTIL I MET James Young, early in 2025, it hadn’t really registered in my brain that some of the familiar annuals I grow from seed, like cosmos and marigolds and even purple basil or black hollyhock (above), could also double as dye plants. James is co-owner of Grand Prismatic Seed, a gorgeous and information-packed online seed catalog based in Northern Utah, where plants tha...

I’M LETTING myself be transported away from the winter scene outside my window, burying my nose not in the snow but instead in the spring-into-summer possibilities depicted in seed-catalog pages. I have familiar, favorite varieties I grow every year—but I’m also looking for some new-to-me possibilities, and Lane Selman of the Culinary Breeding Network at Oregon State Universi...

THE EARLIEST REFERENCES to humans cultivating trees date back to maybe 6000 BC, and there are records of tree-care tactics in the Bible, too, and from ancient Egypt. These person-to-tree interventions were the start of the science and art of arboriculture, and our best practices of pruning and other how-to have evolved in each successive era to the methods we know today. I to...

NOT SO MANY years ago, relative to the history of horticulture, even a now-ubiquitous phrase like “pollinator plant” wasn’t part of our everyday gardening language and mindset the way it is today. Our collective consciousness about the importance of native plants has grown fast, and with it have come more new words for our vocabulary. One phrase that I’ve heard a lot lately i...