A Way to Garden

‘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...

IN THE INTRODUCTION to her latest book “A Forest Language,” Hannah Fries acknowledges a fascination with the words we use to talk about trees—organisms she calls the backdrop of her life. From our human vocabulary of forest ecology and botany Hannah has collected some of her favorite arboreal terms to fill the new volume, ones referred to in its subtitle as “Words That Illumi...

I LOOK AROUND the garden and I see it happening everywhere, on so many different plants: seed is forming. Seed is the start of most everything we grow, yet most of the seed we gardeners and even more important the nation’s farmers plant originates elsewhere—often very far away from our home soil—and many of us who garden know relatively little about seed except how to order m...

WHAT MAKES a tree or shrub exceptional – something worthy of introduction into the nursery trade, and eventually maybe making its way into your garden? There are many pathways a plant can travel to get there, including one unique one from the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. As part of its 150th anniversary celebration in 2022, the arboretum announced its Arnold Select...