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PODCAST

Growing Greener

Tom Christopher

Your weekly half-hour program about environmentally informed gardening. Each week we bring you a different expert, a leading voice on gardening in partnership with Nature. Our goal is to make your landscape healthier, more beautiful, more sustainable, and more fun.

leisure home & garden

All Episodes

29:01

Sustainable Color that Mixes Natives with Exotic...

Growing Greener ·

2026/09/30

"Rewilding (with Dahlias)" was the irresistible title that Jessica Williams chose for the Digging Deeper garden tour and talk she gave for the Garden Conservancy. On this week's Growing Greener Jessica shares how she does not fertilize, mulch, or irrigate her lush, colorful, and wildlife-rich garden, and how she enlisted the bees in her program to breed the black-leaved dahlias whose blossoms make her Odd Duck Farm a living jewel box.

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29:01

A sustainable supply chain for plants that are truly...

Growing Greener ·

2026/09/23

Ecological gardeners and restorationists have long relied on seed collected from wild populations to supply the need for locally adapted, genetically diverse planting material. As the enthusiasm for native plants has exploded, though, this practice has begun to threaten the continued vitality of those wild populations. In this episode of Growing Greener, Uli Lorimer, Director of Horticulture at the Native Plant Trust describes Restoration Accelerator, that organization's initiative to coordinate a

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29:01

Garden Journaling 2.0

Growing Greener ·

2026/09/16

That classic horticultural memoir, the published journal of a gardener's daily activities, has taken on a new life with the advent of online media; Claire Davis, a very talented ecological gardener, discusses how Instagram has become her favored platform for communicating her experiences and reflections, and its unique capabilities.

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29:01

How to Make Wood Chips a Basis for Soil Health

Growing Greener ·

2026/09/09

Brian Vagg of the Compost Academy discusses how wood chips, if properly managed, can be a cheap and reliable means for supplying the organic matter – and microbes – that most garden soils are lacking.

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29:01

Creating Microenvironments to Boost Your Garden's...

Growing Greener ·

2026/09/02

Tom Wessels, professor emeritus at Antioch University New England and a celebrated ecologist, author, and educator explains how gardeners can enrich their landscapes with microenvironments to hugely boost their biodiversity and resilience.

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29:01

Ground-Breaking New Takes on Trees from the Oldest...

Growing Greener ·

2026/08/26

Ned Friedman, Director of Harvard's Arnold Arboretum discusses that institution's programs to preserve the DNA of tree species and populations threatened with extinction by climate change, helping trees flourish in an increasingly challenging environment, and how you can share in his passion for these extraordinary organisms by bonding with one tree.

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29:01

Welcoming Peter Rabbit back into the Garden

Growing Greener ·

2026/08/19

Amy Free, rabbit-lover and anthrozoologist, awakens Tom Christopher to the beauties and ecological importance of rabbits and shares how to host them without sacrificing your garden.

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29:01

Exploring – and Updating – Nature's Calendar

Growing Greener ·

2026/08/12

Theresa Crimmins, Director of the USA National Phenology Network, explains why knowing the timing of natural events such as the annual bloom of different flowers and the emergences of their insect pollinators is essential to good gardening and shares how climate climate change is disrupting natural collaborations that stretch back over millennia.

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29:01

The Garden Conservancy: Your Passport to Garden...

Growing Greener ·

2026/08/05

Horatio Joyce, the Garden Conservancy's Director of Public Programs & Education details the rich opportunities his organization provides to tour remarkable gardens in every region of the United States, and the innovative opportunities for gardening education it provides both in person and online.

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29:01

Are There Microplastics in the Compost You've been...

Growing Greener ·

2026/07/29

Rutger Myers of Eco-Cycle, a leader in promoting community composting programs for 50 years, discusses studies that indicate microplastics may be finding their way into the finished product and what you can do to prevent that.

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29:01

Do "Designed Ecosystems" Function Like Natural Plant...

Growing Greener ·

2026/07/22

A school of European and English garden designers, and now American ones too, claim their "designed ecosystems" of plants gathered from all over the world provide similar benefits to natural plant communities of locally co-evolved species. Peter Adler, a plant ecologist at Utah State University, helps us explore the potential of such a practice.

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29:01

The Facts about Fireflies

Growing Greener ·

2026/07/15

Texan Ben Pfeiffer discusses his personal crusade for fireflies and the remarkable facts about their strange and colorful life cycles in this return visit to a conversation from July 2020

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29:01

New Cultural Perspectives on Ecological Gardening and...

Growing Greener ·

2026/07/08

Sara Weaner Cooper describes how New Directions in the American Landscape is incorporating indigenous American approaches into Ecological Gardening and how by adjusting the growing conditions in her lawn she caused it to transform itself into a meadow of native grasses and wildflowers without the use of herbicides or other unsustainable practices. A replay of a July, 2024 conversation.

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29:01

Tim Clymer Uses Climate Battery Greenhouses to Farm...

Growing Greener ·

2026/07/01

By storing excess heat from sunny days in the soil below his greenhouses, Tim Clymer keeps them warm on winter nights for a fraction the cost of conventional propane heat.

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29:01

An Ecological Perspective on Tick-Borne Diseases

Growing Greener ·

2026/06/24

Dr. Rick Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies shares thirty years of research on the ecology of tick-borne diseases in North America, detailing why landscape treatments such as pesticide sprays are unproductive as well as environmentally destructive, and outlines a very different approach to this public health threat.

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29:01

Citizen Scientists of iNaturalist Playing Crucial...

Growing Greener ·

2026/06/17

Arya Natarajan of iNaturalist describes how that online platform's user community is playing a central role in monitoring changes in global biodiversity and the creation of climate resilient ecosystems

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29:01

Charlie Nardozzi's New Book – an Ecological Update...

Growing Greener ·

2026/06/10

In "The Continuous Vegetable Garden" Charlie Nardozzi applies lessons learned from ecologically-informed gardening to bring vegetable and fruit gardening into a new, more sustainable, and less laborious era.

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29:01

The Nurturing Nature Initiative – Botanical Gardens...

Growing Greener ·

2026/06/03

Emma Grover and Dr. Mauricio Diazgranados discuss a new program from the New York Botanical Garden to unite the thousands of botanical gardens worldwide in devoting their shared knowledge and resources for a coordinated, plant-based effort to combat the consequences of global climate change.

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29:01

What is Naturalism?

Growing Greener ·

2026/05/27

"Naturalism" is the dominant design style in ecological gardening, but what exactly is it? Is Naturalism just mimicry of nature, or does it allow for the designer to include aesthetic principles to please the human eye? Can it allow the gardener to enjoy favorite plants not indigenous to the area? Duncan Brine, co-proprietor with his wife Julia of design/build firm Garden Large explains how he has defined Naturalism to create some of the most celebrated new gardens of New York's Hudson River

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29:01

"Veganic" Gardening

Growing Greener ·

2026/05/20

Are you troubled about supporting industrial agriculture and its mistreatment of animals by purchasing by-products such as manures and blood meal to maintain your garden's fertility? British gardener John Walker, an award-winning environmental writer, shares the techniques he has used to make his garden cruelty free, self-sustaining, and sustainable in a conversation first shared in May of 2023.

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378 results

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