From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. When today's guest Elise Howard and I talked on the show in March, her new book Plant This Not That Was Just Out. The popular book offers basic guidelines for selecting and using native plants and specific substitutes for non-natives you may wish to replace. Once Spring arrived, Elise got back to making a garden around the weekend home in Western Massachusetts she and her husband bought in 2025, not just deciding what to grow, but thornier topics like tackling invasives and all the rest of what goes into rethinking a landscape with ecology and mind. I wanted to check back in and hear how the implementation of the book's principles and plant choices is going for her in real time, because Elise is practicing what she preaches. And like for all of us, that means being confronted with some tricky questions to puzzle out along the way. So more in a moment about her adventures so far, but first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by Colorblends wholesale flower bulbs. A third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com. And by High Mohing Seeds, Wolcott Vermont, Professional Quality Vegetable, Flower, and Urbal Seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, HighMohingSeeds.com. And by White Flower Farm, offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants. On the web, WhiteflowerFarm.com. At least Howard, a literary agent, began learning about natives more than 15 years ago as a volunteer at Riverside Park in New York City. Her book, Plant This Not That, offers 200 examples of swaps for plants that have proven troublesome or just don't do much in the name of supporting biodiversity, grouped helpfully by their landscape purpose from ground covers to hedges and more. I'm glad to welcome her back to the show today to hear how her own adventures in native plant gardening are progressing this spring. Hi, Elise, how are you? Hi, Margaret. I'm great. Thank you so much for having me back. Yes, and you know, I just after we talk the last time, I just thought, oh boy, and you told me you were making a garden, and I was like, oh boy, you've gone and you've gone and set up a big agenda for yourself, young lady. Yes, yes indeed. Yeah. Well, you know, most of the agenda came to me as I was making gardens in the past, but yes, it's true that this is this is the first time that the book is out there in the world, and I'm making a garden and it's sitting by the side of a public road. And I am excited to practice what I preach, I guess. And who's one of your neighbors, by the way, not so proud? I mean, I'm not saying I bought the house for this reason, but when we arrived at the house, I had this feeling of anticipation as we were going up the road. We are across the street from Nassami Farm, which you well know is the Research Facility Propagation Center and Nursery in western Massachusetts of the native plant trust. Yes. So, there you are. Yeah. It's actually great. I go across the street, I load up my wagon, I take my wagon home and then I return the wagon. I guess you don't have to worry about where to buy plants so so we won't, we won't, we won't agonize about that out loud together.

Right.

But anyway, before we get started, I want to say, first of all, we'll have a book giveaway with the transcript of this podcast that I've run away to garden.com. And I'll also give information about an event we're going to do together, which I'm really excited about. You and I are going to be in conversation about native plants, of course.

Sort of in my neighborhood, the next town to me, Hillsdale, New York on Saturday, July 11th. At an event hosted by Books and Cake, which is the newest and most dessert-filled bookstore in my neighborhood. And we hope people can come join us. So we're going to, as I said, give details about that with the transcript of the show also over on awayToGarden.com. So the place you're gardening, Western Massachusetts, how big a place, what's it like, what kind of environment is it that you've, it's an older home, I believe, that you've been renovating. It is an 1813 home. It was the original farmhouse in the area. Interestingly, it only had two owners for about 75 years before we bought the house. And while all the rest of the properties nearby pretty much maintained their status as farms or right next door, there was an apple orchard. our place was no longer agricultural. And so of the about two acres, I would say two thirds of it is wooded at this point. And then a third of it is cleared for the house and the yard. And it is, you know, because it's the old farmhouse, it is pretty close to the road, but it's a pretty rural road. Okay, so, so a couple of, you know, you have some wooded areas and you have some open areas, okay? And, you know, I mean, right away, you're probably, are you a zone six A or you five B or what, what, what, what are you you think Margaret? I don't even know what to say. No idea. Well, you're one of those two. Yes, I've stopped gardening that way. Yeah. Yeah. No, I'm just curious. Just because roughly speaking, I mean, it is good to know which plants would be hardy for you supposedly. But I know you're picking a quarantine. I know that the local natives would be hardy for me, but it's true. Yeah, I think I'm six A-ish and I will say that I have, you know, I use those trees to get me really close to 70 percent. And so some of the near natives that are dear to my heart have made their way into the garden already. So the people understand who Hatt didn't hear our first conversation, which I'll also give a link to with the transcript of this show. You're 70 percent. So you know a number of people including Doug Tellamy, who's some regard as the guru of the native plant movement have arrived at the conventional wisdom that if your garden, if your residential property has locally native plants is planted with at least 70% locally native plants by biomass. So that's why trees count so much and are so important. Then you are doing the work that is necessary to support our local ecosystem, starting with pollinators and the insects that feed on and live among our native plants. So then with the other 30%, you can indulge and I think what you call friendly. Right, well, so I have kind of these concentric circles that I think of now where locally native plants and you know county is about as specific as you can get but some people talk about your eco region or your state, but you have locally native plants. And then near native plants, and by those I mean plants that are native to areas fairly nearby, and as you say, that will thrive in my zone, in my climate and conditions. And then after that, yes, we talk about the polite non-natives because the one thing you don't wanna do is bring in anything that's invasive, which includes a lot of our stalwart traditional garden plants that we now understand are not only not positive but are negatives because they're crowding out other plants. But polite visitors from afar, okay, this spring I've been doing a lot of speaking about the book at bookstores and with garden clubs and you know a couple weeks ago, Pienys were in bloom in New York and New Jersey, where I was speaking and people wanted to know if they could keep their P&Es. And the answer is, yes, you can keep your P&Es, you know, provided you've got your working toward and in making a new garden, that's an important thing to bear in mind. Provided you're working towards 70% native. If you wanna keep P&Es, if you wanna keep, you know, I'd like to say roses and people bring up roses. And I would say if you can sustain them without the addition of a lot of fertilizer and certainly without pesticides, then yes, those polite non-natives can find a place in your garden. Right. So, that's the philosophy. So here you are. You have this two-acre property, you have this old house which I'm sure needs a little TLC and I'd have cost a few dollars to just fix a couple of things here and there. She says living in an old house for a while is in a rural place in the same zone. So you know it's overwhelming right getting started and we start to we have big plans and then you know kuching I mean you know you start to total it up I mean I was just in the garden center the other day and I mean I haven't established garden already on a little over two acres. But I just went looking for things for some

big sort of pots, you know, and I was like calculating how much it was going to be for each I have these big three foot wide terracotta bowls that I have out on a patio and a couple of other places. Wow, you know, and then I thought, wow, what if I were just starting a whole landscape right now? And in this yard in particular, there's some invasive that I have to battle. But honestly, I've barely scratched the surface of those yet because Massachusetts has a new law that requires new septic systems in a lot of houses when they change hands. hands and we needed to put in an entire septic system which caused a huge part of the garden area of the landscape to be dug up. And then there was one particularly ferocious wind and rain storm. I think in the early spring of 2025. that is how we discovered that we had a significant grading problem. So I had this small patch of back lawn that I kind of loved because it was mostly ferns and violets, which is exactly what I wanted in a lawn. And it all got buried underneath soil that the builders had to bring in to do the regrading. Oh. So yes, I had a lot of bare space to fill in. And I guess my thoughts turned from treating the whole thing like a mixed border or entrance garden with a mix of shrubs and perennials and small trees to realizing that I just didn't have the wherewithal to do that immediately, both, you know, not just the economics of buying plants, but the labor and the tour. Right? So one thing I did, And this is something I'm happy to see taking much more hold, is where I needed to quickly fill in the leech field to keep woody shrubs and taproot things out. I bought hundreds and hundreds of plugs, and I used sedges, and then I used more aggressive natives,

like a nan... hundreds and hundreds of plugs. And I used sedges, and then I used more aggressive natives, like anemones and phycesthesia and then some other not-so-aggressive things like hukura and Canadian Columbine. And I planted hundreds of plugs in that space And so we said earlier that you live across the street from Nesami, yes. Nesami farm, like the nursery, et cetera, of native plant trust. And a lot of people don't live across the street from that. So getting plugs or liners or you know, little baby plants, which isn't much more economical way to do this, plus when we're doing an ecologically focused planting, we don't want one sees, we don't want polka dots of one of these and one of those, because the insects, it needs to read for the pollinators, right? It from above, it needs to be legible. Right, it needs to be legible. Yes, it needs to be legible. And also if you look at the classic case of monarchs and milkweed, they lay their eggs on milkweed, but then those eggs hatch and become, you know, eventually of caterpillars and they use the milkweed as a food source. Yes. And if you don't have sufficient plants, they will starve or need to go elsewhere.

Yeah. Right. So for legibility and sustainability to these creatures, we need to think about drifts

and masses, or at least even if they're on relatively small scale, compared to out in the wild

on hundreds and hundreds of acres. But we still have to think bigger that way and so plugs are great. And I will say to people, if you don't know a source, contact your nearest native plant society and you can find out about that at nannps.org, the North American Native Plant Society.org website, nonprofit website, and they have a resource tab on their top of their website, and you can drop down to the Native Plant Society's list. And you can find the one in every state, in every Canadian province. And those websites, then usually, the one for Minnesota, the one for for New Jersey, the one for, you know, wherever usually have some information about, you know, accessibility locally of different resources or you can get in touch with them because there's nothing like local 4011, you know what I mean? Absolutely. So I've been in conversation at some of my book events with the local Native Plant Society folks. And I would say that what you just said about the local 4-1-1 is especially true because they are essentially evangelists for getting plant native plants. Yes.

And nobody loves to talk about their hobby or their mission as much as native plant people. So they welcome the questions, they welcome sharing information. I will also say that on social media like Facebook, most of the active state native plant societies have a group there or you know you can look up, you can just search for your state and native plants and you will find lively conversations and those are great places and as native plant nurseries, local ones proliferate, these are the people who have that information quickly. Yes, and they also understand the plant society members and so forth. They understand that when we want 20 sedges or 50 sedges for a space, you know, or 100 sedges, we don't want to spend 25 dollars per nursery pot. It's prohibitive, yes, to have a retail priced nursery perennial or 1990, even, or whatever it is. But we have to find something else and the plugs are the way to go, and they understand that. And plugs, just so folks have an idea, plugs usually come in at closer to somewhere between four and five dollars at retail. And then of course you have to commit to like a tray of what I've written. Yeah, a tray of them, but I've also seen people get more creative. You can get a mixed tray, for instance. So maybe you're buying four or

five of five or six plants. Yeah. And the societies also often have plant sales, swaps, seed exchanges, all kinds of other things. So that's the way to get plugged in, haha, about plugs. So yeah. You know, another thing that I would think getting started, you know, besides sort of the economics and the time management, you know, the time commitment and so forth, I would I would also think that you mentioned it a little bit, you said the invasives that, you know, sort of having to scan the landscape and really take because of what you know, having written the book and the work you've done elsewhere in your gardening work in the city, you know that you need to be on the lookout and sort of assess the place and figure out what what you've got ahead of you, what what issues the land presents. Like you mentioned, the about drainage and the... Right. Well, so we saw the property in November and we closed at the end of January. And so it was in April of the following year, April of that year, that I discovered Galtweed every year. Right. And that is a plant that was brought in as an ornamental. And you know, because it's fast growing and fill spaces quickly. And it has taken over pretty big spaces in this landscape. and you know, I'm not that far from two, maybe three significant waterways. There are endangered turtles across the street from me near Nassami Farm. And so I want to be as mindful and careful as possible about the use of herbicides. So, but I am at the point where I look at this vast landscape of Gowtweed. I've actually investigated goats, can't find any. So far, I'm still looking, but I'm at the point where I'm contemplating whether or not on balance to eliminate this rampant invasive, I need to look into at least some water safe herbicides. That's something I haven't gotten to yet, but I'm doing the research and I'm thinking about it. Right. And it's a hard decision philosophically personally

Obviously I'm against them. I've been an organic gardener for my career my life whatever, but I have come to understand through my work that

Many of our leading conservation organizations doing restoration

ecology and so forth have to use them in a very sane and the safest way and in the most minimal way, in order for the greater good, in order to make a space rehabilitative. That's not a word, but you know what I mean? Restorable. Yeah, really horrible. Restorable. Restorable. Restorable. Restor time it according to the life history of the plant there, trying to eliminate, they do the proper research. They use the right substance. They use a minimum amount by, again, the proper timing, but also the proper application method, which might be, you know, cutting it down and applying it to the stump, so to speak, or what's left. And these are, you know, very, very specific things that often require a professional interview, you know, someone to intervene professional, not just like, kuku, oh, let's go buy 50 dollars worth of this stuff and spray it all over the place. That's definitely on the list. Right. And I would say it's, yes, it is the method of last resort. But as you said, sometimes when you think about the balance of the equation, using minimal, you know, minimal product in the safest, most controlled way. And I think the thing to know about that is that people have done the research that there are incredibly specific methods, you know, the way you treat Goutweed is different from the way you treat Goutweed is different from the way you treat Ways. So you want to be as specific and thoughtful and careful as possible. Yeah. So it's tricky and I don't know the answer. I don't know. But as again, there are people who whose work I respect and I'm grateful for again, conservation people who have explained to me why they believe it's a tool they do need in their toolkit. And so I have to pay attention to that and I have to respect that because the way the way we're both talking about it though, feel like I approached even the thought of it with a little bit of dread so yeah no exactly exactly I just want to we're just bringing it up you know and it's but but it is important when we're making a landscape to really look at the place both for its assets and it's you know difficult to hear. You know what I mean. And another thing, Margaret, is that I, you know, there are some large mature introduced shrubs in this landscape. And I think when I first got there, I thought, well, these have to go. And what I've now come to realize is that they're lower down on my list now, that, you, I need to get the the gardening shape. I need to get the bare areas having something growing on them. And just to get back to that initial plan, what I've done is covered a lot of the space that I know I can't get to with my original mixed border plan in mind with a woodland edge seed mix that's all native. And then I will begin reclaiming that area. But in the meantime, you know, there are some non-native hydrangeas. or a a couple of roses, a few other things like that that are relatively benign, that I'll get around to as soon as I've dealt with the completely empty spaces. Well, I always think of gardening as my to-do list as a triage list. Yes. I can't do everything and I've got to do it in priority order. I have to be ruthless that way. So I just want to say in the last, like, we have maybe two, three minutes. And I know this is just a project that is underway and not, you know, you haven't been there for 10 years or whatever. But are there already some victories? Do you already feel like, you know, some like have there been some sense of civilization that you know things have been accomplished? Yes I have discovered so when I there was some invasive rose, multi-flora rose, that was you you should have seen me on that day and the scratches and the scratches on my arms the days after I've had that outfit. I've been dressed that I've looked that way. Yes. But when I took all of that away, I found lady ferns, I found sensitive ferns, I found Virginia blue bells. Um, and with more space and air, they have expanded in a most lovely way. And I've got some Virginia creeper growing, which is a pollinator powerhouse growing in and near the woods. and it looks great all season long. It's in the right places.

It can be an aggressive grower,

but I'm delighted to have it.

And last fall, it was just... It looks great all season long. It's in the right places. It can be an aggressive grower,

but I'm delighted to have it. In last fall, it was just spectacular. So that was like a little discovery that a better discovery than the outweed? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I just look that way when I'm feeling overwhelmed by the outweed. Yeah, yeah Well, and I, again, I think part of it is approaching it as there's sort of a triage approach. We can't do everything and we have to be okay with that, right? We have to sort of let go of that obsessive thing of like, oh, I've got to get it all done, you know, right now because it's an ongoing relationship, right? Well, and I think that's the beauty of a garden too, right? Is that it is ongoing, that change is not only always possible, but is guaranteed. And so there's always a good reason to be out there and editing and changing your mind and trying new things and adding more. Right. Well, at least hard. I'm glad to speak to you again and I'm going to have to come over someday and see what's going on over there. But at any rate, I'm going to see you August 11th as I make that up. July 11th. July 11th, did I make that up? I knew I said something wrong. In Hillsdale, New York, we'll give the details about that conversation that we're going to have for books and cake bookstore with the transcript of this show over on awayadagarden.com. And we'll also have a book giveaway. And those details will be over with the transcript of the podcast too. So I hope to speak to you again soon.

And I know I will then. Thank you so much, Margaret. I'm looking really forward to it. Thank you. And thanks to all of you for tuning in. Now don't miss an episode. You can subscribe for you to the podcast version of the show on Apple podcasts or Spotify. And you can find me anytime at awaytogarden.com and on Facebook and on Instagram as at away to garden and happy gardening meantime.

Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by it away to Garden.com and on Facebook and on Instagram as at away to Garden.

And happy gardening meantime. Underwriting support for a way to Garden provided by Colorblends, wholesale flower bulbs, a third generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web, Colorblends.com. by High Moeng Seeds,, Wolcott Vermont Professional Quality Vegetable Flower and Urbal Seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified on the web, highmohingseeds.com. And by Whiteflower Farm, offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants.

On the web, whiteflower farm.com.

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