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.

Today we're going to do some gravel gardening, not merely applying a thin, mulch-like top

dressing of gravel to a garden bed, but planting right into a deliberate foundation

of four or five inches of gravel.

My guest is Jeff Epping, Director of Horticulture at Ulbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison,

Wisconsin, where he created his first gravel garden in 2009.

We'll learn what makes gravel gardens so appealing and how to create one, two, so more

in a moment but first to these messages. publishers of Q. Pocket Books, more gift books illustrated from Q's vast collection of Botanical Art, the most recent book, Fungai, about the strange and singular world of mushrooms,

Toadstools, and their kin, in bookstores now.

That first gravel garden at Olbrich Botanical Gardens that Jeff Epping and his team created

wasn't the last. There have been three more since, and gravel gardens created elsewhere

for clients too. Jeff, who lectures

regularly to garden audiences around the country about his passion for Gravel Gardens,

even transformed the front yard of his home to one in 2018. And he's here to tell us why and how.

Hi, Jeff. How is spring unfolding in beautiful Madison, which is the land of many gardens as I

remember having been there years ago? Oh, Margaret, it's great to be with you.

It's a little chilly as it's been of weight. Sun shining for a change. Yay! So we're happy about

that and all things are moving forward. Yeah, so when you and I did a New York Times Garden

column earlier this year together about gravel gardens. What really made me laugh was

you confessed early on in our conversations that you really didn't like the term gravel garden

...