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.

Maybe seven or eight years ago in a conversation with landscape designer Claudio West, she

said a sentence that has really stuck with me as she explained her approach to selecting

and combining plants. Plants are the mulch, Claudia said then, about

making immersive landscapes that engage humans as much as they do pollinators and

other beneficial wildlife. So it's tempting to choose the plants we buy for our

gardens based on their looks alone. Claudia and her colleague, Thomas Rainer of Fido Studio,

who are co-authors of the groundbreaking 2015 book,

Planting in a Post-Wild World,

have tougher criteria for which plants earn a spot

in their designs.

Claudia is here today to talk about

how the Fido Studio team figures out what makes the cut,

and more, how are you?

Great, thanks for having me, Margaret.

Yes, we've been having fun talking lately because we just did a New York times

Garden Column together, which got a very passionate response, which was

wonderful. I was so happy to see that.

So yeah, and honored. Thank you.

Oh, yeah. Well, I always learned so much in our conversations, my conversations

...