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. You've seen and heard the list of no-no plants that were showy, long-time nursery and garden standards, but have proven invasive and need to go. Yes, we can yank out the Bradford Pairs and Butterfly Bush and the rest of the long list and should, but then what? We need to know what to plant instead. A new book called Plant This Not That by Elise Howard establishes some basic principles for selecting and using native plants, along with specific examples of substitutions for plants you may be wanting to replace. She's here to talk us through some of her suggestions for gardens in various regions around the country, so more in a moment 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 The Moe Project Verified on the web, highmoingseeds.com, and by Whiteflower Farm offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants. On the web, whiteflowerform.com. In her new book, Plant This Not That, Elise Howard offers 200-ish examples of substitutions for plants that have proven troublesome, or just don't do much in the name of supporting biodiversity, grouped helpfully by their landscape purpose for hedging, for ground covers, for foundation, plantings near the house, etc. Elise began learning about natives more than 15 years ago as a volunteer at Riverside Park in New York City. These days, she lives in gardens in the city and in western Massachusetts. Welcome to the program, Elise. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here. Well, your book is very well titled, and this not that because we do need to know, not just what not to do, right? We just can't be scolded. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So I think we'll have a book give away with the transcript of this show over on awayegarden.com. And I've been enjoying seeing your suggestions and substitutions. When you, what kind of, what got you started on the book? Was it first-hand challenges that you had or figuring out good substitutions or what was the impetus? You know, the real impetus was when I was gardening in Maine and I you know the gardening season there is pretty

short. Sometimes my first perennials weren't coming up until late June and then by September 1st, Maynors declared it fall and I had a friend who would help me in the garden and she started to get into native plants with me but she told me that when she started to talk about native plants and native plant gardening with her main friends, they were very skeptical that there would be enough color, that there would be enough range of plants. And I was deeply sympathetic to that because when you're in a climate where the gardening season is so short, you want to maximize the pleasures of the garden, the blooms and the growth and the scent. And that really got me started. I thought I wanted to put together something to show people that this is possible, that you can have all the classic beauty of a garden, the wide range of native plants. OK. So like Doug Talamy, who's been an inspiration to so many of us, you don't write about 100% native and get rid of everything else. You know, it isn't sort of a black or white equation, but rather you recommend sort of a 70, 30 kind of aim about sort of making room looking for opportunities in our landscapes to make room for more diversity while of course eliminating invasives I mean that that's understood. Yeah and in the book you give us some principles to kind of follow and I love those and I wondered if we could talk I think there were like five of them and wonder if we could kind of talk about those sort of bulleted, you know, guidelines to have in mind. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, you know, the, yeah, the thing is that a lot of people are starting with gardens that have been made in a traditional way. And, you know, there are folks who think we need to be 100% native right now. And certainly, you know, our insects and our birds are in crisis. But it's not so easy to just redo your entire landscape in one fell swoop. There's time, there's knowledge, and there's money, right? So I wanted to break it down for people. And as you say, you know, I sort of put it into those five basic principles. And number one is a mainly native garden. Right. To aim for that. Right. To aim for that. And and spoiler, I would love to go for 100% native. I'm hoping to move toward 100% native, but for instance, I recently made a move from Maine to Western Massachusetts and had to start over in one sense because I had to put in a whole new septic system and I had to deal with some re-grading issues. So I do have a big blank patch, but alongside that patch, I've got some very mature shrubs and garden plants. And whoever on this house before me seemed to have a tendency, the more invasive, the better. So I'm dealing with gout weed, I'm dealing with lilies of the valley. A lot of that needs that needs to be removed and it needs to be a gradual process. I've got woods, I've got bitter sweet, I've got honey suckle to deal with. And so if you, it can be daunting. And so one of the things to start with is the idea that every native plant you add is beneficial and the more the better, right? Yes. Yes. Yes. And so then sort of your second principle I think it says sort of to consider wildlife and beauty, yes? Yes. Yes. So I hang out in a lot of native plant forums. and I'll see folks saying, okay, but now insects are eating my shrubs. Or, you know, I've noticed all of these holes on the leaves of my plant. So I think one of the things we need to keep in mind is that we are doing this, you know, beauty is certainly one of the main things this book is about. but we're doing it to support not just pollinators, although that's really important, but also to think about plants as host plants, especially for caterpillars, the caterpillars that are so fundamental to feeding the baby birds, you know, and you can just sort of go up the chain from there. And plants also, native plants also provide shelter. There's the question of overwintering insects and bees and wasps in particular using the holostems of plants. So that's where the planning for wildlife comes in. At a certain point, you want to have a shift in your thinking. I think one of the examples I use in the book is when you start to recognize the semi-circular signs in your plant leaves that leaf cutter bees have been there and getting excited about that. I always think that's exciting because it's so perfect and they're always positioned the same way and it's so distinctive it's like nothing else. It's so easy to recognize those and I think that the little they're called by a million different names but the dagger moths that look like hummingbirds. So I'm not great at insect recognition and I'm not great at birds yet, although I'm working on it, but there are certain ones that are just so instantly recognizable and you can learn to celebrate their presence. Right. So we're going to we're thinking about wildlife and beauty. And then I think you talk about two things that are I think of them almost like like related, although maybe they're not technically, you talk about thinking about layers, planting, making a garden that has layers, and then also about plant communities about the relationship among the plant choices. And I think those are kind of similar in that the layers is all about recognizing that again, it's also interconnected. If you're going to support wildlife, you have to think about the canopy, you have to think about the shrub layer, and you have to think about the ground layer forbs, and then the ground layer, literally what's, you know, the dirt and the leaves that are on the dirt. Because there are birds that live at each of those levels, for instance, but as we're now learning, I mean, leave the leaves is a huge phrase that you hear. Right. Of course. In the native plant community. Sure. And there are so many benefits to that. And then there's the issue of clean up. And again, this goes into another of the points I make.

But leaving stems at six inches or 18 inches because animals are using those stems all year round, right? So those are that's part of the layering thing. And then plant communities, this can be so beneficial. You know, the gardens we grew up with often had, you know, a plant and then

a frame of mulch around it. And what we see with native plants, oh, and also so many supports brought in to keep the taller plants standing up straight. Yes. And I think there are a couple things about plant communities. First is the way plants are interconnected above the ground and then also below the ground. And it turns out that if you start to think about what plants grow well with each other at the simplest level, you know, the shy growers versus the assertive growers and grow plants that go together. They will do that work themselves. The roots will support what's growing above the ground, what's growing above the ground, will support the plants nearby. And you'll start to eliminate those little mulch frames. You'll start to think about plants as green mulch and the way they can support each other. And then also, of course, there's just the fundamental issue of making sure that plants have similar light and soil and moisture. So if we move on to some sort of considerations of what should I plant instead of what I have, in some case where I I want to remove something or something's invasive or whatever the reason being. I wanted to ask about some that are real headliners of problem plants or just plants that don't really add anything like for instance boxwood which is ubiquitous in a lot of traditional garden styles that we were talking about particularly in certain regions of the country. country. You know, it doesn't really give a lot of traditional garden styles that we were talking about, particularly in certain regions of the country.

It doesn't really give a lot of,

it doesn't really support a lot of things.

Right, it doesn't support a lot of things.

And it's also starting, I guess, in some areas,

I'm just finding this out recently

to be subject to a kind of a blight.

So the, oh no, absolutely.

It's why it's widespread multiple pests and diseases and so forth? Absolutely. So what do we do instead of, let's talk about some of these sort of much used plants that we may want to do? So what would be some possibilities? Well, so it's great to start with an evergreen one because that's one of the tricky things about gardening is we brought in a lot of these plants because they had specific features. And there aren't that many great evergreens but there are some evergreens and there are also some plants where, you know, again, you just do a little adjustment of how you think of the way plants are working in the garden. So Ilex, Galabra in the east and northeast and southeast is a great one. So the inkberry. This is an inkberry haul. Yeah, it is evergreen. It supports a lot of wildlife. and basically functions in a very similar way to boxwood. It's easily pruned. You can keep it in shape. And it's almost as close to a one-to-one substitute as you can get when you're thinking this way. And then there's in the West, Mahonia, which is Oregon grape holly. And also in the West, but a little further inland, there's Paxistema, which is Oregon boxwood. So those, again, those are great evergreen substitutes. A more widely native holly is Ilex Verdesalada, which is the winterberry Holly. So this is not an evergreen plant. Right. But what it is is a plant that has beautiful bright red berries throughout the winter. Except when everybody eats them, which they don't have. Like, okay needs. So again, like, okay, you have to go out one day

and all your beautiful bright red berries are gone

and think, hooray, the overwintering birds

have had a meal.

Yeah, everybody's happy.

Yeah, everybody's happy.

Yeah, it's good, it's good, it's good.

So those are some, that's the kind of thinking

that this book is really trying to encourage in us is, okay, wait a minute.

Boxwood, first of all, it wasn't much of a contributor to biodiversity. Second of all, it's plagued with a lot of issues now. Okay, if we're going to yank it, let's not put more boxwood in. And indeed, they're working on disease-resistant primes and so forth, but still it's not a big performer biodiversity-wise. Right. So what could we do instead? a plant like Barbary, Japanese Barbary,

Burbers, Dunburjai, and this is a... diversity wise. So what could we do instead? So then there's a plant like Barbary,

...