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's guest and I were sitting having a cup of tea together recently and talking about, guess what, plants. What came up pretty fast was how lately we both sometimes cringe at the results tour online searches about one garden topic or another, which only seemed to be getting worse in the age of AI, or at the misinformation we see on some viral social media posts. Ecologically focused garden designer Rebecca McMack and I wanted to talk out loud here with all of you about what trusted sources we go to again and again and about how we filter out some of the unhelpful noise when seeking answers to our garden questions. So more in a moment but first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by color blends 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 herbal 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, WhiteflowerFarm.com. Rebecca McMacKinn is an ecologically focused horticulturist and garden designer and the creator of the newsletter Grow Like Wild, which now has a companion podcast version. In the opening of a TED Talk she gave, which has more than 1.3 million views, Rebecca says, full disclosure, I am the nerdiest gardener you're ever going to meet. Rebecca spent a decade as director of horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park, where she managed 85 acres of diverse parkland organically and with an eye toward diversity. And she more recently served as our breedom curator at Wodla on Cemetery in the Bronx. And her claim garden for Brooklyn Museum, which was planted in 2023, shows that ecological gardens can thrive even in the busiest spaces. And she was a Harvard-Lob fellow in 2023 as well. So hi, Rebecca, good to talk to you again, even without the cup of tea. Always a pleasure, Margaret. I actually have a cup of tea. So, okay, okay, cool. You didn't offer me one. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. So, yes, so each of us, in a way, in our own way, as part of our job, you know, your old job at Broken Bridge Park, our jobs as the writing we do, the now podcasting that we do, the teaching, the lecturing, a lot of parts of our jobs, our careers, our aimed at helping people find answers to their garden questions and to learn to garden smarter. And I think even when you were at Broken Bridge Park, you didn't you know new members of your team how to do the hands-on work that you needed from them. But I think you actually taught them how to find information online as well, didn't you? Absolutely. So that was a big part of the job, right? Teaching people how to learn, how to find information. Over the 10 plus years I was there, I hired over 100 garden staff between seasonal gardeners and full-time gardeners and managers, et cetera. And for each one of those people, all it, as you can imagine, really different levels in their experience and knowledge of horticulture, they all needed to know how to find the answers to their own questions. And, you know, I'm a bibliophile. My library is literally problematically large, and I love, love, love books. But I also recognize that that's not where, especially newer generations of gardeners are really getting their information. And it is incredibly easy to find stuff online to just punch something into Google and imagine that the information that's going to come back is going to be the answers to literally the questions of the universe. But we found, and I think many of us find, that when you do just Google something, what comes back is often not actually the information that you need. And when you look at where people are getting their garden information from, 40% of people rate the internet as their main source of information. And that is coming from both YouTube and social media. And I'm concerned about that because when I go to YouTube and social media, a lot of the information that I see is not accurate.

Or it's by really enthusiastic, really talented communicators who maybe aren't the most experienced

gardeners in the world. And so I just thought it would be really helpful, along with you,

one of the most talented researchers. talented, nerdy researchers of gardening, that we could help people, help people, again, not finding the information that we're necessarily looking for, but how to look for information on internet. Right, so it's like, I scroll down the list of results. So I was searching for Hatteprude Ar Wintu, blah, blah, blah, you know, Wintu, so such and such, or whatever. And, you know, I scroll down the list of results. And I sort of have this built-in mechanism from being a journalist in old school traditional forum journalists for so many years, so many decades, you know, I'm sort of a research brain.

You know, I filter and I'm like, no, that's not a good resource,

that's not a good,

that's not a trusted authority.

You know, I kind of screen.

Mm-hmm.

And, you know, so I'm prejudiced toward

like if the URL has a .edu,

like it's an academic institution, for example.

That probably is gonna get extra points in my book compared to just somebody's blog, right? Now maybe that's, you know, an oversimplification, but that's one of the things when I'm just quickly pre-screening, you know, as I'm looking for authority in various ways. New information, you know, I look for the dates on things because, boy, if you have like, plant pests and diseases, like I was recently writing about beach leaf disease, and you know, this is something that's changing by the minute and there's all this research going on. And even if you get something from a research report from 2024, let alone 2023 or 2022, it's not going to have the latest by any means in sites or knowledge or recommendations. And so, you know, I look for dates that. So I have a screening process built into my brain. Yeah. That's so I've learned so much from you about how to scan Google results, because I almost never use Google. Because I consider it not super trustworthy at this point. I I have on my browser, I have a bookmark folder of all of the sources that I go to, rather than sort of rely on an algorithm to answer questions for me. I go to very specific websites and I look up very specific people, institutions, universities.

And those are the places where I go. And I put in those questions that I'm trying to answer as opposed to, I mean, I do sometimes test out like I remember my son, like a couple weeks ago, wouldn't believe that lunama's don't eat as adults. And I put it into Google. And wouldn't you know it? the top AI results said that the adult luna moth, you know, diet was XYZ. And so I just, I feel like the internet is kind of crumbling right now. We're watching with AI and all the algorithms trying to sell us things, right? That information's becoming less and less reliable when you rely on those search engines. And so I really do try to, when I can, focus on certain individuals. It's the same way I get my news, right? I don't just Google things. I like, I find the reporters who I really like in order to listen to what they, exactly, exactly. So, we're going to start to to give some examples and maybe we can kind of go through some different categories, but I'll say that we're going to go through a bunch of things and with the transcript of the show over on AwayToGarden.com, I can give your list of some of those bookmarks and my list of some of my resources that I regularly use. So everybody bit isn't to start jotting like mad because we're the transcript. But yeah, so what example where should we start? Like, sure. I think one of the things that in researching how people get their information, the big shift, even over the last 10 years, is YouTube. A lot of people find garden information and watch garden shows and try to answer questions on YouTube. And so I thought I could share just a few of my favorite YouTube channels for finding really, really good information. So I really love the Zerxie society. So that's for invertebrate conservation. So a lot of insects and other invertebrates. Exactly. And I'm going to come at this, you know, from a very ecological perspective. Sure. I'm not going to be able to. If you have questions about P&E's, that's going to be a deal. Well, I have answers for that. I'll let them know. So yeah, so Zerxie Society is wonderful. Definitely has an insect fence, but they offer a lot of information about just gardening in general for biodiversity. But that's a trusted resource, right? Exactly. Exactly. Universities. Just about every university. Yes. I really like Penn State and Cornell. They're YouTube channels. They have fantastic cordiculture information, whole lectures from experts, and then just how to water, how do we just really basic stuff into the latest information on jumping worms. So I really recommend just subscribing to those YouTube channels and then watching when something interesting shows up. I also love organizations like Grownative Mass, Grownative Massachusetts. They have free seminars, free speakers, and then an archive online of really, really wonderful lectures that you can watch on the topic as well. What are some of your favorites, Margaret, for more ornamental gardening? Well, so with the ornamental stuff, I mean, one place I will look at if I'm delving into a new genus of plants or An old genus of plants again like P&E as you mentioned or orchids or whatever the heck ferns whatever it is I might look and see if there's a botanical society for that So frequently there'll be you know the fern society website and maybe the American or maybe the international or whatever Or the orchid society or the the P&E Society and so forth. There's lots of those. Some of them don't have a lot of content on the websites, but sometimes they have local chapters. So if you really wanted to learn about ferns, or you really wanted to learn about rock gardening, or you really wanted to learn about whatever, you might find your local chapter, or you might at least look it up and then contact the email the person who's listed in your area and find out what resources they have and if they have lectures like you're talking about it's over there. You might plug in to again trusted resources that are even more local because with a lot of this stuff local is important. Absolutely. Absolutely. So I have a list on away to garden.com slash resources that includes a lot of those societies that over the years I've used. And again, some of them have tons of content and some of them, you know, like how to, why does my P&E bloom and how to plant the P&E and how deep and blah blah blah, I might tell all that or might not on other types of those websites. But that's one way to go. And then there's places like Missouri Botanical Garden with its plant and cycle pedia. It's plant finder kind of encyclopedia part of its website where I can search for a plant. And I can read about where does it come from and how much soil moisture does it want and what diseases is it prone to and how tall does it get and what zone is it and things like that. So I use that a lot. Those plant finders, I feel like there's so much technology out there now that really makes gardening and ecological gardening specifically just so easy. It's incredible that you can plug in your zip code and then just get a list of plants that support all of the animals that live around you. Right. So those plant finders, there's, and there's all different levels of complexity like Missouri Botanical Garden is a very sophisticated one, right? Where you can say, I want a blue blooming perennial for sun, and it's got to be three feet high. You can plug in all of this minutia, and it'll give you what those plants are. It's an incredible resource. But there There are some that if you're just getting started and you just really need ideas, there are some that are just a little bit easier. I really like Homegrown National Park, has a good finder. Or they tell you a little bit of information about your eco region, like what are the plans of your eco region and that is not just your hardiness zone but considers geology

and hydrology and all of those various things. And the plants that you get from homegrown

national park are very often keystone species. So those are the most important plants you can plant

on your land to support the wildlife around you. Now when you said before that I'm a Missouri

botanical you were filtering I've never done that. I've done that on the Lady Bird Johnson. The wildlife. Do I have them confused? Wildflower. Yeah, well that's okay because I mean that's the problem is we're both thinking on heads of like big lists. Yeah, but I've done that. I've I've done profile by profile like I've searched for you know, particular genus and species of plant on Missouri Botanical and gotten all the information about that plant. But on the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center down in Texas on their website, they're encyclopedia. You can not only do that, look for a particular plant, but then you can say like what you were talking about, you want, you know, ground covers for their blue, that got three feet high and whatever. And it's like, why? It's amazing. It's wild. And for your zone, for your area, it's fantastic. So Margaret, I just, I just Google it and maybe it's new, but the, the MOBA does have this. Cool new stuff. I know. I wanted to ask because like again, we each have our ways of looking for things and I we haven't discovered everything about even the places that we go. I mean, that's great. Looking at this now, there's so much information here that I have never had the you know, a reason and I would love to just explore it. You can literally search for plants that are black walnut tolerant that are dear resistant that support hummingbirds specifically. And so yeah, like there's just this is like a moment for technology that I think we're all sort of like being able to reap the benefit of. This is the positive version. This is not the AI creepy version. So what we're just saying is that that type of filtering is available on Missouri Botanical and then for natives only available on the Ladybird Johnson site, which is fantastic as well in its own way. Yeah. And yeah. And then I think the Audubon Society has another one that's like a pretty simplistic one as well that'll just tell you like really good shrubs that have berries that birds really like which is nice to know as well Yes, and local is so important in all kinds of gardening But especially when we get to ecological native plant gardening, etc Local gets more and more and more important and you know, I always tell people and make it lectures and so forth You know someone will raise raise their hands and say like well, if it's a virtual class, and there's people from all over the country, they're like, well, where should I look? And I always say, well, do you know your state or county native plant society? And usually the answer is no. But if not, go to I think it's North American native plant society, NANPS, and again, I'll give all this in the transcript of the show. They have a tab on their website of every state or county, all the state and actually Canadian provinces to Native plant societies that exist. you can click over to your one for, know Indiana or Missouri or you know whatever Ontario or whatever and from that website you can probably find and you know access to plant lists and you know guidance really hyper local right and sometimes even down to the county level and again even down, why not meet with some of your like-minded neighbors, you know, at their monthly meetings and learn more that way. So maybe you don't need to buy plants. Maybe someone will literally. Well, and they all have a tab about plant sales and seed swaps and so forth. So that's the most hyper-local of all. So I love helping people filter down from that NANPS that the American Native Plant Society website to their state and you know even closer to home Native Plant website for And so yeah, all horticulture is local. It's you know, you really do need to figure out what's going on in the ground right around your house or building. Yeah. Yes. Yes, so I think beyond just figuring out what plants to use.

There's also a lot of resources online like Lady Bird Johnson, where they really give you a lot of information about how to grow plants, what they look like, what their ranges are. And so that's a whole nother section of online resources, where you looking for information about plants. When you know what you want to plant, but you need to know more about them. And so for that, I really do like Lady Bird Johnson. I think that is a wonderful resource. And then I think you were saying Margaret that you really use Go botany a lot. I do because I'm in the Northeast and Go botany was started by the former New England wild- England wildflower society now native plant trust, right? So it's geared to adjacent to where I live in gardens. So it has the plant pallet for my area. So yes, I do. I check there to see if something is native or near native or introduced or whatever in my area and get some basic information. Yeah. I really love, I really use range maps online. I'm in a different guy. I love the two. Oh my God, it's amazing. And my favorite, there are so many good options now, but my favorite is the Biotta of North America project, Bone App. I probably go to Bone App every day. Oh, me too. Me too. And you just arrange a plant. If you're not familiar with it, you know, you just, you put in a plant name. You can even just put in a genus, you know, like aqueligia. And you get this, these series of maps for every species in aqueligia. And it shows you highlighted county by county, whether or not that plant has been found in that county. There's different color codes, like whether or not it's rare or it's invasive or it's secure or there's different color codes that you can see how that plant has been found in the county as well. Right, and again, those range maps, they're not literally like, is it gonna be on the hillside above my house? You know, it's not that granular, right?

Yeah. But you can go from there if you've been given sort of the general idea that, hmm, that plant is present in my general vicinity. Again, go even more local. I love to do searches when I'm looking into a particular area for the flora FLRA of fill in the blank. might be, you know, I'm Columbia County, New York,

floor of Columbia County, New York, or

floor of Maryland. And frequently you will find that some either nonprofit or governmental agency or academic entity or in some cases, like in my county, these two people who are married, two married scientists, the Hawthorne Valley, FarmScape Ecology Program have for more than 20 years been updating the flora of my county. And many times a week I go to their list, their updated list to see, is that species of aster here or not? Which golden rods are here or not?

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