Welcome back, everyone. To the Epic Gardening podcast, today we have Matthew Reese Warren,

who is a gardener, and also the author of the book, which is out right now. It's called

the ecological gardener. Matthew, man, it's been a little bit of a challenge on our schedules

to have this conversation, but I'm glad to have you here on the podcast. Yeah, I know a bit of a

transatlantic sort of school going on there, but yeah, I'm really happy to be here too, come

way. Yeah, so why don't we start out with, you know, we're all gardeners here, and what is sort of

your your focus? I mean, your book's called the ecological gardener, so I'd assume you sort of

have a philosophy of the garden that you like to practice. Yeah, certainly becoming more and more.

I definitely wouldn't want people to think that I'm some, you know, um, live and breathe,

bonafide, sort of from the day I was born, I came out, an ecological gardener is a moving process,

you know, if we're, um, if you're yourself a gardener or you're listeners of gardeners,

we all know it's trial and error every year. You're trying new things, you're doing different

stuff, so I've sort of been building towards, um, this idea of how to garden certainly through

many, many years, I've been a professional gardener and I love to be a hobby gardener as well, so

I feel like this is changing by the minute, you know, we know about certain sort of

climate situations or certain situations within the environment and wildlife that is,

you know, we're hearing new stories every week, so I'm just reacting to that. I think many people

are not just me, um, and so it's sort of, uh, I would, I'd like to think that my outward sort of

aspiration and inspiration is what I'm putting in every day and trialing and looking at new ways of

gardening that are more in balance with the natural world. Yeah, I would say I would echo that

to some degree. I mean, I started out as a more conventional gardener. I don't actually really

know that I ever went full on conventional, which is an odd term, I would call it unconventional,

...