How-To’s
A New Year’s Tradition for Nature-Based Gardeners: Sowing Native Seeds
Read more: A New Year’s Tradition for Nature-Based Gardeners: Sowing Native SeedsWith the winter solstice almost here and the year coming to a close, we’d like to propose a new tradition to kick off the New Year: Sowing native seeds–outdoors. Many native seeds need a period of cold stratification in order to germinate, and one of the simplest ways to do this is to sow them…
PRFCT Ground Rules with Lindsey Taylor
Read more: PRFCT Ground Rules with Lindsey TaylorThis fall, Edwina von Gal, Perfect Earth’s founder, raised a call to action to all gardeners and landscape professionals to commit to making and caring for gardens that will heal and not harm the Earth. With the realities of biodiversity emergency and climate crisis upon us, gardeners and landscape professionals can be powerful agents of…
Courting Royalty: Planting Milkweed for Monarchs
Read more: Courting Royalty: Planting Milkweed for MonarchsMilkweed is the sole food source for hungry monarch caterpillars, and with more than 70 native species, there are varieties that thrives in every ecoregion in the U.S. They grow in dry or wet terrain, in blazing sun or part shade, and come in shades of pink, purple, orange, green, and white.
Ask the Expert: Holistic Plant Care with Longue Vue
Read more: Ask the Expert: Holistic Plant Care with Longue VueIt can get hot in New Orleans, really hot—and really humid. Climate change can cause drought one month, followed by floods the next. Then there are insect and disease pressures, infestations of invasive plants, frequent epic storms. What’s a historic garden to do? Longue Vue, Perfect Earth Project’s newest Pathways to PRFCT partner, is trying…
The NYC Biodiversity Task Force on 5 Ways to Support Your Ecosystem
Read more: The NYC Biodiversity Task Force on 5 Ways to Support Your Ecosystem“New York City has a secret,” says urban ecologist and founder of NYC Wildflower Week Marielle Anzelone. “The Big Apple boasts more open space than any major city in the United States; more than Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia combined. Even Manhattan, known for its taxi cabs and towering skyscrapers, has rare beetles and 150-year-old…
Radicle Thinking: Eating Dirt
Read more: Radicle Thinking: Eating DirtThe soil beneath your feet, in your garden trowel, and on your gloves is fabulously alive, brimming with billions of organisms and untold communities of pro- and antibiotics.
The Radical Ethics of Ecological Horticulture
Read more: The Radical Ethics of Ecological HorticultureWe all know our choices matter. What we buy, where we shop, whom we vote for—and how we garden. But how do we know what to choose? “We typically think of gardening as a neutral activity,” says Tim Johnson, the CEO of Native Plant Trust. “But over the years, I’ve come to realize that gardening…
How (and Why) to do a Biodiversity Audit in Your Backyard
Read more: How (and Why) to do a Biodiversity Audit in Your BackyardIt’s no secret that biodiversity is in decline: North America has lost close to 3 billion birds since the 1970s, and insects are disappearing just as quickly. More than a third of plants are also at risk of extinction. A gloomy picture, to say the least, but unlike much of the bad news about the…
Bringing Biodiversity Back
Read more: Bringing Biodiversity Back“We have declared 2024 the year of milkweed,” says Andi Pettis, director of horticulture at Governors Island. For the past couple of years, Pettis and her team have been busy incorporating milkweed into the island’s plantings.
Fertile Ground: Silvopastures, Sheep, Sustainability, and more!
Read more: Fertile Ground: Silvopastures, Sheep, Sustainability, and more!“It really felt like the land called us here,” says Michele Logan of Maranatha, her 73-acre farm in the Somerset Hills of New Jersey that practices and models conservation and stewardship, permaculture, regenerative agroforestry, and water management.