Growing Greener Podcast

The Garden Conservancy: Your Passport to Garden Visits and Education Nationwide

Host Tom Christopher speaks with Horatio Joyce, the Garden Conservancy’s Director of Public Programs & Education, about the rich opportunities the organization provides to tour remarkable gardens in every region of the United States, and the innovative opportunities for gardening education it provides both in person and online.

August 5, 2026

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Transcript

Host Tom Christopher
Welcome to Growing Greener, your guide to environmentally informed gardening. Produced in collaboration with the Perfect Earth Project, this program brings you each week some expert who puts you in touch with a different aspect of gardening in partnership with nature. Our goal is to make your personal landscape healthier, more beautiful, more sustainable, and more fun.

This is your host Tom Christopher, and today I will be speaking to Horatio Joyce, Director of Public Programs and Education at The Garden Conservancy. Since 1989, this non-profit has been leading the way in the preservation of remarkable gardens across the United States and coordinating an Open Days program that has enabled members of the public to experience thousands of outstanding private gardens from the West Coast to the East. Horatio will share information about the Conservancy’s very active educational programs for gardeners and garden lovers, and the organization’s commitment to promoting environmentally friendly and ecological gardening.

One aspect of this last effort I am excited to announce is that The Garden Conservancy has chosen to become a sponsor of Growing Greener. Welcome Horatio! I’m very pleased to have you here to introduce, at least virtually, Growing Greener’s new sponsorship by The Garden Conservancy. And I thought we could start with some general information about The Garden Conservancy.

It was founded back in 1989, as I recall, by a noted plantsman and gardener, Frank Cabot, and I believe he was inspired by a visit to a renowned xeric garden of cacti, succulents, and other drought-tolerant plants that Ruth Bancroft had created in the San Francisco Bay Area. Cabot thought that this special landscape ought to be preserved as an inspiration to other gardeners. And in fact, with the help of the new Conservancy he founded, Ruth Bancroft’s garden was opened to the public in 1992, so that was very prompt.

How active has The Garden Conservancy been in preservation, and what sorts of gardens has it focused on?

Horatio Joyce
So we have helped save around 100, if not more, gardens across the United States since we were founded in 1989, so it’s a great legacy. The bulk of those gardens were in our earlier period, but preservation continues very much to be a part of our mission and everyday work at The Conservancy. We hold a number of easements to protect some of the historic gardens that we’ve helped preserve over the years, and those take a great deal of maintenance. I believe every year our preservation department goes out to check on them and to ensure that the owners of the organizations taking care of them are keeping them to the standards of their original creators.

Tom Christopher
Do you know anything about the founding? How Frank Cabot was able to round up support for this mission?

Horatio Joyce
It’s something I think about a great deal, and I don’t have historical records that actually speak directly to his intentions and how he managed to muster the support, but I think it’s a really interesting moment in American history and in preservation history in the United States. There was a good deal of thinking, as we know, in the third quarter, especially of the 20th century, about preservation in the United States. A lot of that energy was focused on the built environment, but there was this increasingly sophisticated discourse about preservation, and Frank was a pioneer in transferring all of the thinking that was going on about the preservation of the built environment, like famously, Penn Station in New York City was lost. But that sort of conversation about how do we preserve the landscape was something that Frank Cabot brought to the natural, and in particular to gardens. And I think he really offered something unique, which was the history of gardens, the history of the landscapes that we create, and really the need to preserve them and to think about them as cultural artifacts.

And that’s something, again, that in the 70s, in history, I’m a trained historian, was becoming more popular, the idea that there are objects beyond just fine art objects that are worth preserving, everyday objects, and he was able to extend that discourse to gardens very convincingly.

Tom Christopher
I think another factor in it that made it very timely, his initiative, was I was working in the field at that point, and American horticulture in many ways was coming of age in those decades at the end of the 20th century. To the extent that we had great gardens, and we had had some great gardens, but they tended to be to a greater or lesser extent derivative. We were bringing in experts from other traditions, other countries, and asking them to work in the United States. And that was great. But I recall very vividly in the 80s, that there were all kinds of homegrown garden design styles that were starting to arise. Things like Ruth Bancroft creating a dry garden. So I think it gave us something that was really inspiring to preserve.

Horatio Joyce
Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right from what I’ve read about that period. And I’d love to know more, and the factors that contributed to this sort of expanding palette of interest in gardens. And it’s famous, and it’s more within the Garden Conservancy that, you know, the succulent garden that you’re mentioning, Ruth Bancroft’s garden that Frank Cabot saw and which inspired, and I should add that it was Anne Cabot, his wife, played a big part in the founding idea of the Garden Conservancy. It was not his cup of tea. This was not a traditional, you know, Northeastern, English-inspired, or even European-inspired garden. There were cacti. There were lots of cacti. But he, at that moment, despite being a fairly traditional, but I should say outstanding gardener, he was able to appreciate that Ruth Bancroft was achieving something outstanding. That she had really elevated herself to the rank of a fine artist.

Tom Christopher
How has and does the Garden Conservancy select the gardens it works to preserve?

Horatio Joyce
Yeah, it’s a good question. So I should, you know, I’m not the preservation department, though I have an active interest in preservation, and it does permeate all that we do at the Garden Conservancy. I am the Director of Public Programs and Education, and so I have the privilege of working with the number of the preservation gardens that we have helped work on over the years who have joined our programs and our program partners in one way or another. You know, the gardening world, even in the United States, is a small world. It’s growing, which is wonderful, but people know each other, and people recommend gardens. And if there’s a garden that is at risk of being lost, everyone tends to know about it. And certainly, they’re directing that information at the Garden Conservancy. We have a great network. Forty-five thousand people participate in our programs every year. We’re national. We’re sort of a clearinghouse, sometimes I think about, for information. That’s one of those vital services that we provide the American gardening world, is that we are sort of a central node and people share information with us, and then we can pass it on appropriately. I would imagine a lot of our preservation gardens came to us in some way like that.

Tom Christopher
I’ve also been really interested by the very broad view of gardens that the Conservancy has brought to its work. Last January, I attended the opening of a documentary titled Earth, I Thank You, that the Garden Conservancy had produced about the history, significance, and preservation of Anne Spencer’s garden in Lynchburg, Virginia. Spencer, who is African American, was a poet, teacher, and civil rights activist, and a key player in the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and 30s. So it’s a fascinating film. It’s available for viewing on the Garden Conservancy website, and I urge listeners to take a look. But the point I guess I want to make is that that garden is very significant and fascinating, not just because of its visual appeal when you’re in it, but because of all the different threads of American culture and history it brings together.

Horatio Joyce
Absolutely. Yeah. Anne Spencer is a fascinating, significant historical figure. I don’t know if this is mentioned in the film, but I’ve come across it. I mean, she really was a devoted gardener. You know, she was out there sometimes like 4 a.m. picking weeds. I’m not a great reader of poetry, but it has been wonderful becoming acquainted with her work because gardening just infuses it, really. It was her two great passions, her two great arts, and they each fed one another. But we, it’s great. I mean, Frank was a really terrific founder. And again, going back to the Ruth Bancroft garden, I mean, he really looked very broadly at gardens, and he really tested himself, what he was comfortable with in terms of gardening. I think that was part of our DNA from the very beginning, was to think broadly, thanks to Frank Cabot and that original interest in the Ruth Bancroft garden, about what constitutes a garden.

And we’ve been doing that in one form or another ever since. And as you say, most recently with the Anne Spencer garden.

Tom Christopher
So the Garden Conservancy has long since expanded its activities beyond preservation. It’s also been a key to opening a host of contemporary private gardens to visitors through its Open Days program. Perhaps you could tell listeners about that, because I think that’s one of the most significant contributions it makes.

Horatio Joyce
Yeah, it’s an ongoing contribution. It’s a big deal, if I may say so. You know, we have some 40,000 people every year that just participate in our Open Days program. We have 360 something gardens opening for us in 2026. We are the only nationwide garden visiting program in the United States. It’s wonderful. At this time of divisions, political, geographical, we are all looking for something to bring us together.

And the Open Days program is a terrific way of doing that. We like to say it drives America’s passion for gardens. And it’s absolutely true. I see it as a really essential service that the Garden Conservancy provides. Great gardens don’t develop in vacuums. They don’t develop in isolation. Gardeners, like artists, have to be visiting each other’s studios. They have to be visiting each other’s gardens. They have to be inspired. And they also have to get a little validation every once in a while. And by that, I mean our garden owners, we call them garden hosts. Those are the gardeners who participate by opening their gardens. A lot of this stuff is often done in somewhat solitary circumstances. Maybe your friends and family can see the great work that you’ve been doing throughout the year. But there is nothing like bringing your community and people beyond your community, sometimes very often beyond your community, to enjoy the beauty that you have created. A little validation is important. It’s an important motivator. Yes, we’ve been going since 1995. It’s phenomenal.

Tom Christopher
It is phenomenal. And one of the things I’ve enjoyed in the Open Days visits that I’ve participated in is everybody has a different vision of gardening. Some of the gardens, I walk in and there’s a side of me that thinks, I don’t think I would do this. But then you say, but boy, is this well done. It challenges you and helps you to grow.

Horatio Joyce
I agree entirely. That’s right. It’s always important to be pushed to look at new things, think differently. It keeps our minds young, fresh, agile, and helps us as gardeners. Yeah, I’m glad that you’ve had that experience. That makes me very happy.

Tom Christopher
Horatio, I need to pause here to remind listeners that this radio station is WESU 88.1 FM. And this program is Growing Greener, a weekly conversation about gardening and partnership with nature. This is your host, Tom Christopher.

And today I am speaking to Horatio Joyce of the Garden Conservancy about that organization’s goals and programs. And I’m excited to say it’s sponsorship of Growing Greener. So let’s get to your work as the Director of Public Programs and Education, because I have to say I’ve been to garden visits and so forth. I had not until I started speaking to you and James, the president, about how deep and rich the educational programs were. So maybe you could introduce us to what you’re doing.

Horatio Joyce
Absolutely. I can build on what we’ve just been talking about, which is Open Days. So I see the origins of the department that I lead going back to 1995, which is the first year of the Open Days program in the United States. And that ran for a number of years and really caught on very quickly, thanks to a devoted family of volunteers. And a lot of our programs are absolutely owed to tremendous volunteers across the country who make these programs possible. And then about a decade later, if not more, we realized that our Open Days hosts, that is the garden owners in the Open Days program, were just a font of information. Beyond just opening their gardens, that they had a lot of wisdom, knowledge to offer the public.

And so we created something called Digging Deeper. And those are more focused garden visits with the garden owner usually about some aspect of their garden that they’re knowledgeable on. We run between 30 to 60 every year. These are called Digging Deeper. They’re usually attached to an Open Day. So if you’re headed to an Open Day around the country, check out our catalog either in print or online, because very often it’s accompanied by a Digging Deeper, a more focused program.

A few years after that, in 2019, we developed the Garden Masters events. And those are even a sort of more specialized experience. And they really vary very widely. They are for groups of 20 to 30. We bring them to sometimes landscape architects’ studios. There’s nothing like going to a Landscape Architect’s studio. It’s very exciting. It’s a highly creative environment, collaborative. It’s a great experience. We go often right now to museums to see collections. We don’t think of museums as great repositories for garden history. But in fact, they are. We’ve had a great success partnering with curators around the country in drawings and prints departments in particular to look at the design drawings and prints that they have in their collections. And the public love it. Our gardeners really enjoy going to visit these historic collections and see how garden designers worked in the past and thinking about garden design.

And then a newer addition to this roster of programs is our Garden Futures Grants program, which has been running since 2021. We’ve given away over a million dollars now to small community gardens and other non-profit garden organizations across the country. And we have just closed our applications this year, and we received over 300 applications, which is more than twice the number that we did last year. And it’s a great program, and it’s a wonderful window onto this great garden moment where more and more little organizations around the country are playing a really important role in sustaining our gardening interest and the growing number of American gardeners. And we’re delighted to be able to support their work.

Tom Christopher
Yeah, and I want to say that I recently attended an online program.

Horatio Joyce
So, I could keep going, Thomas. Yeah, we have a really vibrant virtual programming series every year. We do around 18 virtual programs. A lot of them are author webinars. So, a new book author on a gardening topic will come on and discuss their work. We have great, really, really wide interest across the country who sign in for our virtual programs. We also, I should say, have other types of in-person programs in addition to our Open Days and Digging Deeper and Garden Masters. And those are lecture series, symposia, and conferences every couple of years. So, we’re really, really active.

Tom Christopher
The one I went to was on July 30th, and its title was From Columns to Clicks. This was an intensely practical program, but inspiring at the same time. It featured a panel of experts, including Margaret Roach, whose radio program and podcast A Way to Garden, I think, needs no introduction to gardeners, or to readers of the New York Times. It also included Rochelle Greer, the editor of American Gardener, the magazine of the American Horticultural Society, Kevin Cliff, a therapist and contents creator, Rebecca McMacken, somebody I admire tremendously, the horticulturist who directed the installation of Brooklyn Bridge Park, and who writes a wonderful newsletter, Grow Like Wild, which appears on Substack. And then also Stephen Orr, a former editor-in-chief of Better Homes and Gardens. So, we got to listen to a whole range of people, from traditional journalists to content creators and people who are very much involved in the… Well, all of these people were very much involved in the contemporary and future state of garden information, but they were all talking about how gardeners could get reliable information, where they could go for reliable information, which I think is an immensely important question in this age of self-appointed online experts and, God forbid, AI. And I came away with all kinds of ideas of how to search down the information I need.

Horatio Joyce
Yeah, the impetus for this program was very simple. And it was that it’s increasingly confusing for gardeners when they have a gardening question about where to go. Where is a reliable place to go for garden advice? And the reason for that confusion is a lot of gardeners are new today. Millions and millions of Americans in the past few years have become gardeners. And on top of that, more and more gardeners are gardening ecologically or have a curiosity. So, we have new gardeners, and for many intents and purposes, we have old gardeners who are sort of reinventing themselves. And it’s hard in this changing media landscape to find a good source for gardening information.

And we had, as you just named them, a fabulous, really knowledgeable panel from the media world who really confirmed that it’s tough right now to find reliable information, as you just mentioned, new stuff like AI. It can be a confounding environment to try and find a good source for your simple gardening questions. So, we hope that by discussing some of what I think are intrinsically fascinating dynamics behind this fast-developing garden media landscape, we hope to make people more savvy consumers of garden information.

I think one of the wonderful and heartwarming takeaways from the program, which is very familiar to gardeners, is that it really, in the end, is often down to speaking to your neighbor, to your family member, to your community. And old-fashioned, hand-me-down information continues to be really pivotal.

Tom Christopher
You know, and yet it was Kevin Cliff, whose profession is as a therapist, who mentioned something that was particularly close to my heart. He talked about when he got interested in gardening, and he was working in a nursery, but he made a reference to peer-reviewed studies. And I’m very much a science-based person. My wife is an environmental scientist. And when I start planning something or trying something new in the garden, I really like to have the results of scientific studies and data to fall back on. Peer-reviewed, as many listeners may not know, means that whatever the study in question is, it was submitted to a panel of other scientists in the field for a series of critiques before the write-up was published. So peer-reviewed means that the science involved is sound, even if the reviewers didn’t necessarily agree with the author’s conclusions. This peer-reviewed label provides an easy way of distinguishing sound science from the kind of wishful thinking that is often masquerading as science these days. So I was impressed that it was a therapist and influencer who contributed that remark.

Horatio Joyce
Yeah, I wonder what inspired him to discuss that. But one thing that comes to my mind, and we didn’t unfortunately touch on this in the webinar, was the Wilder app. Thomas, have you discussed this at all on your podcast, Wilder?

Tom Christopher
No. Okay, well, it’s a new app out recently.

Horatio Joyce
It’s free to download. It’s, you know, on Apple apps. And it really is a very good way. It was developed by two landscape architects who are really keen to see ecological gardening take off in the United States and bring it into the modern technological age. And one of the things that they do for users of the app is that they synthesize a great deal of scientific research, peer-reviewed reports that really serious gardeners in the past would have had to dig up for themselves on university library websites and may not have had the language expertise to really break it down. But this app now does some of the work for you, amongst other things. And the Garden Conservancy is beginning to partner with them in a number of exciting ways soon to be announced.

Tom Christopher
Oh, I’m going to be waiting for that for sure. Because I have to admit, even a science geek like me finds some of the papers I end up delving into kind of dry and hard to penetrate. So help with that would be great. Well, I want to finish up by talking about the Garden Conservancy. You’ve made reference to this several times. It’s increasing focus on ecological gardening and sustainability. And this is not at the expense of the aesthetics of gardening, the beauty of gardening that attracts people to gardens. I mean, that’s very much still at the heart of, I think, the Garden Conservancy’s mission. But you’ve been doing things to alert people to how gardeners can contribute to the environment. A favorite of mine in that regard is the Nibbled Leaf program, which the Garden Conservancy developed in partnership with the Perfect Earth Project. Can you tell us about that?

Horatio Joyce
Yeah, it was one of the first things I did when I joined the Garden Conservancy was to work with Edwina van Gal from the Perfect Earth Foundation to develop this nature-friendly gardening initiative within Open Days. And the reason for doing that was both of us agreed that ecological gardening really required a broadening of our aesthetic sensibilities, that ecological gardens did look different. Different, not inferior, not bad, but different. And that the more that people got to see good ecological gardening, the more likely, and when I say good, I mean good according to ecological principles, but also beautifully, poetically done, the more likely they would be to adopt those ecological principles themselves.

And the Open Days program was an enticing partner to that project in that we have some 40,000 people every year going to visit gardens. And if we could some way utilize the Open Days program to broadcast, to show people that ecological gardening was beautiful gardening, we would all be better off. And so, at its essence, what Nibbled Leaf does is that our Open Days audience is able to quickly identify which gardens are nature-friendly gardens, and we call them Nibbled Leaf gardens, named after the initiative’s icon, a very cute nibbled leaf.

And so, if you are interested in Nibbled Leaf gardening, you want to see it done well and want to speak to gardeners who are doing it, you can head to our website or look at our printed Open Days directory and very quickly identify which ones are Nibbled Leaf, i.e. nature-friendly, and target those for your visits this summer.

Tom Christopher
I think it’s a brilliant name too, because when I was coming up in gardening, the emphasis was on unnibbled leaves. I mean, we didn’t want anything in the garden unless we’d invited it there. And there was a lot of use of toxic chemicals to keep it that way. And if you go into a garden and you don’t see any nibbled leaves, you know that it is not nature friendly, so I thought that was a brilliant way to frame the discussion.

Horatio Joyce
Yeah, it’s a wonderful program. There’s still much more to do, but we’ve loved the positive response from our audience thus far. It’s become a real resource.

Tom Christopher
Well, Horatio, in closing, I want to thank you very much for joining me today and sharing your knowledge and insights. And thank you for the Garden Conservancy becoming a sponsor of Growing Greener. But I also want to hear from you about how listeners can become a member of the Conservancy and support its work.

Horatio Joyce
Yes. First, I want to say we are delighted to be sponsoring this program. And thank you for all of the work that you do on this podcast. So it’s wonderful to be partnering with you. We love it. If you are interested in learning more about the Garden Conservancy, we have our website, which is www.gardenconservancy.org. We are also active on social media, on Instagram. If you end up on our website, sign up to join our mailing list. If you are interested in joining the Open Days program as an Open Days host, navigate to the Open Days page on our website. If you are interested in attending an Open Day yourself or another program, I’ll leave it to you. Our website is easily navigable. To find our programs, take a look and hopefully sign up. We would love to see you either online or in the garden.

Tom Christopher
Oh, I’m supposed to include a garden tip now. Edwina wants a garden tip from everybody I speak to. So if you can think of a garden tip off the top of your head.

Horatio Joyce
A gardening tip.

Tom Christopher
Well, even if it’s a tip about educating yourself, what would be a great way for a novice to start their garden education? Yeah. I shouldn’t have sprung this on you like this. I’m sorry.

Horatio Joyce
No, it’s good. It’s nice when things are sprung and you have a very good answer. It’s so impressive. I mean, I really, you know, again, this is a point that I’ve made more than once in our conversation, but, you know, going out and talking with your neighbors and your family, it’s a really effective way to learn. So that, yeah, I mean, it’s good to read. It’s good to be on Instagram. And hopefully you’re not getting AI information, but there’s nothing like reaching out to your community, to your loved ones for information. And then it also has the great added benefit of reinforcing the community and your friendships and relationships.

Tom Christopher
Well, thank you very much.

Horatio Joyce
Thank you.

Tom Christopher
That brings us to the end of this week’s Growing Greener. Please join us again at the same time next week on this radio station, WESU 88.1 FM for another episode.

Or listen to Growing Greener as a podcast at www.ThomasChristopherGardens.com. If you have comments or suggestions, please share them with me, Tom Christopher, via the same website, www.ThomasChristopherGardens.com. Growing Greener is produced as a community service in partnership with the Perfect Earth Project, a nonprofit dedicated to educating, engaging, and inspiring individuals, land care professionals, and decision makers to adopt toxic-free, nature-based, and climate-responsible landscaping practices. Growing Greener is a proud sponsor of WESU 88.1 FM.

 Transcribed by TurboScribe.

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