Growing Greener Podcast
In 2025, Perfect Earth Project partnered with Thomas Christopher’s Growing Greener podcast. Tune in every week to listen to Tom talk with gardening experts and leaders, who are working and living in harmony with nature. They share their different perspective on how to make your personal landscape healthier, more beautiful, more sustainable—and more fun.
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Episodes
The Nurturing Nature Initiative – Botanical Gardens Unite To Address Climate Change
Emma Grover and Dr. Mauricio Diazgranados discuss a new program from the New York Botanical Garden to unite the thousands of botanical gardens worldwide in devoting their shared knowledge and resources for a coordinated, plant-based effort to combat the consequences of global climate change.
June 3, 2026
Garden designer and maker Duncan Brine outlines the fundamentals of naturalistic design and how it can combine with a garden rewarding to people and to wildlife.
May 27, 2026
Are you troubled about supporting industrial agriculture and its mistreatment of animals by purchasing by-products such as manures and blood meal to maintain your garden’s fertility? British gardener John Walker, an award-winning environmental writer, shares the techniques he has used to make his garden cruelty free, self-sustaining, and sustainable in a conversation first shared in May of 2023.
May 20, 2026
A New Chapter in the Roundup Debacle
Award-winning investigative journalist Carey Gillam exposed the corruption and suppression of evidence involved in the Environmental Protection Agency’s original approval of the use of the herbicide Roundup and its active ingredient glyphosate on American gardens and farms. In today’s conversation she details the on-going suppression of evidence of its harmful impact on human and environmental health and discusses how the case about Roundup currently before the Supreme Court is designed to deprive its victims of recourse, and why Donald Trump has made increasing its production a matter of national security.
May 13, 2026
Landraces – Customizing Vegetable and Fruit Cultivars to Flourish in Your Garden
In a conversation first shared in February of 2024, farmer and author Joseph Lofthouse describes how to foster “landraces,” strains of vegetables and fruits adapted to the unique conditions in your garden.
May 6, 2026
Are Alien Plants Superior at Supporting Insect Diversity in the Garden?
James Hitchmough, an eminent British garden designer and former professor of horticultural ecology asserted on a previous episode that research confirms that gardens rich in alien plants support a greater diversity of insects. Today, Matthew Shepherd of the Xerces Society, an organization founded to promote insect and invertebrate conservation shares a different understanding of the science.
April 29, 2026
Dr. Jason Downing of Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden turns rare orchid propagation into an educational adventure for Miami area students, beautifies the cityscape, and rescues native Floridian species from the brink of extinction.
April 22, 2026
Maine’s Wild Seed Project Offers Education and an Example of Nationwide Significance
In this week’s Growing Greener Heather McCargo, founder of the Wild Seed Project, describes its programs to encourage gardeners to grow native plants from wild-collected seeds to preserve genetic diversity in the garden and beyond, and how McCargo has embraced the evolution of her personal garden from meadow to biodiverse woodland.
April 15, 2026
Chemical Warfare from Invasive Plants
One of the ways that invasive plants displace indigenous floras is “allelopathy.” In a conversation first broadcast in February 2024, Dr. Susan Kalisz of the University of Tennessee Knoxville describes how many introduced plants actually poison the soil so that indigenous species cannot germinate or flourish in their former homes.
April 8, 2026
Using Genetics to Avoid Spraying in the Vegetable Garden
Selecting disease-resistant cultivars is an essential tool for avoiding the use of pesticides in the vegetable garden. Plant pathologist Nicole Gauthier of the University of Kentucky explains how to identify cultivars appropriate to your region and your garden, and why “tolerance” may serve you as well as “resistance.”
April 1, 2026
Make Your Lawn a Low-Maintenance Contributor to Biodiversity and Landscape Beauty
As Dan Jaffe Wilder Wilder says “you can grow a lawn which is a whole bunch of green stuff. Or you can grow a lawn that is a whole bunch of low-growing green stuff with some yellow, some blue, some white, some pink and some red mixed in. Which do you choose? “ Join the conversation with this native plant expert and learn how you can make your lawn not only colorful but also easier to maintain and supportive of the local wildlife and native flora.
March 25, 2026
A Gardener’s Introduction to Fungi and Their Essential Support for Plants
Estimates of fungi diversity range into the millions of species, yet the vast majority remain unknown. What is clear, says mycologist Gabriela D’Elia, is that your garden plants depend on the services provided to them by the indigenous fungi.
March 18, 2026
A Brazilian Genius of the last Century Created Invaluable Lessons for Today’s Ecological Gardeners
James Lord speaks of his mentor and inspiration Roberto Burle Marx, the painter, sculptor, musician, and botanist who found in Brazil’s native plants the basis for a new style of landscape architecture and a language to celebrate the distinctive beauty of his homeland.
March 11, 2026
A British Horticultural Ecologist Challenges the U.S. Consensus
Citing European studies, British horticultural ecologist James Hitchmough, a leader of the ecological gardening movement in his country, rejects the intrinsic superiority of native plants over exotic garden imports for supporting insect diversity in the garden.
March 4, 2026
Balancing your account in the soil seed bank
A square foot of topsoil typically hosts thousands of dormant seeds deposited by previous floras. Nathan Lambstrom of Lambstrom Garden Ecology discusses his research into how this “soil seed bank” can enhance or derail ecological restoration, and how to manage your “account” to benefit your garden.
February 25, 2026
A Tree’s Perspective on Pruning
Is your pruning aimed only at gratifying your aesthetics and needs? Chris Roddick also views pruning from the plants’ perspective, promoting techniques that enhance their growth patterns and ecological function as well.
February 18, 2026
O Canada – A Garden Activist Enriches and Beautifies Lawns with Local Prairie Flora
Travel with Growing Greener to Winnipeg, Manitoba to learn how Ash Burkowski is collecting seed from local prairie remnants to raise indigenous grasses and wildflowers that can be integrated into lawns, restoring populations of native flora while relieving homeowners of the need for fertilization and irrigation and reducing the need for mowing.
February 11, 2026
Creating Crops that Thrive in Your Garden
A replay of a February 2024 conversation in which Joseph Lofthouse, author of “Landrace Gardening” details how anyone can create genetically diverse vegetable and fruit crops that flourish in the local climate and soil with minimal inputs in just three years.
February 4, 2026
Byron Kominek knew the family farm needed a more profitable crop than hay to survive. By installing photovoltaic panels and growing crops underneath, he now supplies electricity to 300 neighboring houses while also producing food and hosting educational programs at what is now a popular learning center.
January 28, 2026
The Missing Piece of Your Ecological Garden
Liz Koziol of the University of Kansas shares hew work with mycorrhizal fungi and native plants, and how a properly designed fungal inoculant can make your ecological garden more biodiverse, quicker to establish itself and more resistant to weeds.
January 21, 2026
An Antique Tool Brings New Knowledge of Native Plants
Herbariums, annotated collections of dried plant specimens first appeared in Italy almost 500 years ago. In today’s Growing Greener, Lea Johnson, Director of Conservation at the Native Plant Trust discusses why they remain an essential tool for those who track and study native plant populations, and the new technologies herbariums facilitate.
January 14, 2026
How Your Garden Helped Drive the Deer Population Boom
Dr. Elic Weitzel of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History describes the thousands of years of association between deer and people, how they long ago came to prefer human-created landscapes, and why their population has exploded
January 7, 2026