54. Heather Holm on Pollinators and Native Plants

HEATHER HOLM BIO

Heather Holm is a pollinator conservationist and award-winning author of four books: Pollinators of Native Plants, Bees, Wasps, and Common Native Bees of the Eastern United States . Both Bees and Wasps have won multiple book awards including the American Horticultural Society Book Award. She is the founder and chair of Minnesota Native Bees, an online field guide illustrating the native bees of Minnesota and beyond. Heather’s expertise includes the interactions between native pollinators and native plants, and the natural history and biology of native bees and predatory wasps. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and many local publications. Heather is also an accomplished photographer and her pollinator photos are frequently featured in print and electronic publications.

In her spare time, she is an active community supporter, writing grants, and coordinating and participating in volunteer ecological landscape restoration projects of fire-dependent ecosystems. The latest project is a 13-acre oak savanna restoration that will provide thriving habitat for pollinators, birds, mammals, and passive, nature-based opportunities for people. ​ 

You can learn more about Heather at her website pollinatorsnativeplants.com, and check out her Minnesota bee field guide nonprofit at beesmn.org

SHOW NOTES

• Fifth grade coleus cuttings rooting in a glass jar as an early plant memory

• Learning tree identification from her father

• Horticulture degree followed by biological sciences, with early entomology too focused on pest control to be inspiring

• Moving to Minnesota and discovering the insect diversity of native landscapes

• Joining a university pollination study group to get up to speed on bees

• Web development, graphic design, and darkroom photography as transferable skills that now bring insects to life visually

• Noticing highly specific patterns of insect visitation to certain plants year after year as her turning point

• A beetle on mountain mint that hitchhikes its larvae onto bees and wasps back to the nest

• Scientific American article on bees

• Berry crop research showing farms near diverse habitat can achieve 100% pollination from native bees alone

• Farms surrounded by conventional corn and soy struggling with inadequate native bee pollination

• Deep involvement in ecological restoration, fire ecology, rare bee documentation, and a new Minnesota bee field guide nonprofit

• Hemiparasitic plants like Pedicularis canadensis (wood betony), Comandra umbellata (bastard toad flax), and Aureolaria sp. (false foxgloves) as missing pieces in garden design and restoration

• Prescribed fire increasing floral diversity and being extremely beneficial for bees despite public perception

• Neighboring landscape context as a major factor that home gardens cannot fully replicate

• Flower shape, complexity, and nectar guides determining which insects can access a given flower

• Not every insect visit to a flower results in pollination

• Monarchs commonly called pollinators despite lack of published research confirming they pollinate plants

• Buzz pollination (sonication) and its importance for plants like blueberries

• The southeastern blueberry bee as an eclectic pollen specialist also collecting redbud and lupine pollen

• Southeastern Blueberry Bee: Georgia Native Blueberry Pollinator

• Pollen specialists making up 30–40% of bee species depending on location

• About 90% of native bees are solitary with a roughly 12-month egg-to-adult life cycle

• Offspring spending up to 10 months in a prepupal stage underground before emerging

• Sandy, well-drained soil can support higher bee diversity

• Bees that prefer bare soil often nesting gregariously in clusters

• Bee diversity highest in arid regions like the Southwest and Texas

• Leafcutter bee cuts on rose leaves as visible evidence of nearby nesting activity

• A small mason bee chewing wild strawberry leaves into a leaf pesto to line her nest

• Logs, stem stubble, and leaf litter as overlooked nesting habitat

• Soft landings as diverse native plantings under keystone trees to give dispersing caterpillars a safe place to pupate

• University of Maryland study finding raked yards had fewer arthropods and fewer butterflies and moths

• Using small plugs and adding organic matter slowly when establishing soft landings under trees

• Social wasps representing less than 5% of all wasp species, with the vast majority solitary and non-aggressive

• Residential mosquito spraying, including products marketed as organic, being highly toxic to all pollinators

• High insect visitation to non-native plants not telling the full story; most may be nectar-feeding rather than collecting pollen for nests

• Influence of Plant Taxa on Pollinator, Butterfly, and Beneficial Insect Visitation

• Nectar as carbohydrate fuel; pollen as the fat- and protein-rich food female bees provision nests with

• Leaving 8 to 20 inches of stem stubble on pithy-stemmed perennials as nesting habitat for small carpenter and mason bees

• Offspring from stem nesters not emerging until a full year after the nest is provisioned

• Female eggs laid at the back of the stem, male eggs near the front, with females receiving more food and emerging later

• Focusing stem stubble efforts on Aster family plants — black-eyed Susan, goldenrod, and coneflowers

• Native willows, dogwoods, ericaceous shrubs, leadplant, and red maple as top woody plants for supporting specialist bees

• Looking up into flowering trees in spring, not just down, to find bee activity

• Oil bees combing oil from native loosestrife (Lysimachia) trichomes to waterproof their ground nests

• The cellophane bee Colletes ciliatus specializing on Cuscuta glomerata (rope dodder), a parasitic annual vine that shifts location each year

• Planting natives from neighboring regions in gardens to extend bloom periods and support pollen specialists

• Being a lifelong learner and staying open to tangential subjects as her core professional practice

• The dandelion-as-first-bee-food myth as something that irks her — diversity is always the answer

• The Eternal Frontier by Tim Flannery as a recommended read on North American ecology across deep time

• Slowing down to document pollinators using iNaturalist or the Seek app as her single ask for listeners

• You can learn more about Heather and her books at pollinatorsnativeplants.com, and check out her Minnesota bee field guide nonprofit at beesmn.org.

KEEP GROWING

53. Shelby Radcliffe on Designing with Florida Natives

SHELBY RADCLIFFE BIO

Shelby Radcliffe is a horticulturist and landscape designer whose work at Emergent Gardens blends art, ecology, and human experience. Raised in Central Florida, her early connection to natural ecosystems and photography shaped the way she observes and imagines space. After years in creative practice and small-business leadership, Shelby trained professionally in public gardens, including Wave Hill Public Garden & Cultural Center in Bronx, NY and the U.S. National Arboretum in Washington, D.C.

She completed the University of Florida’s Environmental Horticulture Certificate Program, has volunteered with several organizations, and developed a native plant micro-nursery that became the foundation for her evolving, provocative home garden. At Emergent Gardens, her designs seek to balance beauty, function, and resilience for the benefit of living beings—now and into the future.

You can learn more about Shelby on Instagram at @millennialmatter and Emergent Gardens at @emergentgardens or emergentgardens.com

SHOW NOTES

• Growing up in Central Florida, being locked outside by her father to explore the woods, creeks, and lakes near her neighborhood

• Discovering natural dyes after noticing spiderwort in her front yard, which led her down a plant identification rabbit hole

• A formative moment at Brooklyn Botanic Garden in fall 2021 that led her to pursue horticulture professionally

• Accepting an internship at Wave Hill in 2022

• The lesson that observing and waiting are types of action, and that the first year in a new garden should be spent mostly observing

• Learning to respect a gardener's deep knowledge of their own space, especially when they have years of context you don't

• Choosing the US National Arboretum's Friendship Garden because of her admiration for Oehme van Sweden and Phyto Studio

• Reading Planting in a Post-Wild World by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West as a formative influence

• Balancing creative freedom with restraint

• Thinning and redefining swaths of Penstemon digitalis (foxglove beardtongue) in a garden, later affirmed by designer Claudia West

• How to edit plantings to enhance their appearance

• Founding Emergent Gardens with partners Evan Galbicka and Jacob Villi after clients sought her out for design and install work

• Adaptability as the most important quality when starting a native plant design business, including willingness to compromise

• Budgets being harder than they look, with cascading decisions around plant sourcing, sizing, and cost

• How every new plant you grow teaches you something, and that your capacity to learn is larger than you think

• Starting designs by researching the historic ecosystem of a site as a foundation for plant selection

• A recent project blending a Florida prairie and flatwoods-inspired matrix in the front yard with a cottage-style border near the porch

• Growing hyper-local plants collected from nearby fields and roadsides and placing them in a garden context to surprise people

• Sporobolus junceus (pinewoods dropseed) as an underused grass that generates excitement when planted en masse

• Her passion for sedges and the challenge of getting people excited beyond the familiar Muhlenbergia capillaris (pink muhly grass)

• Growing Dichanthelium scoparium (velvetleaf witchgrass) from seed, spending two years identifying it, and watching it become a garden conversation piece

• Verbena haleii (Texas vervain) and Oenothera simulans (southern evening primrose) as locally collected roadside wildflowers that stop neighbors in their tracks

• Inspiration from Dune Gardens

• Using Pityopsis graminifolia var. aequilifolia (scrub goldenaster) for the yellow flowers and to provide color in garden beds

• Helianthus radula (rayless sunflower) as a bizarre, attention-grabbing native that acts as a preview for the fall and winter garden, with basal foliage growing dramatically larger than expected in more nutrient-rich, moisture-retentive soil

• Amsonia ciliata (fringed bluestar) propagated from abandoned field cuttings into 100 plants, now generating strong reactions in its third full year

• Carex cherokeensis (Cherokee sedge) as her current favorite sedge, sourcing from regionally appropriate nurseries like Charleston Aquatic & Environmental

• Carex leavenworthii (Leavenworth's sedge) thriving in sand and full sun, and Carex texensis (Texas sedge) coming up for future projects inspired by John Greenlee's meadow designs

• Carex tenax (wireleaf sedge), a xeric Florida native sedge she is trialing for upcoming projects after promising iNaturalist observations

• Carex gulsonii (Gulf Coast sedge), a Gulf Coast sedge with a weeping habit and beautiful seed heads propagated from ditch-collected seed

• Bridging the tension between beauty and ecological function through education, positive examples, and learning what already excites the client

• Substituting Hydrangea quercifolia (oakleaf hydrangea) and viburnums for clients who miss the hydrangeas they grew up north

• Using herbicide before planting and UV-resistant plastic solarization to reduce initial weed pressure

• The Roy Diblik push-pull Dutch hoe as her preferred long-term weed management strategy in mulch-free plantings

• Dense ground-covering plantings as green mulch to cool soil, reduce erosion, and absorb heavy rainfall

• Planting more trees and shrubs to create windbreaks, canopy, and long-term resilience in exposed Florida landscapes

• Shrouded in Light as a recommended book for naturalistic planting with shrublands

• Florida's diversity of at least 80 ecosystems and its top-five national ranking for plant endemism as a great joy of gardening there

• Garberia heterophylla (garberia) and Chrysoma pauciflosculosa (woody goldenrod) as late-season Florida natives that extend garden interest well into winter

• Lying on the ground to observe plants from below, such as discovering the bark detail of Hypericum hypericoides from a new angle

• Rethinking plant placement to make overlooked features visible, such as pairing a plant with built-in seating or a sloped sightline

• Researching each new plant thoroughly using Flora of the Southeastern US, Florida Plant Atlas, Florida Natural Areas Inventory, Jan Midgley's propagation books, and iNaturalist

• Using iNaturalist as a design research tool to see how a plant looks across different regions and conditions

• Her design process combining hand sketches, collages, Adobe Illustrator, and extensive site walking

• Aesthetics After Finitude as a formative theory book that shifted her thinking toward non-human-centered perspectives on landscape

• Florida Wildflowers and Their Natural Communities by Walter Kingsley Taylor as her gateway into native plants

• The Florida Meadow Manual by Gage LaPier and Isabella Gattuso Brown as a groundbreaking, research-backed resource for Florida meadow design

• Busting the myth that weeds have no value, noting many native plants carry "weed" in their name and deserve a closer look

• Propagating more gardeners by sharing passion authentically, focusing on the positive, making horticulture feel accessible, and leading with joy over doom

• Also, advocating for more funding for horticulture education and public garden staffing, echoing John Little's Care Not Capital work

• You can learn more about Shelby on Instagram at @millennialmatter and Emergent Gardens at @emergentgardens or emergentgardens.com

KEEP GROWING

52. Tim Boland on Lessons from Polly Hill Arboretum

TIM BOLAND BIO

Tim Boland is the Executive Director of the Polly Hill Arboretum, located on the island of Martha's Vineyard in West Tisbury, Massachusetts. He holds an undergraduate degree in Horticulture and a master's in Botany, Plant Ecology, and Systematics from Michigan State University.

Tim specializes in oaks from all over the world. He is involved in various plant conservation projects to preserve threatened oaks in North America, Europe, and Asia. He is a member of the Board of the International Oak Society (IOS) and chair of the Oak Conservation and Research Committee. He helped develop a special fund that has thus far supported 28 research projects worldwide where oak species are vulnerable to extinction.

In addition, Tim and his conservation partners published a modern flora of Martha’s Vineyard in 2022. He also has expertise in propagating rare North American trees and shrubs. He has been involved in seven seed expeditions, mapping and collecting two species of native North American Stewartia, while also pursuing native azaleas. He is very involved in plant propagation of Martha’s Vineyard endemic plants. Throughout Tim’s career, he has bridged the gap between botany and horticulture and loves teaching aspiring students about the beauty, mystery, and utility of plants. Tim plans to retire this year after twenty-four years leading the development of new infrastructure and programs at the Polly Hill Arboretum. When asked what is next? He jokingly asserts, “I think I’ll get involved with plants!”

To learn more about Tim and the Polly Hill Arboretum, pollyhillarboretum.org.

SHOW NOTES

• Tim's early gardening experiences with his mother and grandfather, who planted redbuds on Mother's Day

• Growing up near a labeled campus arboretum that further introduced him to more plants

• Studying landscape ornamental horticulture at Michigan State

• His transition from zone 4A to zone 7 at The Scott Arboretum where broadleaf evergreen hollies were a revelation

• The circuitous path to Polly Hill Arboretum

• Polly Hill starting her arboretum at age 50 at her parents' Martha's Vineyard property while living in Wilmington, Delaware

• Polly’s philosophy on growing from seed instead of buying plants, saying "I'll miss the teenage years — they're the most interesting"

• Polly releasing roughly 60 cultivated varieties into the horticultural trade over her career

• How conservationist David Hamilton Smith came to preserve the land after encountering a Magnolia macrophylla Polly had grown from 1961 collected seed

• The origins of plant record keeping through the American Horticulture Society's plant science data center, dating to a 1974 meeting involving leaders from botanic gardens

• Polly sending her plant records to a scientist at Woods Hole to be entered into an early database system

• Tim's practice of keeping all invoices and purchase records as his own form of tracking plant provenance and trials

• Polly Hill's dead file containing roughly three times as many cards as her successes, with perhaps 20% or fewer of introductions succeeding

• Fred Galley's advice at the Scott Medal: focus on the successes that are so grand, not the failures

• Tim's curatorial internship program, with 13 to 15 former interns now working as curators or plant recorders at various institutions

• Polly's approach to sowing seeds directly in the ground without a greenhouse, particularly effective for plants with long germination delays like stewartias

• Teaching seed-sowing courses to local farmers interested in adding native plants alongside food crops

• Another of Polly's guiding principle: "Just imagine what you can do if you just get started"

• Tim's experimental approach to propagation, trying four or five different treatments simultaneously on difficult seeds

• The value of plant society informal conversations and learning propagation tips from fellow members over lunch or at the buffet

• Consulting Dirr and Heuser’s The Reference Manual of Woody Plant Propagation and IPPS as go-to references before trying novel propagation approaches

• The word "amateur" meaning "lover of," and how that spirit defined Polly's relationship with horticulture

• Tim's propagation conversations with Polly in her golf cart, working through whether a plant could be grown from seed or needed to be cloned

• Collecting 400 permitted seeds of the federally endangered Triosteum perfoliatum (late horse gentian) and eventually succeeding through cuttings after seed germination attempts over five years failed

• Recognizing family resemblances as a propagation clue linking Triosteum to Symphoricarpos, which roots easily

• Core principles for ethical wild plant collecting: always ask permission, check the plant's conservation status, and take ecological notes on associates and site conditions

• Learning the importance of ecological note-taking from veteran plantsman Rick Lewandowski

• The value of partnering with people who have deep local and indigenous knowledge of the land

• Examples of non-classically-trained plant people with immense knowledge

• The indigenous Wampanoag tribe's involvement in and support of collecting efforts at the lighthouse land on Martha's Vineyard

• Hardiness as the most critical factor in provenance, with the plant's genome acting like a deck of cards played out over tough years

• Polly deliberately sourcing Stewartia from northern populations like Williamsburg, Virginia, and the Delmarva Peninsula for cold hardiness

• The MV Wild Type Program growing only plants native to Martha's Vineyard to preserve local provenance

• Underutilized natives on Martha's Vineyard including Ostrya virginiana (hop hornbeam), Cornus alternifolia (alternate-leaf dogwood), and Lindera benzoin (spicebush)

• Cornus alternifolia in Texas

• Challenges with propagation of our native Stewartia (silky camellia)

• The Asiatic stewartias being relatively easy to grow from seed compared to the two native species, particularly Stewartia serrata named by Steve Spongberg as a new species after examining herbarium specimens at Kew

• Polly collecting seed at the Arnold Arboretum's Bussey Hill with her Stop & Shop bag

• Tim's interest in oaks beginning with a search for Quercus muehlenbergii populations in the herbarium at Michigan State

• Herbarium curator Jose Panero's frustration with oak taxonomy due to hybridization, which eventually led Tim to study evergreen oaks in Oaxaca, Mexico

• Witnessing oaks being cut for charcoal and acorns used for food in Oaxaca, deepening Tim's understanding of oaks' cultural and conservation significance

• Joining the International Oak Society during graduate school and being inspired by California oaks at an early meeting

• Inviting Doug Tallamy to speak at Polly Hill in 2005 when Bringing Nature Home was released

• The Oak Conservation and Research Grant, now supporting roughly 28 projects and $200,000 in field work in Mexico, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Malaysia

• There’s an Oak for Everyone, Tim and Matt Lobdell's article for the American Horticulture Society featuring cultivated oak varieties suited to a range of garden sizes

• Quercus prinoides (dwarf chinkapin oak) as the most underrated native oak, maxing out around six feet with excellent fall color and highly sought acorns for wildlife

• The book The Tree Book by Michael Dirr and Keith Warren as a resource for new mid-size oak cultivars, with Tim encouraging people to request these from municipalities to drive nursery supply

• Post oaks on Tim's property estimated at 300 to 500 years old, resprouted from historic harvesting

• Coppicing as a strategy for managing oaks and other trees and shrubs, including as a way to rejuvenate plants and keep them in scale

• Asimina triloba (paw paw) as a deeply loved underutilized native, with Tim collecting seed across their full range for a USDA grant, traveling with bushel baskets of seed in a small hatchback

• Attending the very first paw paw conference around 1994 and taste-testing so many varieties

• Kentucky coffee tree as another underrated native, with the male form ‘Espresso’ offering incredible fragrance and lacy, acacia-like compound foliage that filters light beautifully

• Pityopsis graminifolia (narrow-leaf silk grass) a silvery-leaved, late-blooming native

• Liatris (blazing stars) as an obsession, with a recent order from Prairie Moon Nursery to trial new species

• Tim's practice of thinking six months out as both a gift and a curse of the gardening mindset

• Slowing down in recent years to actually sit on garden benches and take in beauty

• Using a mental image of something beautiful in the garden, like a witch hazel cultivar in bloom, to calm his mind before sleep

• His garden myth to bust: sterile, clean conditions are ideal as contaminated or recycled growing media leads to damping off and losses of hard-won seed

• Using waxed butcher paper on a bench wiped with isopropyl alcohol as part of a fastidious seed-sowing routine

• Polly's philosophy distilled into a retirement motto: "It's never too late to germinate"

• Encouragement for the next generation to seek out conservation horticulture and how growing rare plants that make a difference for the planet, not just for personal joy

• To learn more about Tim and the Polly Hill Arboretum, pollyhillarboretum.org.

KEEP GROWING

51. Shaun McCoshum on Natural Habitats and Wildlife Gardening

SHAUN MCCOSHUM BIO

Shaun McCoshum is a certified, Senior Ecologist and Wildlife Biologist with over 20 years of experience restoring habitats, conducting research, and gardening. His work includes published scientific papers, books, and copious restoration plans from coast to coast including lands with bison, endangered plants, threatened pollinators, black bears, and mountain lions. His new book explores the pre-European ecology of North America and how habitats existed and explains how we can better mimic processes in our own yards to support habitat. 

Shaun has kindly offered podcast listeners a discount of 30% of his new book! Use the code NHWG30 at the Princeton University Press website.

SHOW NOTES

• Growing up gardening with his grandmother and learning to view pests as puzzles to solve

• His PhD research on whether canola crops could benefit or harm native bee populations in Oklahoma

• Canola requiring significantly more pesticides and insecticides than other crops due to aphid pressure

• Working as a preserve manager for Westchester Land Trust outside New York City, overseeing independently owned preserves

• Cutting down native red maple to restore shrub habitat, one of the only remaining habitats for shrub-dependent bird species

• His current work as a senior ecologist at Westwood Professional Services, conducting habitat assessments for developers

• Evaluating sites under the Endangered Species Act to determine where development should or should not occur

• Developing vegetation management plans for solar facilities to establish biodiverse habitat underneath solar panels

• Protecting wetland buffers during pipeline work and using horizontal directional drilling to pass pipelines underneath wetlands

• His postdoctoral research examining pollinator declines at solar facilities in the Mojave and Sonoran deserts

• Transforming his front yard in Odessa, Texas from a Bradford pear and lawn to a native scape, increasing bee species from 5 to over 50

• His book, Natural Habitats and Wildlife Gardening, born out of widespread misconceptions he encountered in presentations

• The common misconception of "just let nature take its course" and why unmanaged gardens do not restore themselves

• Bee hotels mimicking dead logs, and why they stop working after a year or two without maintenance

• How plants in natural systems are meant to be grazed, trampled, and eaten, triggering anti-herbivory compounds that make them healthier

• The missing role of bears in spreading ocean-derived nutrients as fertilizer across the interior landscape through consuming anadromous fish

• Adding light manure to garden beds every three to five years to replicate the slow-release fertilizer large animals once provided

• The missing role of bison and other large herbivores in breaking down old vegetation and creating layered ground cover for seedling germination

• Trimming back plants selectively to stimulate more blooms, seed heads, and anti-herbivory responses

• The first principle of habitat gardening: evaluate the space from the perspective of the organisms you want to support across their full annual cycle

• Creating pockets of sandy or clay soils for ground-nesting bees

• Burying organic matter to replicate the decaying wood environments that beetles and moths need to pupate

• Creating underground hollow shelters to replicate abandoned burrows for toads and other wildlife

• Broadening pollinator gardens to intentionally support both bees and moths for a larger habitat umbrella

• Why gardeners tend to think in objects rather than systems, and how American cultural independence may contribute to that

• Native plants working with underground microbial communities, precipitation patterns, and temperature cycles rather than growing in isolation

• Any landscape design style can be achieved with native plants, including formal topiaries using plants like Texas sage shaped by heavy browsing

• Native junipers and blueberries tolerating heavy pruning, with a list in the book of natives that respond well to formal shaping

• Decay being the most suppressed natural process in suburban and urban landscapes

• The Eastern Bluebird recovery as a model for reversing decline by replicating a single missing habitat element

• Removing leaves and then buying mulch as one of the most counterproductive common gardening practices

• Allowing leaf litter to break down in place to provide overwintering habitat, nesting material, and food for soil microbes

• The best activity for a small balcony with three or four pots: planting sunflowers for pollinators, caterpillars, and seed-feeding birds

• Shorter alternatives including aster, fire wheels, Gaillardia, and Tithonia daisies, and avoiding heavily hybridized plants like chrysanthemums

• For slightly larger spaces, burying untreated wood chips to create underground pupation habitat for beetles and moths

• How to build the underground habitat pocket: no lining, pack in wood chips, add light soil on top, avoid low spots that collect water, treat as a one-time installation

• Ethan Tapper's work on mimicking old growth forests by adding specific resources like downed wood

• How coyotes improve bird habitat by driving out nest-predating meso-predators like foxes and raccoons

• The trophic cascade in Yellowstone where wolf reintroduction stabilized stream banks and brought back fish populations

• Oaks as host plants for over 200 species of moths alone, with the option to cut one back to shrub size in small spaces

• Bears as promoters of fleshy fruit-producing plant communities, with seeds from bear scat germinating at dramatically higher rates

• Ramial wood chips from young branches used in holistic orchard management, independently mirroring the natural process of large animals trampling material under trees

• Using dead wood as garden bed borders, pedestals for container plants, and structures for vining plants

• Root masses left standing after tree removal as architectural focal points, with examples from Tulsa after windstorm damage

• Building underground hollow shelters into raised beds using upside-down kennel tops covered with stones or logs

• The Gopher tortoise burrow as an ecosystem engineering example, with over 200 species documented using a single burrow

• Prairie dog towns hosting over 400 coexisting species, illustrating how underground structures support biodiversity

• Dr. Doug Tallamy's research showing gardens with 70% native plants have no statistical difference in biodiversity from 100% native

• Using the 30% non-native allowance to place recognizable garden plants at the front where neighbors can see intentional design

• Propagating Greg's mistflower for five neighboring houses in Corpus Christi simply because neighbors found it pretty

• Observing insects and wildlife closely without assigning intent as a calming daily practice, including noticing monarchs probing bell pepper plants for aphid honeydew

• Foraging edible plants from the landscape as a personal practice

• Flora: The Gardener's Bible, chief consultant Sean Hogan, as a reference for baseline plant information that shaped a generation of gardeners

• Busting the myth that native plants and habitat gardens are inherently messy

• Meeting people where they are when introducing native plants, leading with beauty, edibility, or fragrance rather than ecological function

49. Rachel Lindsay on Regenerative Design

RACHEL LINDSAY BIO

As Head of Site Design at Regenerative Design Group, Rachel works principally with organizations and homeowners to create productive, resilient landscapes. She draws from her experiences in organic farming, Latin-American sustainable development, and art to approach design with cultural sensitivity and environmental integrity. Rachel approaches projects of all scales through a soil, carbon, and water conservation lens, looking for opportunities to reduce the environmental impact of design installation while meeting the client’s goals and aesthetic preferences. Her projects encourage people to engage deeply with their local ecosystems and apply holistic and low-stress approaches toward gardening and landscaping. A worker-owner at RDG, Rachel was a member of the steering committee that led the ownership transition process and has been the Treasurer of the Board of Directors since its establishment in 2022.

She holds an MS in Ecological Design from The Conway School and a BA in Anthropology from Wesleyan University. When she isn’t working, she may be found messing around in her garden, cooking with the latest harvest, or hiking with her husband and young daughter.

Learn more about Rachel at Regenerative Design Group.

SHOW NOTES

• How gardening with parents and grandparents shaped Rachel's passion for plants

• Taking a non-direct route to landscape design, starting with an anthropology degree

• Starting a student-led farm during college and the connection between food production, culture, society, and environmental impact

• Deciding to become a farmer after college and assistant managing a farm

• The challenges of farming including the limited impact on changing how others think and the physical toll on the body

• Discovering the Conway School for Landscape Design and realizing landscape design can marry culture, society, environmental science, and food production

• Finding Regenerative Design Group through graduate school where two founding members were professors at Conway School

• Connecting with their holistic approach to design and setting a high bar with regenerative practices

• The evolution of Regenerative Design Group from an LLC to a worker-owned cooperative after 10 years

• How a worker-owned cooperative operates with 13 members who are all co-owners with one share each and equal voting rights

• Considering scope 1, 2, or 3 emissions

• Core principles of regenerative design from pushing toward reducing scope 3 emissions, embracing curiosity, and closing cycles

• Unlearning the focus on the end product and the amazement that soil tests aren’t done until after the design is done

• Using permaculture as a principle in land management and landscape design

• Working on projects that include residential landscapes, site design, food systems planning, and large-scale agricultural and conservation projects

• The importance of starting design projects with observation and understanding existing conditions and how to learn to read the land

• Core principles of design including zones of accessibility, childhood plants, and integrated edibles

• Developing the Massachusetts Healthy Soil Action Plan

• Strategies to improve disturbed soils

• Not having a cookie cutter approach to design projects

• The company's focus on ecological design, regenerative agriculture, and climate change work and the desire for cross pollination

• Ways that projects fail

• Reflections on five years of perspective

• Rachel’s design process and the technology she uses for design

• Inspired by Rebecca McMackin

• What’s exciting Rachel right now

• Reading The Botany of Desire which brought together agriculture, food, anthropology, society, and history

• The joy of having a profession filled with constant learning and identifying plants and animals with kids

• Propagating more plant love with diversity and engaging what people love and helping people find their own sparks of connection to the natural world

• Learn more about Rachel at Regenerative Design Group.