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

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

50. Dr. Allan Armitage on Common Sense Gardening

Dr. Allan M. Armitage is an Emeritus Professor of Horticulture at the University of Georgia, where he served as a faculty member until his retirement in 2014. Internationally recognized as a writer, speaker, educator, and researcher, he is one of the most influential voices in modern horticulture.

Allan has authored more than 70 academic research papers, over 500 industry articles, and 17 books that serve as foundational texts, professional references, and trusted companions for gardeners worldwide. His landmark reference Herbaceous Perennial Plants was named one of the best horticulture books of the past 75 years by the American Horticultural Society and is now in its fourth edition.

His research focused on new crop introduction and evaluation and environmental physiology.  He founded and led the highly respected University of Georgia Trial Gardens, a premier testing ground for heat- and humidity-tolerant plants where he released more than 20 plants to the gardening industry, including the iconic Verbena ‘Homestead Purple’ and ‘Margarita’ ornamental sweet potato.

Allan has received nearly every major honor in American horticulture, including the Liberty Hyde Bailey Award (American Horticultural Society) – highest lifetime honor and the Scott Medal and Award, another of the most prestigious honors in ornamental horticulture. 

Allan remains an in-demand lecturer throughout North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South America, and continues to write, teach, and advocate for practical, joyful gardening.

You can learn more about him at his website allanarmitage.net.

SHOW NOTES

• Growing up in Montreal with no gardening background and a lawn-focused childhood and a memorable plant encounter involving a barberry hedge

• Teaching high school and discovering enjoyment in a small greenhouse environment

• Working as a grave digger and realizing how plants and beauty can comfort grieving families

• Transitioning from high school teaching into horticulture through graduate school

• Graduate research at University of Guelph focused on greenhouse production of cut roses

• Enjoying the return to school, research, and teaching as a graduate student

• Declining a prestigious Canadian government job after realizing it didn’t fit personal values

• Moving to the United States and beginning doctoral work at Michigan State University

• Accepting a position at the University of Georgia and settling in Athens

• Balancing teaching and research as a young faculty member

• Witnessing major shifts in greenhouse production

• Noting the rise of native plants driven by grassroots demand rather than top-down mandates

• Breeding native plants into cultivars that expand color, size, and garden performance

• Recognizing perennial gardening as historically centered in cooler climates

• Writing early perennial books to address regional gaps in plant availability

• Highlighting pollinators as a growing focus across horticulture

• Discussing Phlox, Echinacea, and Baptisia’s transformation from obscure native to mainstream perennial

• Frustration with deer pressure as one of the most common modern gardening challenges

• Advocating for simplifying gardening rather than overcomplicating it

• Warning against fear-based gardening where people are afraid to make mistakes

• Accepting plant failure as part of the process rather than a sign of incompetence

• Encouraging gardeners to focus on pleasure over perfection

• Discussing seasonal ugliness and accepting August as a difficult garden month

• Acknowledging that many people enjoy gardens without wanting to work in them

• Writing The Common Sense Gardener to answer repeated basic questions clearly

• Reframing plant labels from “sun-loving” to “sun-tolerant” and emphasizing tolerance rather than affection in plant behavior

• Observing widespread confusion caused by too many choices and conflicting advice and warning against taking gardening dogma too seriously

• Some thoughts on common sense watering

• Stressing lifelong learning regardless of experience level

• Valuing conversation and peer learning as teaching tools

• Believing success breeds confidence and credibility when sharing knowledge

• Describing writing early mornings to separate academic work from personal projects

• Developing a personal writing voice through repetition and habit

• Acknowledging changes in publishing and the rise of self-publishing

• Expressing skepticism about AI replacing human storytelling in horticulture

• Tracking plant knowledge through travel and visiting gardens worldwide

• Using humor and reader stories to humanize technical plant books

• Writing to make readers smile as much as learn

• Believing stories help people remember plants better than facts alone

• Sharing favorites monthly, including books, gardens, plants, and travel

• Anticipating future shifts toward sustainability and reduced chemical use

• Hoping for reduced reliance on plastic pots in the future

• Encouraging enjoyment, experimentation, and acceptance of impermanence

• Valuing horticultural history and preserving stories behind plant names

• Teaching plant identification through narrative rather than memorization

• Believing gardeners cannot be forced but can be supported when ready

• Recognizing gardening as a leisure activity competing with many distractions

• Emphasizing timing and readiness in cultivating new gardeners

• Learn more about Allan Armitage by visiting his website …

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KEEP GROWING

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.