Ecological gardening, explained with patience.
Growing Greener treats the garden as a living system, not a static display. Through calm expert conversations, it connects practical choices like seed sourcing, cultivar selection, and lawn care to biodiversity, plant health, and climate-minded land stewardship.
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Growing Greener is an interview-driven gardening show about landscapes that behave like living communities. Its center of gravity is ecological practice: native plants, healthier soil, resilient vegetables, lower-input lawns, fungal networks, and plant choices that support more than human taste. The tone is calm and explanatory. Episodes often begin with a concrete garden problem, then widen into plant biology, design history, or land stewardship. A conversation with Heather McCargo, for example, turns wild seed into a lesson about genetic diversity and the value of plants that can adapt in place. A discussion with Dr. Susan Calise makes invasive plants feel less mysterious by tracing how allelopathy can affect neighboring plants and soil organisms. Nicole Gauthier’s appearance brings disease-resistant vegetable cultivars down to a home-garden scale. Dan Jaffe Wilder’s work points toward lawns that can be more useful, more biodiverse, and less demanding. Other episodes stretch the field outward. Gabriela Delia introduces fungi as a vast and still poorly known kingdom with essential relationships to plants. James Lord connects Roberto Burley-Marx’s Brazilian landscapes to present-day ecological design. Dr. James Hitchmore complicates easy assumptions about native and non-native plants, especially when different insects and other organisms are considered separately. Byron Kamenek brings in agrivoltaics, showing how land can produce food, energy, habitat, and public learning at once. The show is not anti-beauty; it simply refuses to separate beauty from function. It respects gardens as edited places, but keeps asking what those edits cost or make possible. Tom Christopher’s role is steady and clarifying, giving guests room while checking terms, numbers, and implications. The appeal is cumulative. Growing Greener helps listeners build judgment, not just follow instructions.
Made for: For gardeners, land care professionals, and plant-curious homeowners who want practical advice grounded in ecology. It especially suits listeners rethinking lawns, pesticides, native plants, soil life, and habitat value.
What sets it apart: Growing Greener stands out by pairing hands-on garden advice with careful scientific context. It does not reduce ecological gardening to slogans; it lets experts work through the tradeoffs and the mechanisms behind each choice.
Your weekly half-hour program about environmentally informed gardening. Each week we bring you a different expert, a leading voice on gardening in partnership with Nature. Our goal is to make your landscape healthier, more beautiful, more sustainable, and more fun.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Expert interviews connect garden ecology and plant science to specific, workable decisions about cultivation, wildlife, and chemical use.
Growing Greener treats the garden as a working ecosystem, with Tom Christopher guiding expert interviews toward both scientific reasoning and useful choices at home.
A pawpaw in your freezer, a bee plotting flower stops: your garden curiosity gets wonderfully specific.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A practical case for letting native plants evolve, with just enough thoughtful editing from the gardener.
Heather McCargo's Wild Seed Project gives Growing Greener a grounded way to see the home garden as something alive, not a finished picture. As founder of the project, McCargo connects the pleasure of her own garden with a broader argument for landscapes that shift, reseed, and…
A clear look at how soil-released chemicals may help many invasive plants outcompete native plants.
Tom Christopher's conversation with University of Tennessee researcher Susan Calise gives soil ecology a surprisingly tangible edge. Calise explains how invasive plants can release chemicals into the soil that harm native plants and the soil-borne organisms supporting them.
A practical look at choosing disease-resistant vegetable cultivars while reducing reliance on pesticides.
Growing Greener treats disease-resistant vegetable cultivars as a grounded choice for home gardeners who still want tomatoes and other disease-prone vegetables without leaning heavily on pesticides.
A warm account of how Burley-Marx turned close ecological observation into bold Brazilian landscapes.
A visit to a Berlin botanical garden changed how Roberto Burley-Marx saw Brazil's native plants. Removed from their familiar surroundings and given pride of place, they invited a closer look.
A measured challenge to native-plant certainty, shaped around the different needs of insects.
Growing Greener takes a measured look at a familiar claim in ecological gardening: that native plants are automatically better for insect life than non-native choices. Dr.
A thoughtful conversation about the intelligence that guides bees through gardens and the wider landscape.
Growing Greener's replay of Tom Christopher's conversation with Dr. Lars Chitka treats the bee as more than a familiar garden visitor. Bees learn, process experience, steer by a sun compass, seem to have a magnetic one as well, and shift their foraging as the colony's needs…
A practical look at pawpaws, from grafted trees and careful storage to frozen pulp for the kitchen.
The pawpaw comes through as a native fruit with a practical argument behind it: unusual enough to feel like a discovery, but grounded in home-garden and small-farm use.
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Food52 hosts break down recipes and food-business origin stories, from sourdough to Salty Pimp cones.
Dan Pashman revisits food science with Kenji López-Alt and rotating live comedy guests.
Host Tom Christopher interviews Sherry Crabtree from Kentucky State University about pawpaws, a native North American fruit.
Host Tom Christopher interviews Dr.
Tom Christopher interviews Heather McCargo about the Wild Seed Project's mission to preserve native plant genetic diversity and promote ecological gardening.
Tom Christopher interviews Dr.
Tom Christopher interviews plant pathologist Nicole Gauthier about using disease-resistant vegetable cultivars to reduce or eliminate pesticide use in home gardens.
Tom Christopher interviews Dan Jaffe Wilder about transforming lawns into low-maintenance, biodiverse landscapes using native plants.
A mycologist explains the essential role of fungi in supporting plant health and the need to survey unknown fungal species.
Tom Christopher and James Lord focus on Roberto Burle Marx, the Brazilian landscape architect, painter, and opera singer whose career ran from the 1930s to 1994.
Tom Christopher and James Hitchmore debate native plants, non-native plants, and insect wildlife through examples from the UK, Delaware, and California.
Tom Christopher interviews Byron Kamenek about the Colorado Agrivoltaic Learning Center, which combines solar energy generation with agriculture.
Elijah Goodwin discusses using goats as a precise tool for controlling invasive plants and restoring ecosystem balance at the Stone Barn Center.
Tom Christopher discusses the pawpaw, a native North American fruit, with Sherry Crabtree from Kentucky State University's pawpaw research program.
Tom Christopher interviews Jennica Allen and Matt Furtacos about a new online guide for gardeners to choose native plants that will persist in the northeastern US under climate change.
Tom Christopher interviews Louise Washer, co-founder of Pollinator Pathway, about her journey from magazine journalist to influential environmental activist and the viral spread of community-based ecological action.