Susan Harris of Garden Rant | Into the Garden Podcast

If you don’t know

Susan Harris

Just read this manifesto to get a feel for the Garden Rant culture.

You need to start knowing her and the incredible blog that she helped start way back in 2006.

Susan’s garden in full fall glory. Love me an Ansonia.

GardenRant has many wonderful contributors, including my pals Marianne Willburn and Scott Beurlein. Susan is one of the originals, and she contributes with the same enthusiasm for for our favorite past time that she always has, but she mixes a healthy skepticism for trends and outdated beliefs that keeps her writing interesting and keeps her readers informed.

Here are a few things that we mentioned in our conversation.

Greenbelt Online, Susan’s website that documents the happenings of her “New Deal Utopia” town in Maryland

Greenbelt’s accompanying YouTube channel

Good Gardening Videos--a public service site that separates the wheat from the chaff of gardening videos. Curated by Susan and others who know better. Go here and know you are getting the good intel.

Jess Zander of @YouCanDoItGardening, who kept me looking at her videos for 20 minutes while I should have been finishing this post. Great gardening info, simply and charmingly presented.

Pruning Hydrangea arborescens better, an article by Sam Hoadley of the Mt. Cuba Center for Fine Gardening.

What exactly our Keystone plants? Susan and I stumbled upon this question and here is my follow up. According to the National Wildlife Federation, “Keystone plants are natives that are essential to our ecosystems because they support 90% of the caterpillar species that enable our terrestrial birds to reproduce, as well as all of our specialist native bee species.”

Here’s a link to keystone plants by eco-region, and the perennials that popped into my head were largely accurate— rudbeckia, symphiotricum, solidago. I believe I mentioned echinacea, and that is a lovely native, but apparently not Keystone.

The hula hooping thing. It’s real.