Growing Greener – Details, episodes & analysis

'Good fences make good neighbors,' especially, according to Vermonter Susan Shea, when it comes to gardeners and woodchucks. A nature writer and photographer, Shea details the extraordinary abilities of this native mammal, the important ecological and cultural roles it plays, and how to install a woodchuck-proof fence.

Everything that grows on your property – its "biomass" – should remain there even after death, says this award-winning garden designer and founder of the Perfect Earth Project.  Fallen branches, leaves, even tree trunks as they decay reactivate a cycle essential to Nature's health, and are an opportunity for a different kind of beauty.

Leader of the Ecological Gardening movement Rebecca McMackin shares reasons why in a time of discouragement, gardening can restore optimism.

Uli Lorimer, Director of Horticulture at the Native Plant Trust, discusses the role gardeners can play in maintaining biodiversity without sacrificing their favorite, non-native plants.

Trevor Smith has won awards with his expert design that brings damaged landscapes back to a fuller function. He's applied that experience to his second passion: educating young people, home gardeners and professionals about how they too can heal the landscape.

Jacob Suissa and Ben Goulet-Scott, two young PhD botanists, have launched an educational non-profit. "Let's Botanize," that demonstrates online and for free how accessible and fun plant science can be.

Kat Tancock and Domini Clark, founders and editors of Rewilding Magazine (available for free online) explore the restoration of local habitats and ecosystems worldwide, with reports from Asia, Africa, and Australia as well as Europe, Canada, and the United States.  A rare, truly international perspective.

Drs. Michael Balick and Gregory Plunkett of the New York Botanical Garden share results of their research in the Pacific nation of Vanuatu, where local informants have shared with them a calendar based on clues from indigenous plants – a calendar that governs residents interactions with nature and which is automatically adjusting to the dislocations of climate change

Ecological landscape designer and educator Kathleen Connolly takes a deep dive into her new approach to putting the garden to bed in fall.  Leave the leaves but keep the beauty.

They sound great – something you apply to a seed or plant and which spreads throughout the organism to provide protection against any insect attack.  The reality, though, as described by Sharon Selvaggio,  Pesticide Program Specialist at the Xerces Society, reveals the way these highly toxic chemicals cause indiscriminate death and persist in the soil for years.