Plants Always Win is a podcast where two Ontario gardeners dive down plant-fact rabbit-holes, answer audience questions, interview intriguing guests, and compete to bring you the most interesting stories and information. We care about ecologically sound gardening, strong human communities, and up-to-date science.
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In this interview episode, Sean chats with Paul Zammit about the life of a garden communicator. Paul has had a long career in horticulture and is presently a professor of Horticulture and Environmental Studies at Niagara College as well as CBC’s Ontario Today gardening expert—although “expert” is a term he would like to contest. After all, we never stop learning, and that’s especially true in the garden. Paul and Sean talk about selfish gardening (taking space from nature for ourselves) compared to building a biodiverse space that wildlife can enjoy alongside us—even if that means broadening our definition of beauty. They lament the spread of incomplete and untrue gardening tips online, although they’re still excited about the information-sharing power of social media. And although they’d happily talk forever, they force themselves to wrap up the conversation by answering some listener questions about insect-afflicted ash trees and re-blooming orchids.
Comments? Feedback? Want your garden question to be featured in a future Q&A segment? Email us, reach out over social media, or get Q&A priority by supporting us on Patreon.
15:25 Biodiversity: If You Plant it, They Will Come
16:24 Invasive Species and Constructive Conversations
21:30 Rethinking Beauty
24:03 Cultivars Aren’t Evil
26:24 Gardening for Ourselves and for Nature
35:20 Social Media and Iffy Plant Hacks
42:07 Intermission
42:50 Q&A
44: 26 Emerald Ash Borers
46:35 Re-Blooming Orchids
53:12 Paul's Shout-Outs
56:20 Outro
Ep.2 Poinsettia VS Amaryllis
Wednesday, December 18, 2024 • Duration 48:07
In this “versus” episode, Erin and Sean face off with two big holiday plants: Poinsettias and Amaryllis. Erin comes in swinging with the fraught history of settler (Poinsettia) and Indigenous (cuetlaxochitl) names for her plant, but Sean pushes back with the romantic (or is it?) mythology behind amaryllis. Both contenders shatter misconceptions (Poinsettias are not toxic! Some amaryllis are imposters!) and share care tips for keeping these festive flora in good shape during the holidays and year round. A few tangents slip in about specialist insects that thrive on toxic plants and the way plants interpret light and darkness. And of course we get a plant rant about florists and nurseries using spray paint and glitter. The episode wraps up with a listener question about how late she can plant an evergreen tree.
Who won the Plant Face-Off? Was it Erin with poinsettias or Sean with amaryllis? You decide! Send your vote by email or on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook with the hashtag #PAWFaceOff.
Comments? Feedback? Want your garden question to be featured in a future Q&A segment? Email us, reach out over social media, or get Q&A priority by supporting us on Patreon.
In this pilot episode of Plants Always Win, Erin and Sean give the Plant Face-Off a trial run…with a twist. Instead of competing for viewers’ votes with the most interesting information about a plant or gardening concept, they go head to head with competing interviews of each other. Find out what theft has to do with Erin’s early forays into gardening, why she makes content about gardening with chronic illness and disability, and how talking about plants every week complements her literary life. Then learn how Sean’s mom got him into a horticulture career, explore the pros and cons of the profession, and get excited about Sean’s dreams for a botanical garden in Muskoka, Ontario. We wrap up with some impromptu (and impassioned) tangents on invasive plants in garden centres, cities that plant only male trees, cultivars vs. nativars, and permaculture.
Find Sean online at @GardenGuyMuskoka on TikTok and Instagram.
Comments? Feedback? Want your garden question to be featured in a future Q&A segment? Email us, reach out over social media, or get Q&A priority by supporting us on Patreon.
In this Versus episode, it’s the battle of herbs and spices. Get your fill of these fascinating aromatic plants that have flavoured our food and changed our history since paleolithic times. Learn why they bother smelling so good—and what you can do to make the most of their flavour—then get ready to cast your vote in the Plant Face-Off. Sean is representing the herbs with bay laurel, a plant not to be confused with the many other bays and laurels in the world—especially not the toxic ones. Learn how it grows, how to preserve the leaves, and why there are so many misconceptions about its safety. Erin follows up with mustard seed and how to grow and prepare it…but first she shakes things up with some tasty knowledge about spices around the world.
Who won the Plant Face-Off? Was it Sean with bay leaves or Erin with mustard seed? You decide! Send your vote by email or on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook with the hashtag #PAWFaceOff.
Comments? Feedback? Want your garden question to be featured in a future Q&A segment? Email us, reach out over social media, or get Q&A priority by supporting us on Patreon.
Intro and Outro Music from #Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
Ep.5 Pokemon Ecology with Alex Meinders
Tuesday, January 7, 2025 • Duration 44:10
We’re always pretty nerdy on Plants Always Win, but in this interview episode Alex Meinders helps us take it to a whole new level. He’s a wildlife biologist and videogame enthusiast whose passion project is the YouTube and TikTok channel Geek Ecology. He uses his real-world science know-how to analyze the biology and ecology of Pokémon—yes, those quirky monsters from the cartoon, card game, and video games.
This week Alex speculates with us about the plant-inspired class of grass-type Pokémon. We consider their place in the food web (are they animals or vegetables?), their evolutionary history (what environmental pressure caused them to look like plants?) and their methods of reproduction (do they create clones by seed and genetic diversity by egg?). If you’re worried about missing out on real-world plant talk, never fear! We dig into some fascinating plants along the way, including the parasitic corpse flower, the piratical ghost pipe, and mandrakes, which really do look like that.
We promised some fact-checking during the episode! Here are the results:
Alex brought up the subject of a tissue-culture mammoth meatball that made news headlines. This was created in 2023 by Australian company Vow as a way to bring attention to their cultivated meat products. It turns out the meatball was not eaten since no one knows how our immune systems will react to protein from 10,000-year-old DNA. If someone wanted to eat it, the company would need to re-do the process with closer attention paid to the needs of regulators. But it’s a great story!
Ep.7 Winter Sowing Native Plants with Amanda Jewell
Tuesday, January 21, 2025 • Duration 52:22
You might think a gardening podcast would focus on guests who have a lifetime of gardening expertise and plenty of credentials. But we want to emphasize that anyone can garden, and amateurs everywhere find niches to flourish in. That’s why we invited Amanda Jewell to share her adventures in learning to grow native plants from seed.
Amanda is a vision therapist by trade. In her free time, she uses her postage-stamp urban yard in Northern Ontario to grow hundreds of native wildflowers every year. She describes for us the joy she felt the first time she discovered that her garden was supporting local insects and how the focus on bringing more wildlife to her yard drove her interest in native plants. She also explains how winter sowing has become such an effective technique for her, in spite of mishaps along the way, and how leaning in to nature’s lack of orderliness is both useful and liberating. We wrap up with conversation about finding community among gardeners and about resources and seed sources for listeners who want to try starting their own native plants.
Amanda’s Shout-Outs:
The Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library distributes free seeds to organizations and gardeners every winter: https://wildflowerseedlibrary.ca/
The Miskwaadesi native garden is a new garden in North Bay, Ontario created by the North Bay Indigenous Friendship Centre: https://www.miskwaadesi.ca/
Timestamps
00:51 Intro
01:25 Gardening in Urban Northern Ontario
03:20 Observe Before You Grow
Ep.6 Milkweed VS Beardtongue
Tuesday, January 14, 2025 • Duration 50:00
This versus episode is a battle of the native wildflowers. Sean leads with penstemon, also known as hairy beardtongue, a charmingly fairytale-looking native perennial genus with species that grow across North America. Points in this plant’s favour: it has few pests and diseases, pollinators love it, and Sean lets us in on the secret to increased blossoms. Also: tube-shaped flowers = hummingbirds and adorably wiggling bee butts.
Not to be outdone, Erin pushes back with common milkweed Asclepias syriaca, another native perennial that’s important for pollinators and a range of specialist insects, including monarch butterflies. Its sweet-smelling ball-shaped flower clusters seem engineered for human appeal, but this plant’s genes are wild and free. Erin explains what kind of garden space you need to grow them and addresses some common fears about the toxins in milkweed’s sap. And then both our hosts get into The Milkweed Controversy.
Tangents this week include rhizomes, informational websites with no dates on them, the ethics of merch, and the menace of black swallow-wort, a.k.a. dog strangling vine.
Who won the Plant Face-Off? Was it Sean with beardtongue or Erin with milkweed? You decide! Send your vote by email or on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook with the hashtag #PAWFaceOff.
Fact Check
We weren’t quite certain, but our memories were right: monarch butterflies are listed as endangered in Canada and, as of December 2024, threatened in the United States. However, it’s also important to know that provinces also have their own systems of classification. In Ontario, the monarch is only a species of “special concern,” which doesn’t come with the protections that “endangered” and “threatened” do.
This versus episode kicks off with a discussion about creating a safe space on social media for respectful, loving communication about everything plants and gardens, then digresses into a discussion of Latin pronunciations in botanical, liturgical, and classical settings. When we make it to the Plant Face-Off, Erin leads with peace lily, or Spathiphyllum spp. She explains why some plants in the Spathiphyllum genus have Big Spadix Energy, then explores the fascinating physical mechanism that makes biting a peace lily a bad idea. She explains how to approximate the conditions of its home in the understory of tropical rainforests and how to treat problems, then digs into why she and others are so darned allergic to its pollen. Finally, Erin and Sean dissect the infamous NASA Clean Air Study that still prompts publications to insist that peace lilies can purify your air of household toxins.
In the second half of the episode, Sean confidently takes the stage to predict a win for his favourite plants, Phalaenopsis orchids, also known as moon orchids or moth orchids (for their moth-like flowers). He explains how they grow hanging in the air, attached to trees or stones, and describes the various options for propagating them. Next he covers such controversial topics as what media to grow orchids in, how to water them, and where to position them for the best kind of light. As someone who has rehabilitated many a box-store orchid, he is well equipped with advice on helping them re-bloom and thrive. Sean closes his segment with some history and surprising medical uses for Phalaenopsis.
Who won the Plant Face-Off? Was it Erin with peace lilies or Sean with Phalaenopsis orchids? You decide! Send your vote by email or on Instagram, TikTok, or Facebook with the hashtag #PAWFaceOff.
Have you learned to read your garden? This week we sit down with Lauren MacLean, a teacher, author, and podcaster from Richmond, British Columbia. She’s a big advocate for how outdoor classrooms help kids learn better, but a few years ago she had a learning experience of her own when her school built a new garden classroom. In this interview she shares with us her background as an outdoor educator and explains the magic of “sit spots” for creating a relationship with our environment—something we should all do in our own gardens. Lauren explains how even though she was new to gardening when her school dug into its new project, she was helped by the nature literacy she and her students already possessed. “Reading” the plants and the species who live in relationship to them is key.
Throughout today’s conversation we celebrate the value of garden failures and what they can teach us and the children who follow our example. We extend grace to ourselves and all gardeners (and houseplant parents!) who struggle to help their plants thrive. Lauren also offers advice for teachers to keep their garden classrooms afloat when the first bloom of ambition fades, and celebrates the community connections they can forge. Finally, we wrap up by trouble-shooting problems like summer watering, wildlife interactions, and weed identification.
If you want to learn more from Lauren about outdoor learning, check out…
Lauren’s Courses:
Nature’s Path: a Year of Monthly Sparks—monthly outdoor-learning professional development for educators and homeschooling families
Thrive Outside: Grow Your Teaching Space—a five-week program for teachers and homeschooling parents to grow their teaching into the outdoors
This week we cover a lot of ground on the subject of groundcovers with Kathy Jentz. Kathy is the editor and publisher of Washington Gardener, the host of the Garden DC podcast, and the author of Groundcover Revolution, a book written to give inspiration and examples for turf grass substitutes that gardeners everywhere can use to find the best plants for their region. They can also use its attractive and accessible photographs to get their spouses and their HOA on board.
We start our conversation by establishing some ground rules: what is a groundcover? Kathy says it’s any plant that covers the ground thickly enough to suppress weeds, which kicks off a conversation about turf substitutes, plant height, maintenance, and moss lawns. We reflect on the history of lawns, the aggressive nature of many groundcovers, and how to manage them through plant choice or through physical intervention. What about avoiding invasive species of groundcovers altogether? Kathy shares some favourites and some species she would never recommend in her region, Washington DC. Erin and Sean offer their own top and bottom choices for Central Ontario and discover, in spite of distance and very different growing seasons, some common ground.
For more of Kathy, you can find her in the following places:
Upcoming speaking engagements
The 2025 Northwest Flower Garden Festival in Seattle
The Pokémon Grimer was part of Generation 1, which came out in Japan in 1996. Points to Sean for remembering that accurately.
It was actually four different fish who beat Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, since, for health reasons, their owner swapped in a different one every twelve hours. But, yes, the notoriously fail-proof game has been beaten by the random movements of fish swimming around a tank with quadrants mapped to the controller buttons.
We also mention the Feejee Mermaid. It turns out there were many such “mermaids” made from combining the bodies of fish and monkeys. They have cultural significance as “ningyo” in Japan, but when westerners like PT Barnum got their hands on them in the nineteenth century, shenanigans ensued.
Comments? Feedback? Want your garden question to be featured in a future Q&A segment? Email us, reach out over social media, or get Q&A priority by supporting us on Patreon.
01:56 Pursuing wildlife biology because Jurassic Park isn't real
3:54 What is Geek Ecology?
5:08 Pokémon Food Webs
10:27 The Fish who beat Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire
11:30 Why “grass type” and not “plant type”?
13:02 Are Pokémon their own kingdom of life?
14:00 A discussion on evolution
18:07 Angiosperms (flowering plants) and gymnosperms (non-flowering plants)
19:09 Impatiens would make good Pokémon
20:30 Plant Pokémon reproduction: seeds AND eggs??
22:10 Sean wants a Pokémon breeding simulator
12:45 Do Pokémon need to be pollinated?
25:29 What plant inspired the Oddish?
30:58 Vileplume: it’s just a corpse flower, right?
34:45 Parasitic plant tangent
29:25 Pokémon with fake Latin names
40:50 Find Geek Ecology online
42:55 Contact Us & Outro
04:16 Becoming a Disney Princess for Hornets
08:10 A Cheap, Low-Maintenance, Wildlife-Friendly Garden
10:00 Growing Native Perennials Is Beginner Friendly!
11:23 Why Some Seeds Need Cold Stratification
13:57 What is Winter Sowing?
15:22 Organization Not Necessary
17:05 When to Open your Winter-Sowing Greenhouses
18:56 Collecting Native Seeds
21:29 Wildlife Garden With Their Poop!
22:07 Amanda’s Native-Plant Wishlist
23:19 Making a Microclimate for a Southern Plant
25:08 Making a Rain Garden or Pond
26:18 The Miskwaadesi Native Plant Garden in North Bay
28:29 Garden Centres vs. Nurseries
30:41 The Nativar Debate
36:26 Pollination and Genetic Diversity in the Garden
37:23 Understanding Your Garden Ecosystem
38:40 Add Rotting Wood to your Garden
43:40 A Warning about Growing Seeds in Mulch
47:20 Amanda’s Shout-Outs and Tips
Comments? Feedback? Want your garden question to be featured in a future Q&A segment? Email us, reach out over social media, or get Q&A priority by supporting us on Patreon.
Ellen Zachos, author of the books Backyard Forager: 65 familiar plants you didn’t know you could eat, The Forager’s Pantry: Cooking with wild edibles, and How to Forage for Wild Foods Without Dying: An absolute beginner’s guide to identifying 35 wild, edible plants, and more
A close study of milkweed and the species it hosts
Holdrege, Craig. “The Story of an Organism: Common Milkweed”, The Nature Institute, 2010, www.natureinstitute.org/article/craig-holdrege/the-story-of-an-organism-common-milkweed
Timestamps
00:11 Intro
01:04 What’s Growing On?
01:50 Sean’s Puppy Update
02:03 Erin’s New Book
05:00 The Plant Face-Off
05:23 Face-Off Results for Poinsettia vs. Amaryllis
06:30 Sean’s Plant: Penstemon, a.k.a. Beardtongue
06:57 The Reclassification of Penstemon
08:58 The Value of Dates on Research Materials
11:03 Penstemon Species and Ranges
12:19 Penstemon In Your Garden
14:21 Penstemon Pollinators, Featuring Bee Butts
16:38 Learning Medicinal Uses for Plants
19:30 Tending Penstemon
23:58 Erin’s Plant: Common Milkweed
25:56 What is Rhizome?
27:51 National Garden Bureau’s Year Of the Asclepias
Peace lilies’ relatives: plants in the Araceae family
Grant, B. L. (2021, August 11). Arum plant information: Learn about common varieties of arum. Gardening Know How. https://www.gardeningknowhow.com/houseplants/hpgen/arum-plant-information.htm
Spathiphyllum as an unusually bad trigger for allergies among houseplants
egás, V. H., Duch, G. D., García, V. G., De La Losa, F. P., Fernández, M. C., Velandia, D. G., & Jané, P. G. (2019). Allergy to Spathiphyllum wallisii, an Indoor Allergen. Journal of Investigational Allergology and Clinical Immunology, 29(6), 453–454. https://doi.org/10.18176/jiaci.0419
Debunking popular NASA Clean Air Study interpretations
Sitting with Nature: An Educator’s Guide to Sit Spots—the book that brought Lauren and Erin together as author and editor, a resource that introduces why and how to use sit spots in the classroom (with lesson plans included!)
Lauren’s Online:
Teach Outdoors is Lauren’s podcast about outdoor learning.
Comments? Feedback? Want your garden question to be featured in a future Q&A segment? Email us, reach out over social media, or get Q&A priority by supporting us on Patreon.
09:25 Writing Gardening Books for an International Audience
11:52 Lawns, Landowners, and Historic Showing Off
14:55 Managing Aggressive and Invasive Groundcovers
20:39 A Native Lily of the Valley
24:45 Growing Conditions in Washington, DC
28:49 Growing Conditions in Central Ontario
31:50 Very Different Growing Seasons
34:50 Kathy’s Favourite Groundcovers
40:35 Erin’s Favourite Groundcovers
43:40 Sean’s Favourite Groundcovers
48:28 Gardening with Deer
50:47 Groundcovers Kathy Never Recommends
53:22 Groundcovers that Sean Never Recommends
54:54 Managing the Mint Family
57:47 Don’t Shame Your Neighbours
1:02:30 Erin’s Least Favourite Groundcover
1:04 Where to Find Kathy
1:05:53 Contact Us and Outro
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