Author: Amy
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My List of 🤦♀️
🦋 Butterfly bush is not good for butterflies. Sorry. You had good intentions. 🍁 Leaves are supposed to fall on the ground. Otherwise we’d have no dirt and be standing on lava. 🌱 Wood mulch is for walking paths and establishing new plants, not permanent ground cover. Would you ever…
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Of Order and Chaos
This morning, I was fortunate to have a slice of time to sit on the porch with coffee before figuring out what to do with this mercifully rainy Sunday. A dude in a baseball cap walked by with his boxer in tow and seemed to shake his head disapprovingly at…
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Decolonizing Plant Names
You can’t write about plants for very long without hitting a cultural speed bump. I’ve hit many along the way. Most recently, I was writing about Monotropa uniflora popping up like creatures from the abyss in the woods. It was listed in our database as Indian pipe and I sent…
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Complicating Beauty
What was the last garden you visited? Public or private, big or small? Imagine yourself moving through that garden. If you are reading this, you are probably a gardener, and you probably know a lot about gardening and plants. As you move through that garden, imagine that all your gardening…
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Quotes and Poetry to Decolonize Your Plant-based Feed
It’s about time we stopped quoting John Muir and captioning our instagram posts with “The earth laughs in flowers” because Emerson wasn’t being romantic with the actual intention of that over-quoted poem anyway. Here is a list of voices and faces that deserve some voicetime and facetime. This list is…
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Gardens as a Space of Healing
This isn’t my story, but my sister told me this a long time ago so I feel like I have the right to appropriate it. When she was in art school, she went to a park with one of her sculpture classes. When they reached an open area, the teacher…
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OMG, My Garden is on Native Land!
I know. Everything is on Native land. I just thought this occasion called for some clickbait. I was digging up my circle in the front yard and my shovel hit something crunchy but compact. I moved the shovel back a few inches and the metallic crunch resisted my intrusion even…
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Your Garden is a Protest
“Your garden is a protest. It is a place of defiant compassion. It is a space to help sustain wildlife and ecosystem function while providing an aesthetic response that moves you. For you, beauty isn’t just petal-deep but goes down into the soil, farther down into the aquifer and back…
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Looking for Gardening Podcasts
I’m always looking for good gardening podcasts, ones that give practical tips and plant profiles, but also one that touches on history, ethnobotany, and interesting stories about plants. One that represents a multiplicity of voices, indigenous wisdom baked into the mainstream hort pie, one that doesn’t quote John Muir because…
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Garden Therapy
Here is a thing I think we need. And by “we” I probably mean me. And maybe a handful of people who care about the dirt around them and the things that grow in it. That thing is: Garden Therapy Affirmation Counselors. GTAC? You know that feeling of affirmation when…
Heart of the Garden 