Peas on a Podcast: Jared Barnes and Thomas Rainer

Our home-grown snow peas bought the farm a few weeks ago, but I found agents of inspiration to take the edge off summer heat. Jared Barnes and Thomas Rainer have wonder to spare and share. Not surprising for two peas in a pod who grew up “semi-feral” playing outside.

Last month, on his Plantastic Podcast, Barnes hosted landscape architect, author and speaker Thomas Rainer. Look for episode 6. It’s a standout. Another good pea is Rebecca McMackin. I listened to her interview on the Growing Greener podcast with Garden Rant alumnus Thomas Christopher. It was too close to press time to present the full scope of her impressive, “ecological horticulture” at the Brooklyn Bridge Park, but please give it a listen. Rebecca is headed to the Harvard Graduate School of Design this fall, as a Loeb Scholar. with a handful of others who are trying to “change the world.”

Peas in a pod: Jared Barnes and Thomas Rainer with Hubricht’s bluester, Amsonia hubrichtii

Here is the Rainer episode’s outline organized by Barnes:

• Thomas’s childhood experiences with plants and wilderness
• Our recent trip to see Amsonia in Arkansas (Searching for Amsonia in Arkansas Part 1 and Searching for Amsonia in Arkansas Part 2)
• The shift from being a lawyer to becoming a landscape architect and advice for students interested in switching careers
• Traveling with Darrel Morrison on graduate school student trips studying the landscapes of the south
• Creating a language around plant communities to communicate with others
• How gardeners can learn to read plant body language (aka plant form) to layer diversity
• How to cover the ground with plants to reduce work and searching for plants that will grow well as ground covers
• Warm-season versus cool-season plants
• Planting in a Post-wild World by Thomas Rainer and Claudia West
• The five principles of designed plant communities and how they distilled the principles down
• Richard Hansen and Friedrich Stahl and their book Perennials and Their Garden Habitats
• The Knowledge Project podcast
• Embracing stress in plantings
• James Golden’s garden Federal Twist
• Flickr as a resource to see plant growth in the wild
• Limiting factors for naturalistic planting in home gardens including plant height similarity, scale, and tidiness
• Native plants need to be approached with artistry like the creativity of how plants are used at Chanticleer or Great Dixter
• Failures in green infrastructure and pollinator plantings and why
• Jim Collins Good to Great doom loop
• Roy Diblik’s The Know Maintenance Perennial Garden
• The importance of doing one outstanding naturalistic planting example that becomes a model (and Jim Collins Good to Great bullets before cannonballs)
• How Thomas hones his skills with the challenges of site design and finding inspiration from plant people
• Thomas’s technique of using his mental library during the design process of thinking back to photos or places he’s seen before
• Thomas’s recent attention to style and how to give plantings an edge with attention to color
• The myth that soil fertility is always good

Young Jared takes to gardening 

Hubricht’s bluestar, Amsonia hubrichtii, in its native habitat in the Arkansas barrens

The peas—Jared Barnes, Thomas Rainer and trip guide, Eric Hunt, from the Arkansas Native Plant Society.

Foggy morning with Baptisia alba in the home garden of Jared and Karen Barnes

The Barnes’s east Texas garden with Baptisia alba, Phlox pilosa ‘Bonnie’s Pink’ and the leafy Carolina spider lily (Hymenocallis occidentalis) in the foreground.

Jared, along with teaching, stewards a 1.5 acre student botanic garden and living lab called The Plantery. Their mission: “We cultivate passionate students who grow and celebrate incredible plants that elevate and inspire our community.”

Call of the Wild

I’ve followed Jared Barnes’s career since he introduced himself at a Perennial Plant Association Symposium in 2007. He was a student scholarship recipient from University of Tennessee at Martin. Every time I turned around, for the next few days, Jared was there, asking questions about perennials. I realized his appetite for plants was insatiable. I tried to feed the beast. The following year I ran into him again at the beautiful Scott Arboretum at Swarthmore College, where he was working as a summer intern. I sensed something special about Jared. This guy was on the move. I wanted to implant a radio chip and follow his progress. He spent the next six years at North Carolina State University where he received his doctorate and now is Associate Professor at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas.

Philadelphia residence designed by Phyto Studio’s Claudia West. Rob Cardillo photo.

Pollinator garden inside the Arboretum at Penn State. Designed by Phyto Studio. Rob Cardillo photo.

And I first met landscape architect Thomas Rainer at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Symposium in Baltimore in 2012. He turned heads by altering conventional views on garden design without taking down traditional cottage or formal gardens. He is an admirer of both. I wrote about the Symposium for the Human Flower Project a few weeks later. “Rainer outlined his ‘spiritual’ and ‘hedonistic’ preferences for planting native species in the landscape. But he didn’t shy away from ‘turning up the volume’ on a design that mixed native little bluestem grasses with a non-native perennial. His punctuation planting with the tall, pencil-thin South American Verbena bonariensis made the grasses look ‘more legible.’” Rainer is a gardener and plant lover, a combination surprisingly rare among his professional colleagues.

Jude Rainer in Florida’s Apalachicola Forest in 2018

Thomas Rainer is co-founder of Phyto Studio in Alexandria, a firm he partners with his wife Melissa and with Claudia West. Rainer, a “horticultural futurist,” co-authored Planting in a Post Wild World with Claudia West, selected by the American Horticultural Society as one of their 2016 books of the year. (I once heard Claudia give a presentation on Color Theory, influenced by Forest Aesthetics, a book written by the 19^th century German forester Heinrich Salisch. I am color blind, but still trying to absorb the full meaning of her deeply provocative talk.)

Barnes’s podcast is a gem. Jared is smart, curious, does his homework and has a voice, with a sweet Tennessee inflection made for radio—or a podcast. “Plants can’t talk, but we can! The Plantastic Podcast is a show for plant killers, green thumbs, and everyone in between…”

“Listen along as Dr. Jared …deconstructs the craft and the practices of remarkable plantspeople so that you can better cultivate your plants and yourself. Let’s Grow.”