GardenComm, Thanks for the Blog-Writing Award!
GardenComm, the professional association for garden communicators, made my day last week when they announced three winners of their blog-writing award and I was one of them for my rants! [...]
Susan Harris
Susan’s a garden writer, teacher and activist in the Washington, D.C. area. Co-founder of GardenRant, she also wrote for national gardening magazines and independent garden centers before retiring in 2014. Now she has time for these projects:
- Founding the pro-science educational nonprofit Good Gardening Videos that finds and promotes the best videos on YouTube for teaching people to garden.
- Creating DC Gardens, the nonprofit campaign to promote the public gardens of the Washington, D.C. area, and gardening by locals.
- Creating and editing the nonprofit website Greenbelt Online to serve her adopted hometown of Greenbelt, Maryland (a “New Deal Utopia” founded in 1937).
Susan rants about anything that misinforms or discourages gardeners – from old-school quacks to mistaken do-gooders to local laws that mandate conformity.
Contact Susan via email or by leaving a comment on one of her articles.
Volunteer Gardener Feeling Some Love from the Public
I've blogged about tending my five adopted gardens, which tending I'm earnestly trying to reduce by making the gardens as low-maintenance as possible. In some instances there are actual maintenance [...]
Marianne Chats with Margaret Roach on “A Way to Garden” Podcast
Don't miss hearing Margaret get tips from our Marianne Willburn about growing tropical plants - on the latest A Way to Garden Podcast. It's a podcast I've recommended more than [...]
Historic “Garden City” is Surprisingly Anti-Gardening
Photos of Greenbelt, Maryland from the Library of Congress collection. The garden city movement, which began in 1898 in the U.K., is described as a "method of urban planning in which self-contained [...]
White House Gardens and Grounds in the News
From the whphotooffice Instagram account: "First Lady Jill Biden participates in an Arbor Day tree planting ceremony Friday, April 30, 2021, on the North Lawn of the White House. [...]
Thriller, Filler, Spiller? Why not just two out of three?
I don't know about YOU and the size of YOUR garden pots, but mine just aren't large enough to comfortably include what we're always told we should - a spikey [...]
Gardens, Homes and Monuments of Richmond’s Monument Avenue
Nowhere in the country has the existence of statues honoring the Confederacy been more hotly debated than in the former capital itself - Richmond, Virginia, with its iconic statues along [...]
My 15 Years of Ranting about Lawn Replacement and Lawn Care
My (former) back yard in 2006. The Unlawning Begins It didn't take much research through my 15 years of posts here on GardenRant to confirm that my number [...]
Will my Japanese Maple Survive the Cicadas?
And will my fennel survive the caterpillars? Brood X cicada on a banana tree leaf in my front yard. We're seeing torrents of news here in Maryland about [...]
Clematis, you’d better be worth all this fussing over.
I'm all about the vines since I've started training them to give me screening and privacy (see before and after in this video). But I hadn't included clematis in the [...]
On Video – My Spring 2021 Townhouse Garden
Last fall I made this before-and-after video of my "Front Garden Make-Over with Vines and Paint." I submitted it to my town's local access TV station and won second prize [...]
The Pointless, Inaccuracy-Laden Petition to “Restore Jackie Kennedy’s Rose Garden”
Has this petition to "Restore Jackie Kennedy's Rose Garden" come across your feed yet? It makes this pitch: In 1961 President and Mrs. Kennedy had just returned from a state [...]