462-Plant This, Not That: Native Swaps for Popular Plants and Trees
3/26/202657 min
Making the switch from conventional gardening to gardening with native plants can feel intimidating — especially when you're staring at a landscape filled with familiar favorites and wondering what belongs in their place. This week, Elise Howard, the author of "Plant This, Not That," offers a practical way forward, showing how simple swaps can transform a traditional garden into a thriving, ecologically beneficial space.
Podcast Links for Show Notes
Download my free eBook 5 Steps to Your Best Garden Ever - the 5 most important steps anyone can do to have a thriving garden or landscape. It's what I still do today, without exception to get incredible results, even in the most challenging conditions.
Subscribe to the joegardener® email list to receive weekly updates about new podcast episodes, seasonal gardening tips, and online gardening course announcements.
Check out The joegardener® Online Gardening Academy for our growing library of organic gardening courses.
Follow joegardener® on Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter, and subscribe to The joegardenerTV YouTube channel.
Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsJoe Lamp'l· Host0:00
Hi, everybody. I'm Joe Lamp'l, the Joe behind Joe Gardener, and welcome to The Joe Gardener Show. Today's conversation is on a topic and a book that I am very excited to share with you. My guest is Elise Howard, author of the brand-new book, Plant This Not That: Over 200 Native Plant Swaps for a More Sustainable Pollinator-Friendly Garden. This is the book that answers the questions so many of us have, from people just getting into native plants for their landscape and garden to seasoned gardeners, too, who want a source that can provide appropriate native plant alternatives to non-native invasive plants that they are looking to replace. I'll raise my hand to that one. Hopefully by now you understand the importance of adding native plants to your garden, and with the help of this book, it offers hundreds of carefully chosen plant swaps for those plants we should consider replacing. I also love the way the book is organized, by common home/garden categories such as foundations, hedges, and specimen trees. Plus, every entry includes each native plant's growing requirements and their ecological benefits, along with beautiful pictures of each option, plus maps showing the plant's native range, and lots of other helpful information on where to shop for natives, how to maintain a native plant garden, and lots more. So if you like what you hear, I highly recommend this book, and we will have the link in the show notes for this episode. So for now, just sit back, enjoy this conversation, and as we get started,