1. What is Sustainable Gardening ?

For me, sustainable gardening is gardening in a way that surrounds our homes with natural beauty AND contributes positively to the environment by cleaning the air, filtering the water, feeding wildlife, and more. It means adding organic matter and not much else. In cities and suburbs it means healing developed land. It always means avoiding a bunch of toxic products and destructive practices we don’t want to use anyway, so sustainable gardening is easy peasy!

This is important because I know how it is - only the diehards like myself want to spend much time gardening, especially doing hard, dirty work, which we really love – the dirtier the better! What’s amazing is that sustainable, low-maintenance, low-input gardening still provides beauty, food, and a connection to nature, and all without being a burden financially or physically to the gardener.  

2. Please give our readers some tips on creating and maintaining a sustainable garden.

As a gardening coach, I teach the sustainable kind, and my biggest tip is to fill up your garden with big, low-maintenance plants, mostly shrubs, small trees, and large ornamental grasses. They’ll give you the most garden for your money, and the garden won’t look bare all winter, like it does with perennials and annuals. (My favorites no-fail shrubs include spireas, viburnums, oakleaf hydrangea, and Knockout roses.)

After three to four years, your shrubs will need a few minutes of pruning every year, so read up on how to prune your particular plants. If that doesn’t work for you, hire an arborist or gardening coach to teach you to prune your shrubs. Another tip if you’re nervous about pruning is to learn on something you can’t kill, like forsythia, acuba, euonymus or butterfly bush.

My other top tips are to water deeply but infrequently, and to apply organic mulch to beds and borders every year to reduce weeding and watering. That’s all the “fertilizer” you’ll probably ever need.

3. Is it possible to have lawns that are environmentally friendly?

You may already be seeing news about the anti-lawn movement, exemplified by laws that limit the fertilizer, pesticides and water you’re allowed to use on turf and even how much of it you can grow. Then there’s the Lawn Reform Coalition that I’m part of. We’re nine garden writers across the U.S. who encourage healthier lawn types and maintenance practices, and show readers cool ways to grow less of it.

Lawns are wonderful for kids though, and you CAN have a lawn that holds up and looks decent without doing any harm.  “Decent” lawns don’t live up to golf course standards, but that sort of perfection is exactly the problem. Now our imperfect, clover-filled lawns are being called Freedom Lawns, and they’re becoming badges of eco-friendliness. Sure, we have a long way to go to cure Americans, especially the male ones, of their addiction to the green ideal, but the change is coming – finally.

4. What recent changes have you seen in gardening which inspire you?

The other big gardening news – actually even bigger gardening news – is the burgeoning interest in growing food. Thanks to the recession and concerns about food safety and child obesity, it seems that everyone’s going back to the land, even if it’s just raised containers like the ones I grow vegetables in on my deck. Community and school gardens are cropping up, farmers’ markets are opening, people in their 20s are discovering the joys of growing, and long-time gardeners like myself are thrilled by it all!