When today’s guest, Elise Howard, and I talked on the show in March, her new book “Plant This, Not That” was just out. The popular book offers basic guidelines for selecting and using native plants, and specific substitutes for non-natives you may wish to replace.

Once spring arrived, Elise got back to making a garden around her relatively new weekend home in Western Massachusetts—not just deciding what to grow, but thornier topics like tackling invasives and all the rest of what goes into rethinking a landscape with ecology in mind. I wanted to catch up again and hear how the implementation of the book’s principles and plant choices is going for her in real time, because Elise is practicing what she preaches, and like for all of us, that means being confronted with some questions to puzzle out along the way.

Elise, a literary agent, began learning about natives more than 15 years ago as a volunteer at Riverside Park in New York City. These days, she lives in gardens in the city and in Western Massachusetts. Her book “Plant This, Not That” offers 200-ish examples of swaps for plants that have proven troublesome or just don’t do much in the name of supporting biodiversity, grouped helpfully by their landscape purpose, from groundcovers to hedges and more. I’m glad to welcome her back to the show today to hear how her own adventures in native plant gardening are progressing this spring.

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