I’ve answered a lot of garden questions in my time as a garden journalist, but nobody has asked more of them than today’s guest—who’s also the person I’ve known longer than anyone else on the planet. My baby sister, Marion Roach Smith, is an author and podcaster, a popular teacher of memoir writing, and like her older sister and the grandmother she is named for, a gardener in her own right. 

She is also the person who coined the phrase “urgent garden questions”—as in: “Margaret, I have an urgent garden question,” meaning that I needed to deliver on-demand answers to the sister on the other end of the phone line, and fast. Or else. 

She’s here to talk about hand-me-down plants we’ve shared and garden lessons we’ve learned – like how her 18 dahlia tubers eventually turned into 175 and that’s too many—and maybe we’ll ask and answer some more urgent garden questions.

Marion Roach Smith is the author of various books, including “The Memoir Project, A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life,” which spawned a whole business at marion roach dot com teaching and coaching memoir writers online through live and recorded classes. She gardens in the capital region of New York State…and most important: she’s my sister.  

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