TODAY’S GUEST and I were sitting having a cup of tea together recently and talking about guess what? Plants. What came up pretty fast was how lately we both sometimes cringe at the results to our online searches about one garden topic or another, which only seemed to be getting worse in the age of AI or at the misinformation we see on some viral social-media posts.
Ecologically focused garden designer Rebecca McMackin and I wanted to talk out loud here with all of you about what trusted sources we go to again and again, and about how we filter out some of the unhelpful noise when seeking answers to our garden questions.
Rebecca is the creator of the monthly newsletter “Grow like Wild,” which now has a companion podcast version in the opening of a “TED Talk” she gave, which has more than 1.3 million views. She says of herself, “Full disclosure: I am the nerdiest gardener you’re ever going to meet.”
Rebecca spent a decade as director of horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park, where she managed 85 acres of diverse parkland organically and with an eye toward diversity. And she more recently served arboretum curator at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. Her acclaimed garden for Brooklyn Museum, which was planted in 2023, shows that ecological gardens can thrive even in the busiest spaces, and she was a Harvard Loeb fellow in 2023 as well.
Read along as you listen to the Aug. 25, 2025 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
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Margaret Roach: Good to talk to you again, Rebecca, even without the cup of tea.
Rebecca McMackin: [Laughter.] Always a pleasure, Margaret. I actually have a cup of tea.
Margaret: Oh, O.K., cool. You didn’t offer me one.
Rebecca: I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
Margaret: So yes, so each of us in a way, in our own way as part of our job—your old job at Brooklyn Bridge Park, our jobs as the writing we do the now podcasting that we do, the teaching, the lecturing—a lot of parts of our jobs, our careers,, are aimed at helping people find answers to their garden questions and to learn to garden smarter. And I think even when you were at Brooklyn Bridge Park, you didn’t just show new members of your team how to do the hands-on work that you needed from them, but I think you actually taught them how to find information online as well, didn’t you?
Rebecca: Absolutely. So that was a big part of the job, right? Teaching people how to learn, how to find information. Over the 10-plus years I was there, I hired over 100 garden staff, between seasonal gardeners and full-time gardeners and managers, etc. And for each one of those people all at, as you can imagine, really different levels and their experience and knowledge of horticulture, they all needed to know how to find the answers to their own questions.
And I am a bibliophile [laughter]. My library is literally problematically large, and I love, love books, but I also recognize that that’s not where especially newer generations of gardeners are really getting their information. And it is incredibly easy to find stuff online to just punch something into Google and imagine that the information that’s going to come back is going to be the answers to literally the questions of the universe.
But we found, and I think many of us find, that when you do just Google something, what comes back is often not actually the information that you need. And when you look at where people are getting their garden information from, 40 percent of people rate the internet as their main source of information, and that is coming from both YouTube and social media. And I’m concerned about that because when I go to YouTube and social media, a lot of the information that I see is not accurate, or it’s by really enthusiastic, really talented communicators who maybe aren’t the most experienced gardeners in the world.
And so I just thought it would be really helpful, along with you, one of the most talented researchers-
Margaret: Speaking of nerds…
Rebecca: [Laughter.] …speaking of nerds, I know; talented, nerdy researchers of gardening, that we could help people help people. Again, not finding the information that we’re necessarily looking for, but how to look for information on the internet.
Margaret: So it’s like I scroll down the list of results, I’m searching for how to prune a rose or when to blah, blah, blah, when to sow such-and-such a seed, or whatever. And I scroll down the list of results, and I sort of have this built-in mechanism from being a journalist, an old-school, traditional-form journalist for so many years, so many decades, I’m sort of a research brain; I filter and I’m like, no, that’s not a good resource; that’s not a trusted authority. I kind of screen things.
And so I’m prejudiced toward if the URL has a .edu, it’s an academic institution, for example. That probably is going to get extra points in my book, compared to just somebody’s blog right now. Maybe that’s an oversimplification, but that’s one of the things when I’m just quickly pre-screening. I’m looking for authority in various ways. New information—I look for the dates on things, because boy, if you have plant pests and diseases… Like I was recently writing about beech leaf disease, and this is something that’s changing by the minute, and there’s all this research going on, and even if you get something from a research report from 2024, let alone 2023 or 2022, it’s not going to have the latest by any means insights or knowledge or recommendations. And so I look for dates, things like that. So I have a screening process built into my brain. [Above: American beech leaves displaying symptoms of beech leaf disease: Bartlett Tree Experts photo.]
Rebecca: Yeah, I’ve learned so much from you about how to scan Google results. I almost never use Google, because I just consider it not super-trustworthy at this point. [Laughter.] I have on my browser a bookmark folder of all of the sources that I go to. Rather than sort of rely on an algorithm to answer questions for me, I go to very specific websites and I look up very specific people, institutions, universities, and those are the places where I go, and I put in those questions that I’m trying to answer.
I mean, I do sometimes test out, I remember my son a couple of weeks ago wouldn’t believe that Luna moths [below] don’t eat as adults, and I put it into Google, and the top AI results said that the adult Luna moth diet was X, Y, Z. And so I feel like the internet is kind of crumbling right now. We’re watching, with AI and all the algorithms trying to sell us things, that information’s becoming less and less reliable when you rely on those search engines. And I really do try to, when I can, focus on certain individuals. It’s the same way I get my news. I don’t just Google things. I find the reporters who I really like in order to listen to what they voice. Exactly.
Margaret: A trusted source. So we’re going to start to give some examples, and maybe we can kind of go through some different categories, but I’ll say that we’re going to go through a bunch of things, and, I can give your list of some of those bookmarks [see bottom of the page] and my list of some of my resources that I regularly use, so everybody doesn’t have to start jotting like mad.
But yeah, so what example; where should we start?
Rebecca: I think one of the things that in researching how people get their information, the big shift even over the last 10 years is YouTube. A lot of people find garden information and watch garden shows and try to answer questions on YouTube. And so I thought I could share just a few of my favorite YouTube channels for finding really, really good information. So I really love the Xerces Society channel.
Margaret: So that’s for invertebrate conservation, so a lot of insects and other invertebrates.
Rebecca: Exactly. And I’m going to come at this from a very ecological perspective. If you have questions about peonies, that’s going to be a different,
Margaret: Well, I have answers for that, so I’ll let them know that [laughter]. Good, good, good.
Rebecca: Awesome. So yeah, so Xerces Society is wonderful. Definitely has an insect bent, but they offer a lot of information about just gardening in general for biodiversity.
Margaret: That’s a trusted resource, right?
Rebecca: Exactly. Universities, just about every university. I really like Penn State and Cornell, their YouTube channels, they have fantastic horticulture information, whole lectures from experts, and then just how to water, how to weed, just really basic stuff into the latest information on jumping worms. So I really recommend just subscribing to those YouTube channels and then watching when something interesting shows up. I also love organizations like Grow Native Mass, Grow Native Massachusetts. They have free seminars, free speakers, and then an archive online of really, really wonderful lectures that you can watch on the topic as well.
What are some of your favorites, Margaret, for more ornamental gardening?
Margaret: Well, so with the ornamental stuff, I mean, one place I will look if I’m delving into a new genus of plants or an old genus of plants, again, like peonies you mentioned, or orchids or whatever the heck, ferns, whatever it is, I might look and see if there’s a botanical society for that. So frequently there will be the fern society website, and it may be the American Fern Society or maybe the international or whatever, or the Orchid Society or the Peony Society and so forth. There’s lots of those. Now some of them don’t have a lot of content on the websites, but sometimes they have local chapters.
If you’re really wanting to learn about ferns, or you really wanted to learn about rock gardening, or you really wanted to learn about whatever, you might find your local chapter, or you might at least look it up and then contact the email of the person who’s listed in your area, and find out what resources they have, and if they have lectures like you’re talking about. You might plug into, again, trusted resources that are even more local, because with a lot of this stuff, local is important. [Below, Paeonia ostii detail.]
Rebecca: Absolutely. Yeah.
Margaret: So I have a list on awaytogarden.com/resources that includes a lot of those societies that over the years I’ve used, and again, some of them have tons of content, like why does my peony not bloom and how deep to plant the peony and blah, blah, blah. It might tell all that or might not on those types of websites, but that’s one way to go.
And then there’s places like Missouri Botanical Garden with its plant encyclopedia, its plant finder kind of encyclopedia, the part of its website where I can search for a plant and I can read about where does it come from and how much soil moisture does it want, and what diseases is it prone to and how tall does it get and what zone is it and things like that. So I use that a lot.
Rebecca: Those plant finders, I feel like there’s so much technology out there now that really makes gardening and ecological gardening, specifically, just so easy. It’s incredible that you can plug in your Zip code and then just get a list of plants that support all of the animals that live around you. So those plant finders, and there’s all different levels of complexity. Like Missouri Botanical Garden is a very sophisticated one where you can say, I want a blue-blooming perennial for sun, and it’s got to be 3 feet high. You can plug in all of this minutiae and it’ll give you what those plants are. It’s an incredible resource.
But there are some that if you’re just getting started and you just really need ideas, there are some that are just a little bit easier. I really like Homegrown National Park has a good plant finder, where they tell you a little bit of information about your ecoregion, what are the plants that are of your ecoregion. And that is not just your hardiness zone, but considers geology and hydrology and all of those various things. And the plants that you get from Homegrown National Park are very often keystone species. So those are the most important plants you can plant on your land to support the wildlife around you. Right.
Margaret: Now, when you said before that on Missouri Botanical, you were filtering, I’ve never done that there. I’ve done that on the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center…
Rebecca: Oh gosh, do I have them confused? Go check.
Margaret: Yeah, well that’s O.K. because I mean, the problem is we’re both thinking in our heads of big lists, but I’ve done that. I’ve done profile by profile. I’ve searched for particular genus and species of plant on Missouri Botanical and gotten all the information about that plant. But on the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, down in Texas, on their website, their encyclopedia, you can not only do that—look for a particular plant—but then you can say what you were talking about: You want groundcovers that are blue that are 3 feet high and whatever. It’s amazing. It’s wild. And for your zone, for your area, it’s fantastic.
Rebecca: So I just Googled it and maybe it’s new, but the MOBOT does have this.
Margaret: Cool, O.K. See, you’re turning me on to new things, that’s why I wanted to ask. Because again, we each have our ways of looking for things, and we haven’t discovered everything about even the places that we go all the time. So that’s great.
Rebecca: Looking at this now, there’s so much information here that I have never had a reason to use, and I would love to just explore it. You can literally search for plants that are black-walnut tolerant, that are deer-resistant, that support hummingbirds specifically. And so yeah, this is a moment for technology that I think we’re all sort of being able to reap the benefit of.
Margaret: This is the positive version. This is not the AI creepy version [laughter]. So what we are just saying is that that type of filtering is available on Missouri Botanical, and then for natives only it’s available on the Lady Bird Johnson site, which is fantastic as well in its own way.
Rebecca: Then I think the Audubon Society has another one that’s a pretty simplistic one as well. That’ll just tell you really good shrubs that have berries that birds really like, which is nice to know as well. [Above, winterberry holly, Ilex verticillata, a bird favorite.]
Margaret: Yes, and local is so important in all kinds of gardening, but especially when we get to ecological, native plant gardening, etc., local gets more and more and more important. I always tell people when I give lectures and so forth, someone will raise their hand and say if it’s a virtual class and there’s people from all over the country, they’re like, “Well, where should I look?” And I always say, “Well, do you know your state or county native plant society?” And usually the answer is no.
But if not, go to the North American Native Plant Society website, and they have a tab on their website of every state or county, all the states, and actually Canadian provinces, too, for native plant societies that exist. And you can click over to your one for Indiana or Missouri or whatever; Ontario, or whatever. And from that website, you can probably find access to plant lists and guidance, really hyper-local, and sometimes even down to the county level. And again, even down to, hey, why not meet with some of your like-minded neighbors at their monthly meetings and learn more that way?
Rebecca: Maybe you don’t need to buy plants. Maybe someone will literally given them to you.
Margaret: They all have a tab about plant sales and seed swaps and so forth. So that’s the most hyper-local of all. So I love helping people filter down from North American Native Plant Society website, to their state and even-closer-to-home native plant website for information.
Rebecca: All horticulture is local. You really do need to figure out what’s going on in the ground right around your house or building.
So I think beyond just figuring out what plants to use, there’s also a lot of resources online, like Lady Bird Johnson, where they really give you a lot of information about how to grow plants, what they look like, what their ranges are. And so that’s a whole other section of online resources where you’re looking for information about plants. When you know what you want to plant, but you need to know more about them. And so for that, I really do like Lady Bird Johnson; I think that is a wonderful resource. And then I think you were saying, Margaret, that you really use GoBotany a lot?
Margaret: I do because I’m in the Northeast and GoBotany was started by the former New England Wild Flower Society, now Native Plant Trust. So it’s geared to areas adjacent to where I live and garden, so it has the plant palette for my area. So yes, I do. I check there to see if something is native or near-native or introduced or whatever in my area and get some basic information.
Rebecca: I really use range maps online. There’s so many of them.
Margaret: I’m a map freak. I love them, too.
Rebecca: Oh my God, it’s amazing. And my favorite, there’s so many good options now, but my favorite is the Biota of North America Project: BONAP. I probably go to BONAP every day in reality. [Above, a sample BONAP range map for Canada goldenrod, Solidago canadensis.]
Margaret: Oh, me too, me too, to see the range of a plant.
Rebecca: Yeah, if you’re not familiar with it, you put in a plant name, you can even just put in a genus like Aquilegia, and you get these series of maps for every species in Aquilegia, and it shows you highlighted county by county whether or not that plant has been found in that county. And there’s different color codes, like whether or not it’s rare or it’s invasive or it’s secure, or there’s different color codes that you can see how that plant has been found in the county as well.
Margaret: And again, those range maps, they’re not literally like, is it going to be on the hillside above my house? [Laughter.] It’s not that granular, right? But you can go from there, if you’ve been given the general idea that that plant is present in my general vicinity, again: Go even more local. I love to do searches when I’m looking into a particular area for the “flora of fill-in-the-blank.” So I might be—I’m Columbia County, New York—flora of Columbia County, New York, or flora of Maryland, the state of Maryland, or whatever.
And frequently you will find that some either nonprofit or governmental agency or academic entity. Or in some cases, like in my county, these people who are two married scientists at the Hawthorne Valley Farmscape Ecology Program have for more than 20 years been updating the flora of my county. And many times a week I go to their list, their updated list, to see is that species of aster here or not, which goldenrods are here or not. Do you know what I mean?
Rebecca: It’s amazing.
Margaret: It’s incredible. So again, with a little more sleuthing, once you’ve looked at those range maps from BONAP or whatever, and you’re like, “Oh, these are my goldenrods,” you could even get more local if you can find out about the updated records in the flora of your county. So it’s kind of fun. Or from your native plant society. I love this stuff.
Rebecca: Totally. Yeah. I think the sleuthing part of it, I think we’re both researchers at heart, and so we love that. But the sleuthing part is really, like you do need to put in a little bit of effort to find things in reality sometimes.
Margaret: What other kinds of categories, so to speak, of knowledge?
Rebecca: So once you know your plants, you know about them. Sometimes we want to know the history of plants, the medicinal values of plants. You want to know the politics around certain plants, if you’re me. You want to know how people have related to these plans over time. There are a lot of online resources as well for deep dives around plants. And for that, sometimes it’s history, even. My favorite resources, I love to use “Arnoldia,” the Arnold Arboretum’s journal. [Above, Davidia, from a 1931 illustration in “Arnoldia.”]
Margaret: Oh, wow. Yes.
Rebecca: They have the writings online. It’s all free, can just, if you want to know the history of, say, Davidia, how it came to the United States and where it was discovered, etc., etc., that’s all on “Arnoldia.” And it’s beautifully written.
Same with the American Horticultural Society. Every magazine is online for free since 1922, and you can really dive into the information there. And so that’s a lot about history and gardening.
But from an ecological perspective, the government and the USDA have incredible resources online. They are not user-friendly; they take some sleuthing. But if you look up the Forest Silvics manual, what comes out when you put in a tree species is like: What animals does this tree relate to? What types of soil does it like? What are the other plants that want to live with this tree? Just a huge amount of information that has been gathered over many decades by the government.
The USDA also has a fire ecology website, but again, you don’t think—I have never thought—“O.K., I need to know the fire ecology of this plant.” I mean, increasingly yes, as the world changes, but what you really get from that information from this website is if you put in tulip tree, for instance, I was just looking at it before this podcast, and it had a whole paragraph about which side of the slope to plant the tulip tree on and why. So really, really deep information. When you’re really ready to read like five pages about one species, it’s a great place to go.
Margaret: Huh. Never been there. Interesting.
Rebecca: One of my last favorites, which is a little quirky: I know a lot of us are probably not using Dave’s Garden often anymore, but if you remember back in the day, even 20 years ago, Dave’s Garden was one of the first places where people just got together and shared their plants online, their experiences with those plants and swapped seeds, etc. And I’m not sure how active it still is, but they have this feature that I still use once in a while, which is called the Botanary. And it’s literally a botanical dictionary where you can take a specific epithet.
Margaret: One of the species names.
Rebecca: Exactly. Any species name like palustris, right? We all know Quercus palustris, the pin oak, you plug that in and it’s going to tell you what it means. So a lot of the species name, if you remember, there’s a genus and a specific epithet. The first word is the genus, the specific epithet is the second word. That second word is an adjective. And very often it’s telling you information about that plant.
Margaret: Like of the water, or of the woods, or yellow, or deciduous, or it tells you something, a quality often of the plant. Sometimes it tells you who discovered the plant, but it usually tells you an attribute. Yes.
Rebecca: And it’s so helpful for getting to know that plant, or even remembering those difficult-to-remember names when you know what they mean in Greek or Latin. And so I really love the Botanary. It doesn’t get enough love.
Margaret: So it’s a plant name dictionary; that’s kind of fun. Lots of good stuff. And there’s millions and millions more. So don’t be surprised if you hear these two voices again, folks [laughter], geeking out on other resources we use, because we haven’t even talked about books and oh my goodness, oh my goodness, oh my goodness-
Rebecca: Journals, classes, all of it.
Margaret: Absolutely. But just to give you an idea that it’s out there, just that you have to know how to filter and how to be a discerning user, just like you would with anything else to establish trusted friendships, so to speak. So Rebecca, it’s always good to speak to you, and I hope your tea was good [laughter], and I hope I’ll talk to you soon again.
Rebecca: Absolutely. Thanks so much, Margaret.
margaret’s resource list
rebecca’s favorite reference sites
range and status
BONAP range maps of every U.S. species.
USDA range maps and great info (but not updated frequently).
Bplant dot org ranges and lists of plants by ecoregion.
plant finders
about native plants
deep dives
- American Horticultural Society: All issues going back to 1922. All free even if you’re not a member.
- Arnoldia: Beautifully written archives of the wonderful journal from Arnold Arboretum of Harvard. Great for wood plant life histories.
- USDA Fire Ecology Site: Extensive looks into all woody and some herbaceous species: habitat type, floral associations, and more.
- Forest Silvics: Great detail by species, ecosystem, etc.
others
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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 16th year in March 2025. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the Aug. 25, 2025 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).
