6 Top Podcasts About Gardening

Dig in to these shows for new or seasoned hobbyists

Terry Ward,

AARP

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Published July 28, 2020

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Whether you're a bona fide green thumb or just thinking about planting some seeds, these podcasts explore how to create a flourishing garden. Entertaining and informative, they also discuss how healing — not to mention nourishing — it can be to tend to our plants. They're available on Spotify, your Apple podcast app and other popular podcast platforms.

A Way to Garden

Margaret Roach, host of the insightful gardening podcast A Way to Garden, considers the garden “part Buddhist retreat and part science laboratory.” Her public radio show airs live on Mondays, but you can listen to the archived episodes at your leisure for hours of inspiration. (The website also has illustrated transcripts of each show that are fun to browse.) Over the course of each 25-minute episode, Roach dives deep in conversations with “plant people,” as well as related experts such as entomologists and ornithologists. Recent subjects have included the secrets to successful tomato cultivation, how to compost, and the best flowers to grow for beautiful table arrangements.

Cultivating Place

You could be an avid gardener, just starting out or someone who simply admires the beauty of a pretty plot from a noncommitted distance, and you'll likely find something to love about Jennifer Jewell's thoughtful, gratitude-filled explorations on Cultivating Place. A garden writer and photographer, Jewell says she finds lessons in the garden “on resilience, collaboration, community and the cyclical nature of everything.” Past guests on her hour-long weekly public radio podcast have included Jamaica Kincaid (who shared her love of lilies) and chef and fruit forager Sara Bir, with whom Jewell discussed fruit as the currency of memory.

The Beginner's Garden

A good balance of home gardeners and experts share personal experiences and deep terrestrial knowledge with Jill McSheehy, the host of The Beginner's Garden. The show airs in 40-minute segments, as well as shorter Q&A segments of just a few minutes that are packed with quick tips (like how to handle herbs when they start to flower). Ever motivational, McSheehy tells us, “Growing a garden is not only possible for everyone, but I believe it can quite possibly change someone's life.” She often shares her own trials and errors in her 3,000-square-foot plot in Russellville, Arkansas, and discusses topics such as when to interfere with pests in an organic garden and how to care for adolescent plants (once you've graduated from the seedling stage, McSheehy explains, it's on to the trying teen years).

Let's Argue About Plants

The editors of Fine Gardening magazine, Steve Aitken and Danielle Sherry, host this fun “podcast for people who love plants, just not always the same ones,” that clips along with entertaining banter and thought-provoking plant talk. Let's Argue About Plants taps horticultural experts and others for informative tips on subjects ranging from how to give your garden more “architecture” and the best picks for colorful shade plants to the splurge-worthiest flora you can buy. But Sherry's evocative descriptions of plants and flowers are alone worth a listen. Of Virginia bluebells, which erupt from the ground in spring, she says: “It almost looks like romaine lettuce, a little bit smoother” with “long tongue-like leaves.” She makes you want to get outside and start digging in.

The Daily Gardener

The eclectic mix of what you might hear over the course of a 30-minute episode is what makes The Daily Gardener so fun. In one of her recent weekly episodes, host Jennifer Ebeling, who broadcasts from her home in Minnesota, introduces readers to the botanist who climbed Colorado's Pikes Peak and discovered the columbine flower, pays tribute to “the man remembered for the boysenberry,” and recites a poem by a Scottish children's author about a grasshopper. Her format doesn't include guests, so the show feels a bit like listening to an audiobook of brevities that cover a wide range of gardening (and garden-adjacent) subjects.

Gardening With the RHS

Anyone who has experienced the heaven that is an English garden — and even those of us just pining for it from across the pond — will enjoy the transporting experience of listening to Gardening With the RHS. Hosted by the Royal Horticultural Society's chief horticulturist, Guy Barter, the weekly shows are roughly 30-minutes long and might pay tribute to the oak tree's significance in history and horticulture, share handy tips on growing patio strawberries, or go down the rabbit hole of how to do away with scale insects on a citrus tree.

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Terry Ward is a longtime travel writer who has lived in Australia, New Zealand and France. She’s now based in Tampa, Florida, and has cruised to the Bahamas with her family from Miami and Port Canaveral.