WHEN 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 Howard got back to making a garden around the weekend home in Western Massachusetts she and her husband bought in 2025—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 check back in 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 tricky questions to puzzle out along the way.

Elise Howard, a literary agent, began learning about natives more than 15 years ago as a volunteer at Riverside Park in New York City. Her book, “Plant This Not That” (affiliate link), offers 200ish 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 ground covers to hedges and more.

Plus: Join me and Elise for an event in Hillsdale, N.Y., on July 11 hosted by Books & Cake bookstore, at Roe Jan Brewery from 4 to 6 P.M. Details on that here.

And: Comment in the box at the bottom of the page to enter to win a copy of “Plant This, Not That.”

Read along as you listen to the June 8, 2026 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). (Author photo, below, by Leo Chapman. Photo of Virginia creeper, above, by Cbaile19 from Wikimedia.)

native-plant adventures, with elise howard

Download file | Play in new window | Duration: 00:28:01 | Recorded on June 5, 2026

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Margaret Roach: After we talked the last time, Elise, I just thought, oh boy, and you told me you were making a garden and I was like, “Oh boy. You’ve gone and set a big agenda for yourself, young lady.” [Laughter.]

Elise Howard: Yes, yes, indeed. Yeah. Well, most of the agenda came to me as I was making gardens in the past. But yes, it’s true that this is the first time that the book is out there in the world and I’m making a garden and it’s sitting by the side of a public road, and I am excited to practice what I preach, I guess.

Margaret: And who’s one of your neighbors, by the way, not so far away?

Elise: I mean, I’m not saying I bought the house for this reason, but when we arrived at the house, I had this feeling of anticipation as we were going up the road. We are across the street from Nasami Farm, which you well know is the research facility, propagation center and nursery in Western Massachusetts of the Native Plant Trust.

Margaret: Yes. So there you are. [Laughter.]

Elise: Yeah, it’s actually great. I go across the street, I load up my wagon, I take my wagon home, and then I return the wagon.

Margaret: I guess you don’t have to worry about where to buy plants, so we won’t agonize about that out loud together.

But anyway, before we get started, I want to say you and I are going to be in conversation, about native plants, of course, sort of in my neighborhood, the next town to me, Hillsdale, N.Y., on Saturday, July 11, at an event hosted by Books & Cake, which is the newest (and most dessert-filled) bookstore in my neighborhood. And we hope people can come join us.

So the place you’re gardening, in Western Massachusetts, how big a place, what’s it like? What kind of an environment is it that you’ve … It’s an older home, I believe, that you’ve been renovating.

Elise: It is an 1813 home. It was the original farmhouse in the area. Interestingly, it only had two owners for about 75 years before we bought the house. And while all the rest of the properties nearby pretty much maintained their status as farms, or right next door there was an apple orchard, our place was no longer agricultural. And so of the about 2 acres, I would say two-thirds of it is wooded at this point, and then a third of it is cleared for the house and the yard. And because it’s the old farmhouse, it is pretty close to the road, but it’s a pretty rural road.

Margaret: O.K. So you have some wooded areas and you have some open areas. I mean, right away, are you a Zone 6A or are you a 5B or what are you, do you think?

Elise: Margaret, I don’t even know what zone; I’ve stopped gardening that way.

Margaret: She  has no idea [laughter]. Well, you’re one of those two. No, I’m just curious just because roughly speaking, I mean, it is good to know which plants would be hardy for you supposedly. And I know you’re picking according to nativity.

Elise: I know that the local natives would be hardy for me, but it’s true. I think I’m 6A-ish. And I will say that I use those trees to get me really close to 70 percent. And so some of the near-natives that are dear to my heart have made their way into the garden already.

Margaret: So that people understand who didn’t hear our first conversation, your 70 percent-

Elise: So a number of people, including Doug Tallamy, who some regard as the guru of the native-plant movement, have arrived at the conventional wisdom that if your garden, if your residential property, has locally native plants, is planted with at least 70 percent locally native plants by biomass—so that’s why trees count so much and are so important—then you are doing the work that is necessary to support our local ecosystem, starting with pollinators and the insects that feed on and live among our native plants.

Margaret: So then with the other 30 percent you can indulge in I think what you call “friendly” non-natives? [Laughter.]

Elise: So I have these concentric circles that I think of now where locally native plants, and county is about as specific as you can get, but some people talk about your eco-region or your state, but you have locally native plants. And then near-native plants, and by those, I mean plants that are native to areas fairly nearby and as you say, that will thrive in my zone, in my climate and conditions. And then after that, yes, we talk about the polite non-natives, because the one thing you don’t want to do is bring in anything that’s invasive, which includes a lot of our stalwart traditional garden plants that we now understand are not only not positive but are negatives, because they’re crowding out other plants. But polite visitors from afar.

O.K., this spring I’ve been doing a lot of speaking about the book at bookstores and with garden clubs. And a couple of weeks ago, peonies were in bloom in New York and New Jersey where I was speaking, and people wanted to know if they could keep their peonies. And the answer is, yes, you can keep your peonies, provided you’re working toward—and in making a new garden, that’s an important thing to bear in mind—provided you’re working towards 70 percent native, if you want to keep peonies, if you want to keep … I’d like to say roses, and people bring up roses. And I would say if you can sustain them without the addition of a lot of fertilizer and certainly without pesticides, then yes, those polite non-natives can find a place in your garden.

Margaret: Right. So that’s the philosophy. So here you are, you have this 2-acre property, you have this old house, which I’m sure needed a little TLC and might have cost a few dollars to just fix a couple of things [laughter] here and there (she says living in an old house herself in a rural place in the same zone). And so it’s overwhelming getting started, and we have big plans, and then cha-ching!, you start to total it up.

I mean, I was just at the garden center the other day and I mean, I have an established garden already on a little over 2 acres, but I just went looking for things for some big sort of pots, and I was calculating how much it was going to be for each. I have these big 3-foot-wide terracotta bowls that I have out on a patio and a couple of other places. Wow. And then I thought, wow, what if I were just starting a whole landscape right now?

Elise: Yes. And in this yard in particular, there’s some invasives that I have to battle, but honestly, I’ve barely scratched the surface of those yet, because Massachusetts has a new law that requires new septic systems in a lot of houses when they change hands. And we needed to put in an entire septic system which caused a huge part of the gardened area of the landscape to be dug up.

And then there was one particularly ferocious wind and rainstorm, I think in the early spring of 2025, that is how we discovered that we had a significant grading problem. So I had this small patch of back lawn that I kind of loved because it was mostly ferns and violets, which is exactly what I wanted in a lawn, and it all got buried underneath soil that the builders had to bring in to do the regrading. So yes, I had a lot of bare space to fill in, and I guess my thoughts turned from treating the whole thing like a mixed border or entrance garden with a mix of shrubs and perennials and small trees to realizing that I just didn’t have the wherewithal to do that immediately, both not just the economics of buying plants, but the labor and the time.

So one thing I did, and this is something I’m happy to see taking much more hold, is where I needed to quickly fill in the leach field to keep woody shrubs and tap-rooted things out, I bought hundreds and hundreds of plugs. And I used sedges and then I used more aggressive natives like anemones and Physostegia [above, from Wikimedia by R.A. Nonemacher] and then some other not-so-aggressive things like Heuchera and Canadian columbine. And I planted hundreds of plugs in that space. [Below, an underplanting of sedges from “Plant This, Not That.”]

Margaret: And so we said earlier that you live across the street from-

Elise: Nasami, yes.

Margaret: [Laughter.] …Nasami Farm, like the nursery, etc., of native plant trust and a lot of people don’t live across the street from that. So getting plugs or liners or little baby plants, which is a much more economical way to do this. Plus when we’re doing an ecologically focused planting, we don’t want onesies, we don’t want polka-dots of one of these and one of those, because the insects, it needs to read for the pollinators from above. It needs to be legible.

Elise: Yes, it needs to be legible. And also if you look at the classic case of monarchs and milkweed, they lay their eggs on milkweed, but then those eggs hatch and eventually you have caterpillars, and they use the milkweed as a food source. And if you don’t have sufficient plants, they will starve or need to go elsewhere.

Margaret: Right. So for legibility and sustainability to these creatures, we need to think about drifts and masses, at least even if they’re on relatively small scale compared to out in the wild on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of acres. But we still have to think bigger that way. And so plugs are great.

And I will say to people, if you don’t know a source, contact your nearest native plant society and you can find out about that at nanps.org, the North American Native Plant Society website, nonprofit website, and they have a resource tab on their top of their website and you can drop down to the native plant societies list and you can find the one in every state and every Canadian province. And those websites then usually—the one for Minnesota, the one for New Jersey, the one for wherever—usually have some information about accessibility locally of different resources or you can get in touch with them, because there’s nothing like local 411. Do you know what I mean?

Elise: Absolutely. So I’ve been in conversation at some of my book events with the local native plant society folks. And I would say that what you just said about the local 411 is especially true, because they are essentially evangelists for getting everyone to plant native plants. And nobody loves to talk about their hobby or their mission as much as native-plant people. So they welcome the questions, they welcome sharing information.

I will also say that on social media like Facebook, most of the active state native-plant societies have a group there or you can look up, you can just search for your state and native plants, and you will find lively conversations and those are great places. And as native plant nurseries, local ones, proliferate, these are the people who have that information quickly.

Margaret: Yes. And they also understand, the plant society members and so forth, they understand that when we want 20 sedges or 50 sedges for a space or a hundred sedges, we don’t want to spend $25 per nursery pot. It’s prohibitive, yes, to have a retail-priced nursery perennial, or $19.99 even or whatever it is. But do you know what I mean? We have to find something else, and the plugs are the way to go, and they understand that.

Elise: And plugs, just so folks have an idea, plugs usually come in at closer to somewhere between $4 and $5 at retail. And then of course you have to commit to, well-

Margaret: Like a tray of whatever it is.

Elise: Yeah, a tray of them, but I’ve also seen people get more creative. You can get a mixed tray, for instance. So maybe you’re buying four or five of five or six plants.

Margaret: And the societies also often have plant sales, swaps, seed exchanges, all kinds of other things. So that’s the way to get plugged in (haha) about plugs. [Laughter.]

Another thing that I would think getting started besides the economics and the time management, the time commitment, and so forth, I would also think—you mentioned it a little bit, you said the invasives—that sort of having to scan the landscape and really take, because of what you know having written the book and the work you’ve done elsewhere in your gardening work in the city, you know that you need to be on the lookout and sort of assess the place and figure out what you’ve got ahead of you, what issues the land presents. Like you mentioned the one about drainage and the-

Elise: Well, so we saw the property in November and we closed at the end of January. And so it was in April of the following year or April of that year that I discovered goutweed everywhere. [Above, goutweed by Cbaile19 from Wikimedia.]

And that is a plant that was brought in as an ornamental and because it’s fast-growing and fills spaces quickly and it has taken over pretty big spaces in this landscape. And I’m not that far from two maybe three significant waterways. There are endangered turtles across the street from me near Nasami Farm. And so I want to be as mindful and careful as possible about the use of herbicides.

But I am at the point where I look at this vast landscape of goutweed. I’ve actually investigated goats, can’t find any so far. I’m still looking. [Laughter.] But I’m at the point where I’m contemplating whether or not on balance to eliminate this rampant invasive, I need to look into at least some water safe herbicides. That’s something I haven’t gotten to yet, but I’m doing the research and I’m thinking about it.

Margaret: Right. And it’s a hard decision philosophically, personally. Obviously I’m against them. I’ve been an organic gardener for my career, my life, whatever, but I have come to understand through my work that many of our leading conservation organizations doing restoration ecology and so forth have to use them in a very sane and the safest way and in the most minimal way for the greater good, in order to make a space rehabilitatable. That’s not a word, but you know what I mean? Restorable.

Elise: Restorable. Yes.

Margaret: And so they don’t go out willy-nilly spraying into the air; crazy stuff. They time it according to the life history of the plant they’re trying to eliminate. They do the proper research, they use the right substance, they use a minimum amount by, again, the proper timing, but also the proper application method, which might be cutting it down and applying it to the stump, so to speak, or what’s left.

Elise: Exactly.

Margaret: And these are very, very specific things that often require a professional, someone to intervene who’s professional, not just like cuckoo, “Oh, let’s go buy $50 worth of this stuff and spray it all over the place.” That’s definitely off the list.

Elise: Right. And I would say yes, it is the method of last resort, but as you said, sometimes when you think about the balance of the equation, using minimal product in the safest, most controlled way. And I think the thing to know about that is that people have done the research that there are incredibly specific methods. The way you treat goutweed is different from the way you treat knotweed is different from the way you treat Oriental bittersweet. So you want to be as specific and thoughtful and careful as possible.

Margaret: Yeah. So it’s tricky and I don’t know the answer. I don’t know. But as again, there are people whose work I respect and am grateful for, again, conservation people, who have explained to me why they believe it’s a tool they do need in their toolkit. And so I have to pay attention to that, and I have to respect that because-

Elise: The way we’re both talking about it though, I feel like I approach even the thought of it with a little bit of dread.

Margaret: Exactly. We’re just bringing it up, but it is important, when we’re making a landscape, to really look at the place both for its assets and its difficulties [laughter].

Elise: Well, another thing, Margaret, is that there are some large, mature introduced shrubs in this landscape. I think when I first got there, I thought, “Well, these have to go.” And what I’ve now come to realize is that they’re lower down on my list now, that I need to get the garden in shape, I need to get the bare areas having something growing on them.

And just to get back to that initial plan, what I’ve done is covered a lot of the space that I know I can’t get to with my original mixed-border plan in mind with a woodland-edge seed mix that’s all native. And then I will begin reclaiming that area. But in the meantime, there are some non-native hydrangeas, there are a couple of roses, a few other things like that are relatively benign that I’ll get around to as soon as I’ve dealt with the completely empty spaces.

Margaret: Well, I always think as gardening, my to-do list, as a triage list, because I can’t do everything and I’ve got to do it in priority order. I have to be ruthless that way. So I just want to say, and I know this is just a project that is underway and not you haven’t been there for 10 years or whatever, but are there already some victories? Do you already feel like have there been some senses of elation that things have been accomplished?

Elise: Yes, I have discovered there was some invasive rose, multiflora rose; you should have seen me on that day, and the scratches on my arms the days after.

Margaret: I’ve had that outfit. I’ve looked that way.

Elise: But when I took all of that away, I found lady ferns, I found sensitive ferns, I found Virginia bluebells [above, photo from Wikimedia by Catie Drew] and with more space and air, they have expanded in a most lovely way. And I’ve got some Virginia creeper growing, which is a pollinator powerhouse, growing in and near the woods [photo, top of page]. And it looks great all season long. It’s in the right places. It can be an aggressive grower, but I’m delighted to have it. And last fall, it was just spectacular.

Margaret: So that was like a little discovery, a better discovery than the goutweed [laughter].

Elise: Yeah, exactly, exactly. I just look that way when I’m feeling overwhelmed by the goutweed.

Margaret: Well, and again, I think part of it is approaching it as there’s a sort of a triage approach. We can’t do everything and we have to be O.K. with that. We have to let go of that obsessive thing of like, “Oh, I’ve got to get it all done right now.” Because it’s an ongoing relationship, right?

Elise: Well, and I think that’s the beauty of a garden, too, is that it is ongoing, that change is not only always possible, but is guaranteed. And so there’s always a good reason to be out there and editing and changing your mind and trying new things and adding more.

Margaret: Right. Well, Elise Howard, I’m glad to speak to you again and I’m going to have to come over someday and see what’s going on over there. But at any rate, I’m going to see you July 11 in Hillsdale, N.Y. So I hope to speak to you again soon and I know I will then.

Elise: Thank you so much, Margaret. I’m looking really forward to it.

enter to win a copy of ‘plant this, not that’

I’LL BUY A COPY of “Plant This, Not That” by Elise Howard for one lucky reader. All you have to do to enter is answer this question in the comments box below:

Is there some troublesome non-native you are looking to swap out this year (or one maybe that you did last season)?

No answer, or feeling shy? Just say something like “count me in” and I will, but a reply is even better. I’ll pick a random winner after entries close at midnight Tuesday, June 16, 2026. Good luck to all.

(Disclosure: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)

MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 17th year in March 2026. 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 June 8, 2026 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).