Today Virginia is chatting with Anne Helen Petersen, author of four books and co-host of the Work Appropriate podcast, who also writes the newsletter Culture Study—and its recently launched little sister, Garden Study. We're exploring how gardening can be part of perfectionism and productivity culture—or its radical undoing.

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes—including the director's cut of this conversation where VA and AHP answer all of your gardening questions.

Disclaimer: Virginia is a journalist and human with a lot of informed opinions. Virginia is not a nutritionist, therapist, doctor, or any kind of health care provider. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions she gives are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

BUTTER & OTHER LINKS

the reader survey

the Sunset handbook

Monty Don as “gardening god” and fashion icon

clematis pruning groups

growing vegetables for a lot of diet culture reasons

Great Dixter and the Vita Sackville West garden

The Optimization Sinkhole

renovation culture

diet culture happening in garden culture

Duluth Trading Co overalls

overall shorts from Target

a gardeners tool belt

A Good House for Children by Kate Collins

throw pillows from Anchal Project

FAT TALK is out! Order your signed copy from Virginia's favorite independent bookstore, Split Rock Books (they ship anywhere in the US!). Or order it from your independent bookstore, or from Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Target, or Kobo or anywhere else you like to buy books. You can also order the audio book from Libro.fm or Audible.

CREDITS

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by Virginia Sole-Smith. Follow Virginia on Instagram or Twitter. Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing. The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe. Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell. Tommy Harron is our audio engineer. Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

Episode 104 Transcript

Our gardener origin stories:

Anne

I grew up in a house that had a ton of gardens. My mom’s a huge gardener. I grew up in really arid Idaho, not in the mountains—actually the lowest point in Idaho. But my mom had over 250 roses and a huge vegetable garden and all sorts of things and planted all of it herself because it was a vacant lot before we built our house. So, many of my memories as a kid are “oh, your mom’s out in the garden.” And I was not really interested in it at the time. I was not that kid was like, “Mom show me how to plant a pea,” or whatever. There were some flowers that I liked in the garden. I really loved the bleeding hearts. And then when I graduated from college, I came to Seattle and was a nanny for several years and I got so bored when we were out walking. You know, the two year old that I was walking with, we talked to about trucks and stuff like that.

Virginia

There’s only so much discourse there.

Anne

This was before phones, so I couldn’t even be a bad nanny and look at my phone all the time. I just had my own mind. I would go on a walk 2-3 times a day in this little Seattle neighborhood and I learned all of the plants. The parents of the kiddo I was nannying for had a Sunset handbook, which is the bible of gardening out here in the West. Also, the house that I was living in at the time with my friends had a pretty substantial garden. I was like, okay, I’ll do some gardening out here and that taught me a lot about those plants. Then when I was in grad school, the first place that I lived in Oregon, I had a pretty robust vegetable garden that was really fun to do. And then I moved to Texas and I was like, I know nothing.

Virginia

Oh wow, totally different.

Anne

I tried to grow some things on my balcony. It was horrible, just abysmal, and I didn’t garden again. Then I did a little bit of vegetable gardening in Montana, especially during the pandemic, like a lot of people. But then I moved to an island off the coast of Washington that had an incredible, luscious garden that was really mindfully put in by the previous owners of the house. It has like 40 to 50 rhododendrons and azaleas that succession bloom. It has a climbing hydrangea that’s 40 feet tall and probably 40 feet wide. There’s several of them that come together seamlessly.

Virginia

Which is ancient, those grow so slowly! Rhododendrons and climbing hydrangeas are some of the slowest things to establish.

Anne

It was probably planted in the 1960. And I’ve just fallen in love with gardening, like deeply in love with it, the last couple of years.

Virginia

I love this.

My origin story is also mother-related. My mom is British. Gardening is the national pastime there. And it’s a big part of mainstream culture in a way that it’s just not here in the United States. (See: Monty Don as “gardening god” and fashion icon.) So my grandfather was a really serious gardener, my aunt, my cousins, just that whole side of my family. And I wanted nothing to do with it, like, zero interest as a kid and a teenager and even throughout my 20s. You getting interested in plants at 24 I feel like is quite a child prodigy with gardening.

Anne

I really have to emphasize how much this had to do with having nothing else to do.

Virginia

I went to college in New York City and then stayed in New York City through my 20s and so it was not really on my radar. But then we moved up to the Hudson Valley and when we bought our first house here, I was immediately overwhelmed because there was a yard. And then I had a friend that spring take me to lunch. I think we went to sushi and got sake and I was like, a little tipsy. And then she was like, “We’re going to go to Home Depot and look at seeds.” And I was like, oh, yeah, that seems great. And I got totally hooked that year. I started with a couple of pots and then by the end of the summer I was ripping up beds and remaking everything.

Anne

That’s so funny that you started with seeds from Home Depot!

Virginia

The most basic gardening experts.

Anne

Yeah, like, maybe not even viable, right?

Virginia

No, none of them. But I just needed a little toehold. I needed one little piece to feel doable and then it was like all this genetic predisposition kicked in. It turns out you turn 30 and all of your British gardening DNA becomes activated. And now here we are 12 years later and it’s my main hobby and obsession.

I do think with gardening it feels like learning a foreign language at first. It’s not just naming the plants, also every plant has its own particular ecosystem and story and pruning strategy. I feel about it the way I felt about learning the New York City subway system the first year I lived there. I just had to plan on the fact that I was going to go the wrong direction and end up in Brooklyn all the time.

Anne

For me it was go the wrong direction and end up on—what’s that little island? If you take the F, you end up on that little island.

Virginia

Roosevelt Island! Yes. It’s because it was this thing that was put together with no master plan and it’s just like, it is what it is.

Anne

I still feel that way about so much with gardening, too. Clematis still scare me so much.

Virginia

Oh yeah, with the pruning groups. How do you ever know what pruning group you’re in?

Anne

Type one, two, three!

Virginia

So, we were both at one point vegetable garden gardeners. And now we have zero vegetable gardens.

Well, I have some tomatoes.

Anne

Not even tomatoes. The closest I get is rosemary.

Virginia

Tell me, why is it not vegetables anymore for you? What are your main garden passions at this point?

Anne

I loved vegetables when I was starting out because I think it is a great entry point. It’s a lot more straightforward. It’s like, I plant the spinach seeds at this time, you can see it in the books.

Virginia

It’s very mapped out.

Anne

There are great books that show, here’s when you plant the spinach seeds, here is when you plant these other things. There are a lot of things, though, that I think oftentimes frustrate people because there are just there are vegetables that are very hard to grow. Carrots! Really hard to grow.

Virginia

Right! Shockingly hard.

Anne

And we in the Pacific Northwest, we have great weather to grow a ton of crops, but bad weather to grow a lot of the fun stuff, like peppers. You can’t grow any sort of melons really, like maybe you get one. You can grow hard squash and that sort of thing. But most people, just like everywhere else, just grow a billion zucchini and then drop them off at everyone’s doorstep.

Virginia

I will not grow zucchini.

Anne

I think also there was something lovely about planning every year. But then also like there was a lot of work, too. And every year is an empty bed.

Virginia

Yeah, that’s true.

Anne

Most of my containers are annuals with a couple perennials, like each pot has maybe one perennial. So I wanted that space for things that were there during the winter, too. That’s the other thing. I think as you continue gardening, you figure out that in the winter, when I feel so gloomy and sad, I want to be able to look out the window and see something.

Virginia

Yes, the winter interest of it all. You talked about that in a recent piece. It is the funniest phrase. And yes, it’s all I want.

For me, there were two pieces to giving up vegetable gardening. One was we were not eating a lot of the stuff. I realized I was growing vegetables for a lot of diet culture reasons, right? And a lot of the Michael Pollan, foodie, mid 2000s - 2010s stuff that I was then ready to get out of.

But two, it didn’t feel as satisfying creatively. With perennials and annuals, you play around much more with color. There are a lot of design elements. For me gardening is more of a creative expression. I don’t know, we can unpack that, maybe that’s very bougie and privileged, but it’s what actually I love about it.

Anne

For beginners: A perennial is a plant that comes back every year and an annual is a plant that thrives for a season and then dies.

We recently had a conversation in one of my newsletters about why would you plant annuals if they die every year? But a lot of gorgeous, gorgeous plants—especially plants with a lot of color—are annuals and that’s part of why people plant annuals.

Virginia

And they bloom the whole season, usually. Whereas perennials, like lilacs, it’s an amazing two weeks. And then the peonies are an amazing two weeks. There are a few perennials, like my Oakleaf hydrangea shrubs will bloom for a longer stretch but a lot of perennials have this brief spectacular moment and then they’re done. Whereas annuals can then tide you over.

Anne

And I’ll say, too, that I think part of the reason I vegetable gardened in the first place was that I could justify it as like I’m saving money by growing vegetables.

Virginia

Yeah, sure.

Anne

Actually, I think when I garden in grad school, there was some truth to that because I would eat the same thing all the time. The fact that I had two zucchini that I could take from a plant basically every day for two months of the year, yeah, sure. Although, zucchini are really cheap.

Virginia

Really inexpensive.

Anne

Tomatoes, maybe a little bit more. There actually are all these calculators and stuff in different books that show you which plant saves you the most money. Like growing this saves you the most money.

Virginia

I do think tomatoes are one, once you’ve invested in the raised bed or whatever. There are a lot of sunk costs to gardening. But sure, if you have a place already to put them, buying a couple of seedlings or starting from seed if that’s your ministry—it’s not mine. Buying a couple of seedlings for $4 at the beginning of the season and then you will have pounds and pounds and pounds of tomatoes, but you will also spend lots of time watering and fertilizing and all of that has a value as well.

Anne

When I was very into vegetable gardening, it’s no mistake that it was also during grad school when I was very invested in productivity culture. Like if I wasn’t working on something, my leisure had to be work in some capacity. And now as I’ve tried to divest myself from productivity culture, I am so much more open to like, I’m just piddling around, just doing stuff. Even if I’m the only person who sees it, it doesn’t matter.

Virginia

Leisure can be just having something pretty and enjoying it. It’s easy to look at your garden and see only a to-do list at a certain point. But instead, just enjoying going out and doing a five minute like deadhead or the small little things. Just that puttering around is something so soothing and regulating to me about just like the quick evening garden putter or the early morning garden putter. It’s so nice.

Anne

Charlie, my partner says if he doesn’t know where I am in the house—because we both work from home—at least in the summertime, he’s like, “I know, you’re just out with your plants.” And sometimes it will be that, oh, I just went to take the garbage out and I’m just looking at my dahlias.

Virginia

My kids know the same thing. They know to come find me in the garden, always. And a lot of it is like, “I’m going to check the mail” and I’m just out there.

Anne

I find it’s so useful when I’m concentrating on something. I have days that are writing days where I’ll sit in one spot for a long time just trying to pound out a draft of something. And I used to check Twitter during that time. But now I’ll go out and I’ll look at my flowers. It really scratches an itch in a similar way.

Virginia

I agree! Without the nasty screen hangover part.

Anne

Right, because I’m still looking for things that have changed. And I think you could actually honestly do this if you had like three pots on your windowsill. Like, plants change so much. They change overnight. They change over the course of a day if they’ve been watered, right? There’s just so much that you can look for, not to sound weird and boring. You and I have talked a little bit about this. I think about how it’s kind of like a puzzle to figure out.

Virginia

I was thinking about how I’m doing less jigsaw puzzles right now. I realized the other week it’s because it’s garden season. It is this constant puzzle and there is a lot of constant troubleshooting, like why is this not happy here?

I’m in the Hudson Valley. We live on a small mountain, so it’s very rocky woodland. It claims to be zone six, but it really behaves more like a zone five because we’re up a little bit. And lots of shade. Lots of rocky soil, lots of dry shade. In my first garden, we had a Victorian with a small, sunny lot in town. It was such a shift to come here and figure out gardening in a rocky, woodland-y kind of place. But that has been really satisfying too, I’ve actually really gotten into shade gardening here.

Anne

I should say that I am in zone eight. And I live on the water—it’s not fancy! There’s a lot of sand from the sandstone that’s the native rock here. And there are a ton of native plants everywhere you look just because it’s a very rural island. I live next to two houses, but the native stuff is taking over all over the place. This is, I think, kind of interesting and something that people don’t always talk about with gardening. The county regulations, especially with our island, are very specific about what you can and can’t plant on the shoreline.

Virginia

Yeah, that makes sense.

Anne

Within so much distance of the shoreline. I have a grandfathered in lawn that you could never get away with planting now, but I’m slowly getting rid of it.

Virginia

Because you need more garden space!

Anne

Totally, I am slowly tearing out the grass. Like, what if I just make a little bed over here?

Virginia

What if this one just got a little wider over here?

Anne

Yeah, just a little bigger. But we also get a ton of wind coming in from the water and it changes what you can grow on one side of the house and the other. Things have to be very robust to stick up to that icy winter wind. Figuring it out is part of the fun, too, right? Like oh, this lupine loves it here. Why don’t I get more lupines and put it there?

Virginia

Or will it please make more for me? That’s always satisfying, when something actually starts to really spread out. You moved into a very established garden, which was my experience with my first house. But with this house, the previous owners had put in zero garden basically. It was a total blank slate, which was wonderful in lots of ways. Because it is hard sometimes with an established garden when you’re battling against somebody else’s vision or, like, why did they put this here and it’s so hard to get out.

Anne

Fortunately, we didn’t have any of this, but I’m sure so many people listening have battled the weed netting.

Virginia

Yes, yes. I had that in my first house.

Pus there are trends in plants, right? Our first garden had so many small, striped variegated hostas, not the good fat hostas, but the little ones. People love to put those everywhere here. And I dug up millions of them in my last house. So I didn’t have that problem here. But I did have nothing, which was also intimidating and hard to figure out. I have spent years watching these beds that we did put in finally starting to knit together, like finally figuring out what works and will actually self-sow and make itself bigger here. My whole mission in life is always less visible mulch. I don’t want to see the mulch! I want the plants to knit together. And it takes a long time.

Anne

Well and this where I think that gardening is sometimes a hard hobby to imagine, specifically when you don’t own the house, when you’re moving a lot. Because perennial gardens in particular, part of the reason the plants cost more money is because they last theoretically forever. And to be able to envision yourself in one place is really hard for a lot of people for all sorts of different reasons, right?

Precarity is the defining characteristic of our contemporary existence. So if precarity is the enemy of long term planning, I always think of having kids is like the the biggest protest that people make in terms of precarity. They’re like, screw it, I’m still going to have kids, right? And I’m still gonna have a garden.

Virginia

Gardening is fundamentally quite illogical in a lot of ways. And sometimes it’s discouraging when you plant something, like will I even be here to see this? I do sometimes drive past my old house and there is a fence so you can’t totally see what they’ve done, but I know it’s not the same garden that I left them with. There’s a little heartbreak there.

Anne

Oh, it is my mom’s greatest sadness that the people who bought that house, our house with all of those roses, they tore out all of the rose beds. All of them.

Virginia

It is now my greatest sadness.

Anne

Can we talk about roses a little bit?

Because I actually think that there’s a really interesting generational divide. I think of them as Boomer plants.

Virginia

Agreed. And they are so high maintenance and they can be very fussy. The way you have to prune them back to the leaves of three or five or whatever it is. My British grandfather was big on roses and I remember learning about roses, but I have never planted a lot of roses.

Anne

But I think that they’re coming back now. I think that I’ve seen a lot of millennials getting into roses.

Virginia

Okay. Well, stay tuned, guys. If there’s a plant trend, I’ll probably be on it. Even though my sun garden is so small and there’s so much competition. Because I have so much shade I have to really love a plant to give it some real estate because I just don’t have that much. I don’t think roses are going to be it, but I do really appreciate the big beautiful cottage roses, the ones that get like almost like peonies. I’m really here for that.

Anne

I have a couple that I inherited and one of them is a tea rose. It’s like a baby pink sort of thing that I would never ever plant and I keep being like do I need to love this plant?

Virginia

Can you give it to your mom?

Anne

She just downsized and moved to my island, actually. But she is very specifically for the first time in her life not planting anything. She’s going to eventually have a few things.

Virginia

I don’t believe it. That’s just the moving transition. She is a gardener.

Anne

I know. But she’s like, “Whenever I want to piddle, I’ll just come over to your house.”

Virginia

Well, that’s great for you.

Anne

It is great for me! She pruned all of my ferns this year.

Virginia

I feel like she’s going to want that tea rose. Give it a year.

Anne

Alright. But I do have a climbing rose which I just love. That’s one great thing about roses is you can kind of be assholes to them if they’re in the right place they will still do whatever they want. They’re still going to come back. That’s something I admire about native plants, especially. You’re like, I’m doing everything that I can to eliminate you and they’re like nope this is mine.

Virginia

Yeah, oh my gosh my asters and my milkweed right now! They are just taking over. It’s a land grab, which is fair, it’s their land. But all the other stuff is like “I’m trying to do something here guys?” The asters are like, “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

I want to make sure we talked about Garden Study the new sub newsletter of Culture Study. You’re calling it Cup of Jo, but for gardens. I am obsessed with it.

Anne

This is something you and I workshopped together.

Virginia

I’m being recruited. But I’m so far resisting?

Anne

I asked on Instagram: I want something that’s like Cup of Joe for plants. People gave me different answers of what they thought that could be and none of them were quite it. I was like Virginia, we should just do this and we’re like okay, here’s what our posting schedule would be.

Virginia

We’re not ruling it out.

Anne

We’re not ruling it out, like having a spin off of both of our publications subscribers get free access as they do to Garden Study now.

Virginia

You’re continuing to evolve it.

Anne

Part of the reason it’d be great is, we garden in different zones! We have very different ways that we approach it and limitations on what we can do and can’t do and that sort of thing. We’d have so many great guest contributors. It’d be amazing!

But as it is, Garden Study is also amazing. It’s basically a gardening blog for people who are incredibly enthusiastic but not judge-y experts. So much gardening content that I have consumed on Instagram, in books, wherever is from master gardeners. I love expertise, but not with these gorgeous gardens that just make me feel bad about my garden.

Virginia

There’s definitely a piece I want to write at some point, possibly for our garden blog. There is a really fascinating story to be told about the elitism of American gardening culture. Like the Garden Conservancy, my mom and I go on some of their tours sometimes. Throughout the summer you can go and tour these fancy gardens. But it’s just billionaires with tons of money and land. We went to one last year, there was some billionaire who had a full time gardener who planted some million number of daffodils. So in the spring, it’s a glorious daffodil heaven. But you’re also on this weird estate.

There’s a lot going on with the way gardening gets talked about in a lot of those sort of elite, traditional gardening magazines and publications completely ignoring the fact that this is like a rich person with staff able to execute this vision.

Anne

Or like the money to take a weird spot in your garden and like have a landscape architect come in and fix it for you. That is not a reality for the vast majority of gardeners. A lot of people don’t even have the handy capacity to build a retaining wall.

Virginia

No, that’s so hard.

Anne

I always will remember, I don’t know where I saw it, but it was this man’s backyard garden on Fire Island. It was small and he had all these great little nooks that you could tell that he cherished. And he didn’t have a staff, at least like it didn’t look like it.

Virginia

It didn’t look like it needed a staff.

Anne

No, it was just something that you can tell was his hobby that he adored whenever he came up to Fire Island. I think they lived there most of the year.

But really what I like is other people who are like, “my peony is not blooming for the third year, what did I do?” I’ve had so many people volunteer to do garden interviews already because as evidenced by this podcast, people really like talking about their gardens but also no one in their like real lives often likes to talk to them as much as they want to.

Virginia

It is important to find your garden friends. It’s very important.

Anne

We’re going to do pictures and, like, please don’t feel like you have to like make it look amazing or anything like that because I think what it does is it lowers the bar to say joyful gardening looks like so many things. It looks like two containers on your porch. It looks like a super weedy patch but you put some wild flowers in there that make you so happy every time that you see them. It can look like so many things.

Virginia

This is one thing that I think British gardening culture has done really well. I mean obviously England has a huge class hierarchy and there are the big estates like Great Dixter and the Vita Sackville West garden. But there’s such a culture of everybody has a garden there. Everybody with their semi-detached house and tiny backyard is doing these amazing things. The nooks and the prize winning whatever, in this very lovely way.

My favorite garden in the world was my Auntie Liz’s garden. She had a small cottage in Suffolk and the garden is tiny but there are little rooms and it’s this enclave of magic. Just exquisite. She was a brilliant gardener, but the attitude there is that everybody can do it and it’s accessible. And not just this inspirational, fancy Architectural Digest way.

Anne

Well, and also I think that the in-person associations can oftentimes become very hierarchical and exclusive. I think a lot of like old biddies who are a part of some of these things that like, unless you are also someone who has been doing this your entire life you’re not invited. Like garden tours. I love them in theory, but I also think people feel like they can’t have their house on a garden tour if it’s not, like…

Virginia

There’s a reason it’s all billionaires estates around here, right? The bar to entry is too high. It’s a problem for the future of gardening. I do think there’s an awareness in the larger gardening community that this shift needs to happen because this is not something that is hand down-able.

Anne

There is a coffee klatsch that I go to on my island, where you just go and have coffee and it’s mostly all older ladies. It rotates between people’s houses and one of my favorite parts has been just going and seeing what their gardens are.

Virginia

Yes, it’s my favorite thing to do on vacation in a new town, walk around the neighborhood and see the gardens, I love it.

Anne

They all want to talk about their gardens. So that’s fun. You’re like, oh, you got this to bloom here. A lot of them are retired so they have a lot of time to spend on that.

Virginia

That’s how you get free plants from people.

Anne

Everyone wants to divide all of their perennials. Division, for people who don’t know, a lot of perennials you need to essentially cut them in half or more than half in order to promote more growth. So you can take a spade to the plant and either throw it away, but hopefully give it away. Sometimes on Nextdoor, people will be like, oh, I have all these divisions out. I am on a committee of people who are in charge of the library garden. And two years ago, it was entirely planted with divisions from people’s houses on the island.

Virginia

That’s so sweet.

Anne

I know, right? You can get a ton of stuff. If you just post even on like your local group, does anyone have any divisions in the spring?

Virginia

That’s so smart.

A piece you wrote this year was The Optimization Sinkhole. You talk about how we’re all conditioned now to want to upgrade and improve everything, especially in terms of domestic space. I really related because I had the same terrible coffeemaker that you tear to pieces. And I did upgrade but I was like, yeah, you’re right. I could have just not.

I do feel like gardening can so easily become this. I am aware often of having this never ending list of every corner of my garden, of our property. And we are surrounded by woods so then nature is here, the natives are coming in and the invasives are coming in.

I’m never gonna get every corner of my garden into some sort of state of perfect. Do you struggle with that?

Anne

Oh, I struggle with that all the time.

Virginia

I feel like this gets us into renovation culture, too, which I would like to talk about a little.

Anne

You and I are very similar in that we are perfectionist, type A, people pleasers. And so it’s difficult not to turn that lens onto the garden.

I think sometimes you can feel like, oh I have to weed everything. Everything has to be weeded all the time. Or, like you said, it’s easy to look at the garden and it turns into a to do list. Similarly to how it’s easy to look at your house and it becomes this room that needs to be renovated. Like, this needs to be fixed, always just constant dissatisfaction instead of reveling in the things that are amazing about it already. I think I recognize that impulse in myself, so when it starts creeping up, I can name it. Push it back. The other thing that’s been helpful to me is giving myself permission to be like, that’s next year’s project.

Virginia

Hmm. Yes, I think in terms of the five year plan of the garden a lot, and a lot of the five year plan is quite ambitious. But I have found some things that I put on that list, like when I did it when we first moved in and 2016, there are things on that list that I no longer want to do that I thought felt really essential, but the way we use the space has changed. I don’t need a hardscaped firepit area that I was sure we needed in 2016?! We don’t use our fire pit that much and it’s fine sitting on the grass.

Anne

Right? And sometimes things will come and wreck your plans. Like we had to replace our septic system in its entirety because it was their original septic system. It’s real bad. But the way that they had to do that is not only did they have to dig a huge hole to put in the new septic system, they had to take out the old septic tank and bury it in another part of our yard. Because the other option, just because of how our property is, was to either helicopter it out or take it out on a barge. Neither of which were viable options.

So that tore up so much of the lawn. And we had to decide okay, what parts of the lawn still matter to us? Like, are we going to reseed that? Which is really easy in the Pacific Northwest just because of our conditions. So we could do a little bit of that. But then, oh, the grass was always scraggly there anyway, what if we do this?

Virginia

Shade garden!

Anne

But seriously, like, there are other parts of my yard that I’m like, that’s a disaster zone. I have to make either big changes or I have to be okay with it being what it is. It was like, oh, these weeds are always going to come over from the neighbor’s yard and either I can be mad about it or I can, whenever I’m going down that path, just pick up a few weeds. Just the ones that are bothering me. But then also, thinking proactively, about things that can obviate the need to feel bad about things. So like you said, like, mulch plus ground cover.

Virginia

Really helps. Love a ground cover.

Anne

Things that are easy to take care of that you don’t make you feel like a failure all the time. Like, sometimes you want those challenges and then sometimes you just need a beautiful grass to feel like a success.

Virginia

My first few years, the garden did look a little rough, to be honest. I could do close-in shots of pretty flowers, but because there were so many new beds, there was so much kind of raw space. It was not really hanging together yet. I was aware of it not looking great. People weren’t rude about it, but you know, people will say like, “oh, it’s a new garden,” and these sort of kind but patronizing things where you’d be like, “I’m trying so hard, can you not?”

Now, in year four, for most of the garden it’s starting to really feel like a garden. And because I finally found the sun, the sun part looks like it’s like a Year 10 garden because things grow way faster in the sun. So now I’m realizing, I see problems and other people come over and just absolutely would have no idea what I was talking about.

Anne

Oh my gosh, yes, 100%.

Virginia

That is very liberating to realize, and also honestly screw anyone who judges your garden. That’s weird. But if you’re someone who struggles with that, like the house needs to be picked up before we host people, that mindset can definitely show up in your garden. And it can helpful to be like, no, the garden doesn’t need to be weeded before we have a barbecue this weekend. Nobody cares.

Anne

Nobody’s looking at it. The only person who will even notice it is my mom. She will be like, oh, some dandelions over there. Yeah, Mom, go pick it.

Virginia

Jump right in.

Anne

But no one else. If anything, I feel bad because I think sometimes my friends know that I’m seeing things. But actually, I think when I go to their house, I might see like some nightshade invading their hydrangea, and I just go over there and kind of casually rip it down. Not cause I think they’re bad gardeners, just like…

Virginia

It’s a service I can provide while I’m here.

Anne

I’m just trying to be nice to that plant. So I think that that’s one thing that we can all benefit from is thinking about, like, no one’s judging you. I’m not judging you.

Virginia

Again, I feel like this is a place where a diet culture shows up.

I wrote a piece last year about I think there’s a version of diet culture happening in garden culture with the obsession with only natives and needing to be a purist about natives.

Anne

Do you want to describe how this usually manifests?

Virginia

Part of the problem is we don’t even have clear definitions of natives. But it’s a plant that is native to your region. So, a plant that has been here for many hundreds, if not thousands of years in some form. So there are plants that are not native to a garden and if they get planted there, they will aggressively take over and push out the native plants. This is bad for local ecosystems because wildlife depend on all these native plants. So that’sthe backstory on natives.

But what will happen is Anne or I will post something on Instagram, or I posted in a local gardening Facebook group looking for suggestions for a shrub that does well in this climate. And people will just reply “natives.”

You’ll post a picture of your lilac or your hydrangea or my tree peony, which is Chinese and beautiful, and people will be like, “Why aren’t you planting more natives?” in this very judgey way.

Anne

Or I like you and I were talking about how I could be like, “I have all these rhodies and rhodies are native,” and you’re like, “well, they’re probably just gonna point out it’s like some sort of hybrid that’s actually not.”

Virginia

No, no, that’s the Korean Rhododendron and how dare you. Obviously, all the local wildlife will flee it.

I think there’s actually a lot of anti-Asian racism bound up in the natives thing because most of the invasives are Asian in origin. It feels bad to me, being this mad about invasives, and calling something Japanese knotweed. I think there’s something there, that a lot of the invasives get identified by their country of origin in that way.

Anne

Right? Even like the blackberry that’s incredibly invasive here in the Pacific Northwest is called Himalayan Blackberry, for example. But I think there’s a difference that is often lost, which is when you’re planting a tree peony, the tree peony is not going to take over your lawn.

Virginia

It can’t, it’s the slowest growing thing in the world.

Anne

It’s not going to take over anyone else’s lawn. It’s not going to change the habitat in your larger neighborhood. It is not an invasive.

Virginia

No.

Anne

It’d be different if I, instead of planting a new hydrangea in this little spot, if I was like, oh, you know what I should do? I should go get a bunch of blackberries from one of these Himalayan blackberry plants that are all over the island. I should bury them in my yard and start growing blackberries. There other things that are identified as invasive.

Virginia

Burning bush is a big one here.

Anne

They’re just different. And it’s, it’s totally different according to your zone, like, something like Wisteria is invasive in parts of the South. And it’s not invasive here. You have to baby wisteria.

Virginia

You have to beg it grow.

Anne

So a lot of this depends, too, on like, are you planting with any sort of knowledge or research? Because you can’t just depend on what is sold at the store. Not even your nursery necessarily, because so many people want wisteria so you’re still going to be able to get wisteria.

Virginia

I mean, burning bush is one of the most invasive shrubs around here and people love it because it turns bright red in the fall. You know, like New York, New England, we’re supposed to have amazing fall foliage. So they’re ignoring the fact that burning bush is not native here and it seeds itself everywhere. Like you see it in the wilderness, the woods, and it is a big problem. And it’s in every nursery for sure.

Anne

Right? Right. Because it’s asked for. So that’s different. You’re not like, hey, Facebook group, should I plant this burning bush in the corner?

Virginia

No, I’m like, “I had a lilac here. I’m thinking about something along those lines. What do we think?” And people are like, you should only have a native. So there’s just a purism about it. And there’s a lot of privilege involved. If you’re shopping mostly at Home Depot or big box stores for your plants, because that’s where they’re cheap, you’re not going to get a huge variety of natives. So, to require this of everybody is requiring everybody to have knowledge and expertise and the ability to order things from specialty stores or check out to different nurseries that specialize. It’s just not on everybody’s radar.

Anne

I will say that one of the cool things that a lot of places do more of now is local gardening associations or county extension offices—which sound like a very official entity but are actually just this very cool thing that’s nationwide where every county has an extension offices, agricultural office—they’ll do native plant sales. If you just want to have a garden that lives, like a native plant sale is an incredibly great place to get stuff that is going to thrive in your garden because it’s native, right?

Anytime people are incredibly prescriptive about how people should do something, if they’re not causing harm, it just, it bothers me. There can be people who that is their thing that they are obsessed with in the garden, right? It’s like, I want to have all these natives or I want above all else to have a pollinator garden. And just because you’re not focused on pollinator gardens doesn’t mean that you’re also not providing pollination.

Virginia

Or that I’m actively trying to prevent the pollinators.

Anne

You’re just spraying Roundup everywhere.

Virginia

Its a “if you’re not with us, you’re against us” mentality. So in my property, we have three acres. Most of it is woods, but we have this half acre meadow area that we have spent a significant amount of money and time turning into a native wildflower meadow. And I feel I have done that. And now if I would like to have some non natives, if I would like to grow some giant hostas or some dahlias and poppies and things that are my obsessions, I’m going to do that in the other parts of my garden.

Anne

Also, like, people are like “lawns are the devil,” and I’m like, well, I inherited this lawn. I don’t fertilize it. And like most people in the northwest, I don’t water it.

Virginia

So it it actually causing that much harm? Sometimes you need some grass to break it up.

Anne

I just think the main goal here is other people’s choices with their garden, if they’re not causing harm, is none of your business. If they ask for advice and are like, I’m looking for some plants here, a person could have suggested to you some native plants.

Virginia

Without emphasizing the nativeness. Like, tell me actual plants that might work in the conditions I just described.

I think where it gets diet culture for me is like, if I were to limit myself to natives, I would feel restricted. I would feel like I wasn’t allowed to have all of the abundance of pleasure and beauty that I want in my garden. I think natives are beautiful. But milkweed is never going to be a dahlia. They are just two different concepts. And I don’t need to garden with a set of rules like that.

Anne

And people get so legalistic about it in terms of, is it a real native, recent native or naturalized native? It’s like Paleo, where people are arguing over which foods did paleolithic people actually eat.

Virginia

I mean, given that we were originally covered with ice, I guess there are no natives. I don’t know how far back we’re going. But at some point, it was very difficult to grow things here.

Anne

Yeah. And sometimes I do think that people seek out those rules when they feel like they need to have restrictions.

Virginia

It’s a control thing.

Anne

In that optimization culture piece, the top comment is someone who said, “I think that I took all of the energy that I fed into diet culture and I moved it on to my house.”

Virginia

I’m not saying I feel called out by that, but I felt called out by that. Can definitely relate.

Okay, we are going to do some listener questions!

And there are a bunch of them. We’ll try to do short answers so we can get through a whole bunch.

Virginia

One person wrote:

Tips for taking over a garden. What are all these flowers, plants, bushes, and what do I do with them?

And someone else asked:

Advice for tackling a wild garden after stepping away due to illness? Feeling daunted.

And then:

Tips for a beginner who’s sort of starting from nothing?

Maybe that’s a separate category. Let’s talk first about this idea of like, you’ve either moved into a place or you’ve been away for a while, and the garden can just feel like this mess, like, I don’t even know where to begin.

Anne

So when I moved into my garden, there were some things that I knew and then some things I had no idea. A very useful app is the iPlant app or the Seek app is also really good. The identify the plant function on your iPhone is pretty good, depending. I would just save them into the app if you want to.

Another thing is a lot of different gardening companies do consults. If you have some money to just like figure out where you are, you can have them come out and they will tell you very basic stuff, like cut this back in fall, those sorts of things if you don’t have that basic knowledge.

And this is great for the person who had to step away for a while because of illness or for whatever reason, because of a season in your life where you weren’t able to be attentive to your garden, a perennial garden in particular is going to be fine. If you don’t cut it back, it’s okay. These plants are meant, in some capacity, to be able to live every year without someone babying them. So some things might go wild. Like, there might be some more weediness and that sort of thing. But if you can keep it just alive, which means basic watering, stuff will be fine. That means that you can come back to it and figure out oh, like, I’m supposed to fertilize these once a year. Which is true for most flowering bushes or trees in some capacity, that sort of thing.

What’s your advice?

Virginia

We had the situation with our first house and I think I broke it up in my mind into sections and I tackled one section rather than trying to do the whole thing at once. There was one long border that had a beautiful climbing rose and a lot of peonies and then just weeds, so I did the plant ID app to figure out that I could pull out most of it, and just leave the good stuff. Then I just worked on figuring out what I wanted to put there. So you could just tackle one section a year and be like, it’s fine, like three quarters of the yard is gonna look like garbage for a few years. But I’m just working my way around.

And I really support getting a consult. What we did when we moved into this house where I was very overwhelmed because it was a different type of gardening than what I’ve done before and it’s not like a straightforward lot shape. Like, the way they positioned the house on the lot is not where I would have put it and so there was a lot to figure out.

I did hire a garden designer who came and walked around with me and asked a lot of questions about how we wanted to use this space, like where were the kids going to play, where do we want to have people over, and she made me this really beautiful—I really want to frame it at some point—kind of blueprint of what the garden could eventually be. It was money, but it wasn’t tens of thousands of dollars. More than $500, let’s say, but investing in that upfront to have someone kind of break it down, then I have been able to year by year be like, Okay, do I want to work on a chunk of this this year? Like I said, we don’t need to hardscape a fire pit area, that was a whim I had that I’ve moved on from and actually it makes more sense to use the fire pit in this other place. But having that helped me feel less overwhelmed. So you can even do that yourself, but if you’re like a newbie, having an expert help you figure that out is super useful.

Anne

I also would suggest giving yourself time because you’re not going to know what it all is there until you live an entire year in your garden.

Virginia

This is so important. We should have started with this. This is a huge mistake I see people make all the time. I am so glad that the year we moved into this house I was pregnant and writing a book and I was like no we will not be gardening here this season because it meant I had a summer of just figuring out where we did get little slivers of sun. And even with that, we still got some of it wrong. We put a bunch of stuff in a bed that I then realized a year later was much deeper shade and actually none of that was going to bloom and had to come out.

So living somewhere and really getting to understand where you have sun where you have shade, like, where are you? What are your pathways around the property? What are your views out? Which window do you look out of most, where you want to be able to see the garden? Those kinds of things.

Anne

Where are there 600,000 Grape hyacinths that you had no idea were there? Where is there a majestic ancient peony that you’re like, Oh, I guess that’s there and I’ve never grown peonies before so I didn’t even know what it was. All of those things are so key. You can put mulch down if the weeds are a problem. I think that’s something that is oftentimes underrated is, like, what’s an easy thing I can do to feel a little bit more in control of this garden that’s already here. I can mulch it.

Virginia

All right. Next question is What to wear for bugs and sun?

And also I got a few people asking about ticks. Do you have ticks in the Pacific Northwest? I don’t even know.

Anne

A tiny bit, but they’re not the Lyme kind.

Virginia

I’ll speak to the tick part. I mean, the biggest thing we did, which obviously is not within reach of everyone, but we invested in a deer fence for our property and because it also made it dog-proof. And the upshot of that is way fewer ticks in our yard because the deer aren’t walking through and dropping them. Because we would have herds of deer, every night, coming in. The area that’s now a meadow was just constantly covered in deer poop. It was disgusting. So fencing is useful.

Anne

I never even thought about that in terms of deer.

Virginia

It really helped because deer and ticks here are just very abundant.

But you have the gardener overalls that you love!

Anne

I love them. They’re from Duluth Trading Co. They come in many different sizes, like they actually are size inclusive. I think they’re up to like 3x maybe? And fit large, like whatever you normally wear they fit larger than that. They come in different lengths and then also different fabrics. And yeah, I just love them. I garden in a baseball hat to protect my skin, but otherwise we don’t really have bugs. We don’t have ticks.

Virginia

Well, that must be nice.

Anne

The high is like 78 so like, I wear sunscreen on my shoulders.

Virginia

Anyway. I have some gardening overall shorts from Target that I will link, because I know they are plus inclusive. I’m pretty laidback because we have the fence. I don’t do a lot of tick prevention. But I do do tick checks every night. So it’s just a requirement when you live in these woods. But I don’t overly obsess about it.

We have periods of each season where the mosquitoes get really intense. They’re not all the time, but there are a few weeks in the spring where it’s either mosquitoes or little gnats that fly in your face. Usually if we have a wet summer, which we currently are, September gets pretty bad with mosquitoes, which sucks. I have a lot of citronella torches scattered around the yard. And I often will garden with the torch on and I have a bug net that I will wear when I really need it. I just put it over a little straw hat and it’s not an all year round thing. We are definitely a climate where our screen porch gets a lot of use. I do wear sunscreen for sure. But I also think like it’s important not to get overly precious, like I don’t use gardening gloves unless I’m doing something with thorns.

Anne

Oh interesting.

Virginia

I just never wear gardening gloves because I don’t want more things to do. I feel this way about exercise, too, like any sport that requires me to put on a bunch of gear, it’s just not gonna happen.

Anne

Something I recently got for a birthday present is the Floret, it’s like a tool belt, essentially, it’s a gardeners tool belt. And it’s leather, it’s beautifully made. You can get knockoffs. There’s a place for your needle nose trimmer, like for the small ones and then also for your normal clippers. You can also stuff your gardening gloves in there and gardening twine or whatever. Then I just have everything in it and it hangs on the hook outside next to the door so I just put it on.

Virginia

And you’re in gardening mode.

Anne

I also want to emphasize that, like, I don’t have bugs, but most of the year it’s raining and wet and muddy. I actually use my Carhartt overalls for those situations most of the time, just because it’s cold, and I put them over a sweatshirt and then I have a rain jacket on on top. And I love the permission to just get filthy. And I wash those overalls once a year, maybe. They’re just going to get muddy again, right? Like, it doesn’t matter. I hang them in like the downstairs bathroom and they just stay hanging out there. You don’t have to have special clothes. There’s no uniform, you can garden in cut offs in a tank top. You could garden in whatever you’re wearing now.

Virginia

I’m usually in pajamas because first thing in the morning I go out to eat my breakfast and then I start piddling around and I’m like, oh here I am, like aggressively weeding without a bra on. Don’t overthink it.

This person says

I grow herbs in small pots because I’m not good with plants but like to cook. Any tips?

I would say put them in bigger pots. I think the small pots are the hardest because they grow so fast.

Anne

Yes. And also they freeze really fast. A lot of herbs you can keep overwinter like oregano and thyme and rosemary, but they can also freeze when they’re smaller. It makes it easier for the water to freeze like the whole thing, the whole enterprise.

Virginia

Pots, the smaller they are the more finicky and high maintenance they are.

Anne

I would get a bigger pot and then put like three oreganos in it. That’d be so fun to have like lemon oregano and there’s so many different kinds that you can get to serve different purposes. And also, I think that if you can grow herbs, you can grow anything. They’re actually pretty finicky.

Virginia

Another tip for the Mediterranean herbs like oregano, thyme, rosemary, lavender. Mine do well if you have the regular dirt you plant them in, but then if you top them with some gravel, the gravel helps keep the water in and mimics the sort of Mediterranean like rocky hillsides that they want to grow on and they look really pretty.

Anne

Don’t ever be scared to give them a severe haircut. Anytime they look leggy, oftentimes after they bloom they look like that. Give them a big haircut and as long as they’re healthy they will rejuvenate.

Virginia

Yeah, they grow back fast to where they’re at.

Best fall plants besides mums?

Anne

Oooh you know what’s a huge hit out here? Everyone grows these are ornamental cabbages.

Virginia

Oh yeah, those are popular here, too.

Anne

I don’t love them because they start to bolt and then they look all shaggy underneath.

Virginia

Yeah, I agree. I also hate mums. I am really anti-mum.

Anne

I also hate mums.

Virginia

We might be controversial, we already went against natives so we might as well just…

Anne

You know what I like in the fall, are pansies.

Virginia

Oh, that’s nice.

Anne

Pansies can overwinter if it’s not horribly cold.

Virginia

They cannot do that here, but they can survive some light frost definitely. Because we had kind of a cooler spring, I planted pansies probably at the end of March and just this week they finally need to come out of their pots. They are really inexpensive and they can just like go a long time. That’s a great choice.

Anne

Yeah, if you’re in a moderate climate like mine, they can you can get them in March. They might like be a little sad in the summer because they don’t like so much heat. But then they’ll come back strong in the fall and then they’ll survive over the winter too and they self seed pretty robustly if you put them in the ground.

Virginia

Okay, zone five and six people, that part’s not true for us. Everyone else enjoy, but they are at least a very cheap annual.

My favorite fall bloomers for my area:

Asters are a great one. They bloom in September/October here. Goldenrod tends to bloom pretty late. And dahlias because we can’t put the tubers out until May, after May 15. So my dahlias won’t start blooming until August at the earliest and they will bloom until frost, like I will pull them out in November.

I am someone who lives in the Northeast and actually didn’t like fall for a very long time, because I don’t really like the color orange that much and I don’t really get the whole pumpkin spice thing and it is what it is. I am a summer person. Anyway, dahlias have made me a fall lover because they are so spectacular and I get to have like lots of different colors. They’re my favorite fall flower and they’re way cooler than mums.

Anne

Don’t sit on geraniums and petunias! My geraniums last until the first hard frost.

Virginia

That’s true. A lot of that kind of stuff. You don’t need to take it all out and replace it with pumpkins right away, slow your roll, guys. It’s fine.

Favorites for attracting hummingbirds?

Anne

You know what they have fallen in love with? I kind of accidentally planted this giant penstemon in a container and they are in love with it. Foxgloves, I find they like.

Virginia

Yeah, any tubular kind of thing. I’ve got some annual salvia, the little blue guys, they’ve really been coming for that.

Anne

Fuschias.

Virginia

Agastache. There’s one that’s literally called hummingbird agastache, it has like little pinky red flowers and they agree with the branding. They show up for it.

Anne

I also think that they love my nasturtiums, which are literally the easiest.

Virginia

Oh, that’s such a good one.

Anne

Yeah, either you can buy them very cheap as seedlings or you could just put the seeds in the ground and they’ll pretty much grown in anything. So, thats a great one.

Virginia

Oh, and the native honeysuckle, they’ll probably go for any honeysuckle but I do try not to grow the non-native ones because they are invasive in my area. But the native one, which sadly does not smell, but it has red flowers, the humming birds will show up in droves.

Okay, I like this question.

Why does gardening feel so much more satisfying as a home improvement than a renovation?

Hmm, interesting. I don’t even know if it’s totally true for me. I find renovating very satisfying, as well.

Anne

I’ve never renovated anything, personally. But we actually are redoing our bathrooms and it’s going to feel so amazing. I think that gardening is more joyful, however.

Virginia

I think so, too. You’re outside.

Anne

You’re outside. You’re doing it. That’s the one thing, I am not doing my renovation.

Virginia

No, I’m not going to tile a bathroom. Maybe somebody is though, and that’s great. I support the DIYers.

Anne

And your bathroom, you do it, and then you’re done. Whereas your garden is a living organism.

Virginia

I do think one of my favorite things about home decor, which I both truly enjoy and have to walk that line with optimization issues is, I do like the zhuzhing of home decor. Like deciding, oh, actually, I like this better in this other room. I’m doing it right now, like rearranging a few rooms and like, oh, this picture will look so good in here and putting things together, shopping my own house to spruce up an area that’s bugging me. Or realizing I can solve a problem by like, oh, we just need a stool here and I have a stool in the basement I can bring up and put there and now the kids can reach the sink or whatever it is. I think gardening scratches that same itch. You’re doing a lot of zhuzhing always. It’s a lot of like, okay, the coneflowers got dotted around too much. I need to move them and group them better this way. That’s so satisfying.

Anne

So could we talk about one thing that we skipped, which is what to do with weeds?

Just because they feel like it’s something that everyone wants to know and then people feel bad because they get judged about different things.

I grew up in a Roundup household. I don’t use Roundup at all now. Part of it is that I think if I use Roundup, if it rains, the Roundup then goes straight into the ocean which is terrible. God, we could go into all sorts of stuff about it, but like it’s just not great. It’s not a great thing and my mom is having to unlearn her Roundup tendencies. Because it really is a place where if someone saw you with a Roundup thing, they would come up to you and be like, we don’t do that here, for better for worse.

So I just ground cover, man. I love ground cover. Something that is going to just swallow those weeds. And then just chop at them. Think of them as nemeses.

Virginia

I think the more you plant, the fewer weeds you will have, or at least you will not to see the weeds as much. My more densely planted beds, there are weeds in there but it’s crowded, so it’s not really bothering me.

I don’t use chemicals in my main perennial gardens at all, but my exception was when we were reclaiming this meadow area, which was a big project. When we moved in this entire like half acre area was waist high mugwort, which is a very difficult weed and knotweed and a couple other pretty difficult to get out things. We tried hand pulling it for a season and quickly realized we were never going to win that way. So we did do one big spraying one year and kind of scorched the earth, mowed it all back after it all died down and seeded it with a native wildflower and grasses mix. It was terrible that year, and I was mortified people were going to see me spraying. But now we’ve had two years of this beautiful native wildflower meadow. So there are times where you’re like, this is the only way out. We have to burn the earth to save it. And that was my one time.

Anne

Yeah, you reclaimed it because of that. Sometimes people here, what you have to do with blackberry is oftentimes just to have someone come in with like an actual machine and then you have to burn it. You have to do a controlled burn on it. Same thing with what is it called? Horsetails. Horsetails are all over the place and they’re rhizomatic. So my friend lives essentially on a rhizome so what they do is they take a little blowtorch and torch it.

Virginia

Yep, I’ve done that. We had the dragon weeder, which is like this blowtorch thing. That’s really good for cracks where the weeds pop up, gravel or cracks in the driveway. Because it’s easy to control the flaming. We did one time host a party and people came over like, your yard is smoking. And I was like, Oh, right.

Anne

Always do it with a hose nearby. Never do it when your island is on a burn ban which we currently are.

Virginia

But I also think, as we talked earlier, embracing that weeds are always going to be there. You don’t need to be a perfectionist about it. They’re just part of the whole thing. A lot of them are not really hurting anything. They’re just not what you put there.

Anne

A weed is not a failure. It’s not a personal failure.

Virginia

Weeds are not a moral failing. That feels like very much like optimization perfectionism culture coming in. We don’t need that in our gardens.

Alright, the last question we’re gonna do before we do butter is

What is your gardening why? Decoration, wildlife, time in your body without anxiety, food?

I love that question.

Anne

That should be part of my garden study q&a. I think my why is just very embodied observationality. I feel very attuned to whatever I’m doing. Some of it is I think what people call flow state in different capacities. Time disappears for me when I’m gardening. On a meta level, I love that I am obsessed with and gratified by something that isn’t work. And it’s been a long road getting to that point.

Virginia

I relate to that, too. I think for me gardening was one of the first ways I enjoyed being in my body in a non diet-y, non-punitive way. So there’s a lot of healing that happened for me that way. I definitely relate to the flow state and to having an obsession that’s not work related, though here we are both bringing it into our work.

Anne

I know and I was mindful of that. I was like, am I just monetizing my hobby? No, I just actually want to talk about this all the time.

Virginia

I think, too, for me, there’s such a visceral joy I get when my poppies bloom, when my dahlias bloom, when these things that I’ve worked for and waited for it. I’m definitely someone to who can be like a little compulsive about shopping or wanting and craving, and the garden is a place where I can have that need met.

Of course, there is shopping because there is there’s buying way too many plants every spring, which I always do. But there’s also the reward of like, oh, there it is, like there’s that beautiful moment of beauty that I wanted.

Anne

But also teaching us patience, too. My dahlias are about to bloom, because we’re different zone, and every day I walk up and I’m like, are you gonna do it yet?

Virginia

What do we think guys? Anyone? Anyone?

Anne

Like waiting for stuff to come up in the spring? It’s just so delightful.

Virginia

Yes. Yeah, that is true.

Well, this was delightful. I’m so glad we did that.

Butter

Anne

I get a lot of books in the mail from people just because I feature a lot of books in my newsletter. Sometimes you pick up a random one that comes in the mail and it’s just amazing. This one arrived on Friday and I started reading it that night. And like, I feel like the book is devouring me instead of me devouring the book. It’s a gothic feminist mystery set in on the cliffs of coastal England. And it’s set in 1970 and it’s about, like, something’s wrong with the house.

Virginia

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Can you give us the title?

Anne

I haven’t finished yet. A Good House for Children.

Virginia

And who is it by?

Anne

Kate Collins, a first time author. Really beautifully written. Sometimes you’re like, oh, this is a great genre book, but writing is a little formulaic. This, the writing is, I think, actually really exquisite. So I highly recommend.

Virginia

I can’t wait, I can’t wait.

I’m going to recommend a house thing, which is my new obsession. I’ve only bought two and I feel like that’s real restraint for me. It’s these throw pillows from Anchal Project. My sister can be blamed for this new obsession, she turned me on to it.

It’s like a very ethically made awesome company. I think it’s kind of like East Fork but for textiles. Oh, and they’re just so pretty. They are pricey, but think of this as like slow fashion. You are investing in people being well paid for talented, skilled labor and it’s important. I’m obsessed with the geometric stitch throw pillows. I just got the offset lumbar.

Anne

I like the stamp throw one.

Virginia

. They’re just all really pretty really beautifully made. Again, obviously an investment. This is not your Target throw pillow, which I also own many of. I put them in a room the children don’t go in much because I don’t need melted chocolate chips ruining one of these. But if you’re looking for a really beautiful present for someone or yourself, it’s a cool company. They have clothes, they have bags, and I’m pretty into it.

Anne

I’m totally getting one of those.

Virginia

I feel like it’d be right up your alley.

Anne

I just have to be okay with a modicum of dog hair on everything.

Virginia

Yeah, there’s that.

Well, this was so much fun. Tell listeners where we can we can support your work. Obviously, everyone needs to go get on the garden study list.

Anne

Yeah. So the way to sign up for garden study, if that’s something that’s up your alley, here is the post that tells you how to do it. It is a subset, an opt-in subset of Culture Study, which is my newsletter. So if you subscribe to just Culture Study, you’re not going to get it. You have to opt in. It is just delightful. The comments are for subscribers only and every comment section is already just…

Virginia

It’s amazing.

Anne

And we’re going to have periodic threads where people troubleshoot things that they want to grapple with in their gardens or just like talk about their nerdy favorite plant. It’s a place for us.

Virginia

It’s a place for us. We needed a place. Thank you. I’m so excited. And we will continue to brainstorm our collaboration. Maybe it’s you being a frequent podcast guests for occasional garden study on the Burnt Toast podcast.

Anne

I would love that.

Victoria Field

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