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I SUSPECT I’m not alone when I say that weather extremes in recent growing seasons have made me feel a bit like a stranger in a strange land in my own garden, wondering what will bloom when and when to do what. And most of all, wondering what madness is coming next.

WHEN I READ the other day that Native Plant Trust, the nonprofit plant conservation organization in New England, had successfully raised the money to complete the endowment fund needed to save its region’s most imperiled native plants in a seed bank, it was like a silver lining kind of story.

INCREASINGLY in recent years, my garden weeds include more and more tenacious opponents. And the landscape along the roadsides nearby and pretty much everywhere I drive is one of hedgerows formed of a tangle of non-native shrubs and vines. I’m talking about invasive species, of course (like those Oriental bittersweet, Celastrus orbiculatus, in the Wikimedia image above), and I got in touch with Daniel Weitoish of Cornell Botanic Gardens, to hear how to identify which plants to target as we try to manage our landscapes and how to tackle them most strategically.

IF YOU’VE EVER tried creating and then caring for a habitat-style garden with native plants, well, let’s just say it’s not exactly the same thing as combining a group of hostas with some astilbes and a couple of bleeding hearts.

‘PLANTS TELL the story of a place,” says field botanist and native plant nursery owner Jared Rosenbaum. “If you want to be rooted on the earth you live on, you can look to plants to interpret that story.”

ORGANIC FARMING and gardening have always been based on the principle of feed the soil, not the plant. I recently got some expert advice for doing that, and also learned more about why our diligent soil consciousness matters so much, with the co-directors of the nonprofit Real Organic Project, a farmer-led organization advocating for food produced in concert with healthy soils and pastures.

HAVE YOU DONE your bulb shopping yet? It’s ordering time both for fall-blooming treats like Colchicum, which you can only buy now if you hurry, and for the ever-wider assortment of fall-planted, spring-into-summer blooming species.

I WAS SCROLLING through Instagram the other day—yes, sometimes I just can’t help myself—when I saw a post by Matt Mattus about Christmas cactus. So even though it’s still high summer, it made me long for one of my own.

WHEN MOST OF US think of growing herbs each spring, what we probably put into our shopping cart, whether from online seed catalogs or at the garden center, are the culinary must-haves: the basil, the parsley, the dill and such.

IT’S HYDRANGEA SEASON, and in the Northeast in particular this summer, it’s really been a crazy hydrangea season, with billows of blue bloom from bigleaf hydrangeas on view everywhere, it seems—which is not always the case in colder hardiness zones. It seemed like a good time to review what makes hydrangeas happy, and what hydrangeas make me and my old friend, Ken Druse, happy.

WE’RE GOING TO talk about collectibles today, but not the kind you score at a flea market or from an online auction. We’re going to talk about collectible trees. Yes, trees. A new book by Amy Stewart called “The Tree Collectors” introduces us to 50 people whose lives have been transformed by what she calls their “arboreal obsessions.”

ARE YOU THINKING about the possibility of transitioning an area of your lawn into something more diverse, like maybe a meadow? A question I’m asked a lot is how to go about it—the actual preparatory steps. So I invited Benjamin Vogt, a specialist in natural landscape design, to walk us through the process.

IT’S ONE of the best-known naturalistic gardens anywhere, and yet it’s perched in the most unnatural spot imaginable, 30 feet high above New York City traffic on an abandoned elevated railway line. The High Line on Manhattan’s West Side is celebrating the 15th anniversary of the opening of its first section, years that have been filled with expert lessons on gardening in this looser, nature-inspired style.

SOME OF THE many unusual fruits that Allyson Levy and Scott Serrano grow in their arboretum in the Hudson Valley of New York, like goji berries or maybe Schisandra (above), are ones you’re more likely to see on ingredient labels of health food store products than for sale in nurseries or growing in gardens. But grow them you can.

NOBODY WANTS to get the IRS notice in the mail that they’re being audited, heaven forbid. But when it comes to gardens, Rodney Eason believes that the occasional audit is a very positive process, and encourages us to perform one on our own landscape.

WHAT’S ONE of the best sources of inspiration and information about gardening you can get outside of a classroom, and that is also wonderfully entertaining? By making time to go visit other people’s gardens, we can open ourselves up to lots of learning. And on the flip side of that equation, opening our own gardens to visitors can be a pretty educational experience, too.

I SUSPECT every gardener has for years now over and again heard the warnings about the most widely used pesticides in the United States, neonicotinoids—or neonics for short. In 2013, the American Bird Conservancy issued a report warning of their impact on terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, and especially the ripple effect their use was having on birds. The Conservancy has issued an updated report with a telling headline, “Neonicotinoid Insecticides failing to come to grips with a predictable environmental disaster.” So where are we now with limiting the use of these pesticides and what can we as citizens and gardeners do to help in the effort?

INTEREST AND AWARENESS around native plants has been trending in recent years, and it makes them feel almost new. But of course natives are the original plants of an area, and even in certain specialty corners of the nursery industry, they’ve been around far longer than they’ve been making headlines.

MOST PEOPLE call in an arborist when they think it’s time for a tree to be removed, a costly process both financially and environmentally, since trees are critical drivers of diversity. Today’s guest runs a tree-care company and also a tree-focused nonprofit that emphasize other services instead of removals, advocating for the planting of young trees, for caring for our trees with smart structural pruning, and regular inspections to get to know them better and stay ahead of any problems, and for thoughtful support of dead and dying trees as important forever members of our ecosystems.

LANDSCAPE DESIGN may be part of the green industry, but sometimes rethinking a garden space (or creating a garden where there didn’t used to be one) can create a lot of very un-green waste material—especially true when you’re designing in an urban setting.

TODAY’S TOPIC is orchids, but not the ones you might be growing as a flowering houseplant. Our subject is native terrestrial types that are more often than not under great pressure in the wild, their numbers dwindling.

THE AREA around Philadelphia is well known for its richness of public gardens, including many historic ones. But the region is also home to an impressive roster of distinctive private landscapes from formal 19th century European-style estates to mid-century modern residences and contemporary ones. Now, a new book takes us inside the gates of 21 of them, places filled with ideas for our own gardens maybe, too.

YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD the expression “No Mow May” in recent years, a campaign borrowed from an effort in the U.K. meant to increase diversity by leaving lawns unmown for the one spring month, but is that the answer for U.S. gardeners?

IT’S THAT TIME of year when we gardeners are shopping, shopping, shopping, often in hot pursuit of just the right plant that will make the design of a bed or the larger landscape hang together—that elusive missing ingredient. But what if the answer isn’t a plant sometimes, but a pot or a sculpture or some other non-living elements strategically placed?

I,FOR ONE, have a number of houseplants that would look a whole lot better right now if given a pinch or two or three, plus I could potentially enjoy the benefit of more plants from those trimmings, whether to keep, or better yet, to share. A new book by plant stylist Hilton Carter demystifies multiple methods of making more plants, including by various types of cuttings, and he filled me in, including on why rooting in water is his favorite medium of all.

I CONFESS to something of a weakness for Japanese maples, and I suspect I’m not alone. Now, thanks to breeding work by experts like today’s guests, there are more and more varieties being made available that are suited to a widening range of climate zones and garden conditions, meaning the circle of maple lovers can keep on growing.

IN A RECENT phone call, Tim Johnson used the phrase “bio-productive gardens,” and it stopped me.

SOME PEOPLE collect art, and others collect vintage cars or maybe stamps or coins. Darryl Cheng collects houseplants. And in his latest book, “The New Plant Collector,” Darryl suggests some gorgeous possibilities with detailed guidelines for figuring out how to make a good match for your growing conditions before you invest.

EARLY ON IN making my garden decades ago, I bought a nursery pot of bluestar, or Amsonia, at a native plant sale, and planted it in a border here. It has never asked anything of me, never had any pests or diseases, and just keeps delivering sky-blue spring flowers and vivid gold fall color, year in and year out, and looking pretty handsome in between.

WHEN SHOPPING the seed catalogs, I realize I’m probably more likely to consider a tomato or pepper I haven’t grown before, or some unusual annual flower, than to try some new-to-me herb. But what a shame. I need to modify that behavior and spice things up a bit.

MAYBE MORE than any other topic, the use of native plants has consistently figured among the top garden trends in recent years. Just how popular is the movement toward a more ecological focus in the way we design and care for our landscapes?

WATCHING BIRDS lifts my spirits, as it has for decades, and who couldn’t use their spirits lifted right about now? But there’s another much bigger potential benefit, which is that sharing my sightings helps scientists understand what’s going on with bird populations in a changing world.

WHAT’S NOT TO LOVE about zinnias? Organic seed farmer and breeder Don Tipping of Siskiyou Seeds and I both vote an emphatic “yes” in favor of making zinnias a part of every garden year.

AS SHE OFTEN DOES, naturalist and nature writer Nancy Lawson—perhaps known better to some of you as the Humane Gardener after the title of her first book—caught my attention the other day.

DAVID CULP is a self-professed Galanthophile, a lover and passionate, longtime collector of snowdrops in all their various incarnations. He’s also a host of the annual Galanthus Gala symposium, which happens the first weekend of March in Downingtown, PA, and virtually online, too, for those of us who want to join in without even leaving home, as I did last year, and will again this time around.

IF YOU THINK nothing’s on the to-do list in winter, fellow gardeners—that we’re all meant to be dormant, like the cannas in the cellar and the herbaceous perennials outside and the flower beds—well, think again.