The Garden Mixer

Every gardener has a tchotchke threshold — the point at which a garden stops being a garden and starts being a yard sale with better plants. But where exactly is that line, and who gets to draw it?
After decades of embracing, avoiding, judging, and occasionally defending their own questionable choices, Leslie and Marianne weigh in on the art of garden ornamentation — how to use it well, when to put the hedgehog down, and why Fergus Garrett's favorite garden in Hastings has hardly any plants in it at all.
Toads or total chaos? Today on The Garden Mixer.
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“French Bistro” theme by Adieu Adieu. License D0LZBINY30GGTBBW

It’s mid summer and if you haven’t been staking your floppiest floppers, the chance is you haven’t quite gotten away with it. Some plants stand tall on their own. Others need a little help.
In this Barrel Aged One More Sip of The Garden MIxer Leslie Harris and Marianne Willburn tackle one of gardening's most practical—and most overlooked—skills: staking. They discuss which plants are worth staking, which ones are better left alone, how to make supports nearly invisible, and why choosing the right plants in the first place can save you a lot of work.
Along the way they share techniques learned at Great Dixter, the beauty of traditional pea-sticking, why timing matters, and a few confessions about staking jobs that never quite happened.
Whether you're growing peonies, delphiniums, dahlias, grasses, or other tall perennials, this conversation will help you keep your garden looking natural instead of looking like a tomato patch.
Gardening shouldn't be boring.

Every gardener has them. The plant that ate the house, the catalog seduction that ended in tears, the tree you loved that didn’t love you. Regrets are how gardeners learn — or in Marianne’s case, how they beat themselves up while learning. Leslie chose the topic. Marianne suffered through it. Both of them had more material than an hour could possibly cover.

Welcome to a guided tour through the taxonomy of gardening mistakes — organized by category, confessed to with varying degrees of shame, and occasionally still present in the garden because nobody could bring themselves to finish the job. The girls are drinking deep from the well of regrets, and they’re fairly sure you’re going to relate. Today on The Garden Mixer.
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“French Bistro” theme by Adieu Adieu. License D0LZBINY30GGTBBW

Deadheading, do we or don't we? The answer, as you expected, is complicated. And Leslie and Marianne want to dive into the nuance on this week’s One More Sip.
In fact they’re going to discuss a lot of heinous herbaceous amputations in the name of beauty, such as Chelsea chopping, tiered pruning, and post-pruning.
Why does it work? And when doesn’t it? And do you really have the patience to snip 235 cornflower heads into a basket when you can simply rip it out and let the Verbena bonariensis take over?
All this and baby stealing on this Barrel Aged version of One More Sip of The Garden Mixer.
This episode is celebrating its first birthday. If you would like to stay current with the latest One More Sip episodes, join us on The Garden Mixer on Substack to be a One More Sip paid subscriber.

America has a hydrangea problem. In the best possible way. They’re consistently among the best-selling flowering shrubs in the country, they colonize every garden center and big box supercenter from May to August, and, if you don’t have a deer problem, you’re likely to succumb to the latest plump, end-of-aisle offering every time you go out to buy some milk. Erin Schanen, The Impatient Gardener, and Founding Mixer, describes what has happened to us in one word: Hydrangification.

Marianne did not want to do a hydrangea episode — Hydrangement is real, Leslie’s got a bad case, and how much more can possibly be said? But Leslie disagreed and drafted in Scott Beuerlein — radio host, horticulturist at the Cincinnati Botanical Zoo and Botanical Garden, and Marianne’s nemesis at GardenRant — to prove it.

He had analogies. He had opinions. He had been thinking about hydrangeas all day.

And Marianne was wrong. It turns out there is quite a lot left to say. Join them as they delve deep into the hydrangea addiction sweeping the country.
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Full Show Notes at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠The Garden Mixer Podcast’s Substack⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠
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“French Bistro” theme by Adieu Adieu. License D0LZBINY30GGTBBW