Blessed to grow up “in a time when children spent their days outdoors,” C.L. Fornari, host of The Garden Lady, learned to make fun with the stuff of the earth – mud and clay, soil and sand, and, of course, all things green.
After a nearly 30-year career in radio and broadcasting, she brought her gardening advice show to CAI, GBH’s sister station on the Cape and Islands, in January, and it recently began airing on GBH 89.7 on Saturdays at 1 pm. We sat down with her to discuss, in her words, “the life-affirming topics of plants and gardening.”
How did you fall in love with plants and gardening?
C.L. Fornari: I was blessed to grow up in a time when children were pushed outdoors and told not to come back until dinner. As a free-range child, a tree downed in a storm would become my world for a week. I would eat flowers all over the neighborhood, and no one ever told me whether they were edible. We had to make our fun outdoors, with mud, dandelion stems, the bushes in the traffic islands – I think that that’s where my love of plants really came from.
One of the first things my husband and I did when we first lived together was plant a vegetable garden. It’s something that we have always prized – we have this long history of planting a vegetable garden together every year.
How did this program come about?
C.L.: I got my start in radio on an NPR program called The Cultivated Gardener in 1999. After two years, that program ended, so I approached a local talk radio station, and for 22 years, I had a program there. And then recently, I decided our local NPR station (CAI) has my ears, it should probably have my voice as well. Fortunately, they agreed!
What appealed to you about radio?
C.L.: I’m an auditory learner, so even as a young person, I loved that combination of hearing voices and having my mind free to make the picture.
What made CAI a natural partner for your show?
C.L.: I know from the years I’ve been on the radio that people all over the Northeast love plants and gardening. And frankly, most gardening is regional – the plants and the problems and the joys we deal with in the Northeast are completely different from the ones they deal with in Texas or Southern California. Having a local radio program that broadcasts garden advice just makes a lot of sense.
With your show now being broadcast on GBH 89.7 and available online as a podcast, have you noticed any difference with the expanded reach of the show?
C.L.: Many more calls than we can possibly fit in an hour! And we’re getting calls from all over; last Saturday I got a call from Pittsburgh. It’s a wonderful thing. Whether they’re gardening in New Hampshire, Connecticut, or the Cape, it’s fun taking live calls and piecing together the puzzles of their gardening dilemmas – what the weather’s been like, the composition of their soil, etc.
What’s been your approach to building your audience over the years?
C.L.: I’m honest about plants and gardens from my point of view, and I don’t have any particular products that I’m pushing. I just give people advice gleaned from my years of experience. People respond to that – I believe the word for it today is ‘authentic.’
Beyond that, I always try to get people to look at how nature grows plants. When we’re talking about working in our gardens, we humans often think we have a better idea – “I’ll grab something to throw on my plants and make them grow better.” Instead, I want people to consider how nature fertilizes plants, or grows a tree, or nurtures a plant in the wild, and what we can learn from that. Finally, plants and gardening is a life-affirming, joyful thing, and we need all of those we can get.
You start every show with a postcard from Mother Nature, Green Man, or a particular plant. How did you land on that idea?
C.L.: It started as a book proposal. I was an art major in college, and as a young adult, I worked as an artist. All I ever wanted to do was go in the studio and make stuff. But I’ve always been a gardener, I’ve always loved plants. And in fact, when I was working as an artist, much of my artwork had to do with plants and gardens. It wasn’t until we moved to Cape Cod that the universe kind of pushed me from the studio into the garden. But I still do some artwork, mostly with photographs in Photoshop.
So I thought, what if people could get a postcard from plants? What if Mother Nature sent you a card saying, ‘You think you deal with bad soil? I’ve been growing in bad soil for millions of years!’ So I developed a bunch of cards, and after it didn’t go anywhere as a book proposal, I decided to start every program with a postcard from plants. It’s a fun, visual way to give – to use a botanical term – pithy advice about a particular topic. I also put the postcards on my website and use them to promote the show on my social channels.
What, in your opinion, is uniquely beautiful about the plant life of New England and the Cape?
C.L.: All of New England is very lush, especially compared to the Southwest, for example. And we certainly have the seasons. Sometimes winter can be annoying, but it’s also a break in the action letting us focus on other things – that can be a positive.
I’ve gardened all over, in Southern California, Wisconsin, the Mid-Hudson Valley, the North Shore, and now, on Cape Cod. In San Diego, I could grow my own avocados and fruit trees. Here, I can grow peonies. There’s something special about every area. I think if I was plucked down in the middle of Texas or the heart of Alaska, I would find a way to garden there.
For the Cape specifically, I love the sand. People seem to think our soil is bad, but it’s fabulous compared to the clay and rock you’ll find in the Mid-Hudson Valley, where the soil gets so hard you practically need a backhoe to dig a hole for a plant. More plants succeed with great drainage than in soil that doesn’t have good drainage, so I’m very happy gardening here.
What are some of the challenges of New England gardening?
C.L.: One challenge of gardening near the ocean is a cold spring. And with climate change, I notice we’re getting more and more wind – not just with storms, but all the time. That can be a challenge because it dries plants out faster. On the Cape, we joke that we have January, February, March, March, March, June – and sometimes the beginning of June can be dicey. But on the other hand, the fall is pretty lovely.
What are some common gardening misconceptions among beginner gardeners?
C.L: Where do I start? Number one, that plants need a lot of fertilizer all the time. Once again, we have to look at how nature grows plants – there’s no little fertilizer fairy out in the woods sprinkling products on the plants! No, it’s organic matter dropping on the soil and rotting from the top down. You know, given that and a little moisture, nature can grow something anywhere.
Mother Nature is our best garden coach.C.L. Fornari
I also think people don’t understand watering. They’re either afraid of over-watering or under-watering. They often give plants a lick and a promise – a little bit of water frequently, rather than watering really well and then not watering for a while.
Again, look at how nature waters plants here in the Northeast: a deep soaking followed by a period of no water. There are parts of the world where it rains every afternoon at 4 o’clock. This is not one of them. Our plants are not adapted to water every day, or water every other day.
With our houseplants, a deep, thorough soaking, followed by a period of no water.
What should gardeners be paying attention to in June, July?
C.L.: Get a rain gauge and keep an eye on how much rain nature has delivered. That would be my number one advice for anyone with an outdoor garden. A rain gauge measures rain differently than a tuna fish can, a pail, or a wheelbarrow.
It’s a calibrated measurement of a cubic inch of rain falling on a square inch of soil. A rain gauge is the only way to get an accurate measurement of rainfall. If nature gives us an inch or more of rain in one week, that’s pretty much all a mature plant or a lawn needs.
The other thing to pay attention to in the summertime is not to assume that if you see something on one plant, it’s going to spread to all your plants. Insects, diseases, and even some problems caused by rain or lack of rain are often very host-specific. Just because you have one plant that has a particular disease or issue doesn’t mean that all your plants are going to get that.
Finally, it’s important to keep in mind that we don’t have to panic; not everything we see in our yards and gardens demands a response from us.
How would you convince someone who’s never gardened to get their hands in the soil?
C.L.: 1. Look at a flower – don’t you want that? Pretty much across all cultures, flowers make people feel good for whatever reason.
2. We love to eat well, and once you have fresh food from a garden, you’ll understand it’s the most flavorful food on Earth. You discover that eggplant has a flavor when it is fresh out of the garden, whereas what you buy in the store, even organically raised, has no flavor or might even be bitter.
3. Study after study shows being around plants and soil is good for our immune systems, it’s good exercise, it’s good for our emotional well-being. We’re only just beginning to understand why being among plants is so good for us, but the reasons are manifold.
And get those kids outside and in the gardens and the dirt!
What are your tips for growing organically?
C.L.: First, get an accurate diagnosis of anything you perceive as a problem [which you can do by calling in to The Garden Lady!]. Then, remember that your garden is connected to everything else; even the things you perceive as a problem connect in positive ways to something else. For example, you see aphids on your roses – oh no! Did you know that hummingbirds eat aphids? In our rush to solve what we think of as a problem, we forget that it’s connected to something we also want to thrive.
Lighting round questions:
Favorite common name for a plant?
C.L.: Hearts-a-bustin. It’s a shrub I grow here on the Cape. It’s our native euonymus, euonymus americanus.
Favorite native plant?
C.L.: Our native oak trees, the Rodney Dangerfield of native plants – because they get no respect. People routinely think nothing of cutting them down because they want more sunshine. This plant supports more species of wildlife than any other plant, and it’s the tree that built this country – its wagons, its cabins, the heat in its hearths.
Favorite flower?
C.L.: Whenever people ask me about a favorite plant, my answer is whatever I looked at 10 minutes ago.
Favorite crop to grow?
C.L.: If I could only grow one vegetable, it would be Tuscan Kale, because you can harvest it from a month after you’ve planted it until after New Year’s. From the middle of May through October, we eat Tuscan kale at least twice a week, often three times a week. I can go outside and cut whatever leaves need to go into the pasta sauce, the curry, the sushi – whatever I’m making.
Favorite fruit to grow?
C.L.: Well, the only fruit that we really can grow well here on the Cape are blueberries, and even then we have to net them because otherwise we compete with the catbirds for the crop.
Top 3 public gardens to visit this summer?
C.L.: Well people have got to go to the Coastal Maine Botanic Garden.
If they’re venturing south, they should go to Chanticleer Garden (outside Philadelphia).
If you’re visiting Cape Cod, go to Heritage Museums and Gardens.
If you’re in the Boston area, go to the New England Botanic Garden at Tower Hill or Arnold Arboretum.
If you’re out in western Massachusetts, stop by Naumkeag.
No matter where you find yourself, there will be a public garden within 10 minutes’ drive of you. Visit them; they are places of hope and revival.
If you only could choose one garden tool, what would it be?
C.L.: A Spear Head Spade. You can do a lot with your hands, but it’s much harder to dig a hole without a good shovel or spade.
Tune in to The Garden Lady on WCAI 90.1, WNAN 91.1, WZAI 94.3, and GBH 89.7 on Saturdays at 1pm, or in podcast form here!
