Welcome to our new home!

This month, the Garden Professors have moved to a new website. You can still easily find us at gardenprofessors.com (bookmark that address!), but we’re no longer actively posting on the eXtension website. This change was necessitated by eXtension’s decision to restrict leadership to faculty belonging to premium universities (those paying a sizable annual membership fee). Since neither Dr. Gillman nor Dr. Chalker-Scott belongs to a premium university, and since both are founding members of the Garden Professors, we made a group decision to host our blog independently.

We’ve been working on this transition for a number of months, which is partially why we haven’t been posting as often as we’d like. Along with our new space we’ve added some new members: Dr. Laura Jull (University of Wisconsin), Joseph Tychonievich, and Raymond Eckhart will be joining us as regular bloggers. We’ll be adding blurbs on each of these new members in our “Who We Are” section.

Ideally we’ll be posting on a daily basis, meaning more consistent posts for you. We’ll also be including posts from guest bloggers (our “visiting professors”). And you can also visit us on Facebook, where we have both a page and a group. The group is a great place for you to ask questions or start discussions on topics that aren’t in our archives.

We look forward to bringing you more good science-based gardening information in our own unique ways. Thanks for sticking with us!

IMG_7778The original Fab Four

Introducing Linda Chalker-Scott

I’m an associate professor in the department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Washington State University.  I’m also an Extension Specialist in Urban Horticulture, meaning that I have a global classroom rather than one physically located on a college campus.  I’m trained as a woody plant physiologist and I apply this knowledge to understanding how trees and shrubs function in urban environments.  This is a fancy way of saying I enjoy diagnosing landscape failures – sort of a Horticultural CSI thing.

I’m a native Washingtonian, but I spent my academic life at Oregon State University and then moved to Buffalo for my first university position.  I moved back to Seattle in 1997 and worked at University of Washington’s Center for Urban Horticulture.  In 2001 we were fire-bombed by ecoterrorists (and yes, the irony of the greenest center on campus being targeted by ecoterrorists is not lost on me) and I lost my ability to do lab work.  During this time I developed a more applied research program and in 2004 I began my Extension position with WSU.

Jeff and I have never actually met, but we’ve been chatting via internet for some time.  Apparently he manages his time better than I, since he has the ability to spearhead this blog on top of everything else he does.  I know I’m looking forward to this new venue for discussing the science behind America’s favorite outdoor activity (assuming that’s still gardening and not Ultimate Frisbee or frog licking).