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

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Linda Chalker-Scott

Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott has a Ph.D. in Horticulture from Oregon State University and is an ISA certified arborist and an ASCA consulting arborist. She is WSU’s Extension Urban Horticulturist and a Professor in the Department of Horticulture, and holds two affiliate associate professor positions at University of Washington. She conducts research in applied plant and soil sciences, publishing the results in scientific articles and university Extension fact sheets. Linda also is the award-winning author of five books: the horticultural myth-busting The Informed Gardener (2008) and The Informed Gardener Blooms Again (2010) from the University of Washington Press and Sustainable Landscapes and Gardens: Good Science – Practical Application (2009) from GFG Publishing, Inc., and How Plants Work: The Science Behind the Amazing Things Plants Do from Timber Press (2015). Her latest effort is an update of Art Kruckeberg’s Gardening with Native Plants of the Pacific Northwest from UW Press (2019). In 2018 Linda was featured in a video series – The Science of Gardening – produced by The Great Courses. She also is one of the Garden Professors – a group of academic colleagues who educate and entertain through their blog and Facebook pages. Linda’s contribution to gardeners was recognized in 2017 by the Association for Garden Communicators as the first recipient of their Cynthia Westcott Scientific Writing Award. "The Garden Professors" Facebook page - www.facebook.com/TheGardenProfessors "The Garden Professors" Facebook group - www.facebook.com/groups/GardenProfessors Books: http://www.sustainablelandscapesandgardens.com

21 thoughts on “Welcome to our new home!”

  1. The best of luck to you all – I’m glad that you have decided to be independent. I look forward to your blogs.

  2. You provide an invaluable service! Thank you for sharing your knowledge and I look forward to getting to know this site.

    ps. what the heck is a “premium” university?

    1. Thanks, Barbara! We appreciate your interest and kind words. (A premium university is one that can afford to pay at least $40,000 per year to be affiliated with eXtension. WSU chose not to do that.)

  3. I look forward to many good posts, comments and gardening wisdom. Glad you chose this route rather than losing members or disbanding. Thanks for all you do to educate about gardening.

  4. Just a general suggestion comment… I sort of wish you’d put the author’s name just below the title line. I realize it is at the bottom of the article, but it helps me set context when I know who I am reading and their background (where they are used to gardening or their perspective – are they a bug person or a soil person or…). Anyway, thank you for being here!

    1. Word Press has a system. It puts all the author information at the bottom. The system has changed over the years so depending on the age of the post things will look different. In a perfect world I would have a vast fortune so I could pay someone to go through our hundreds of posts and get them all formatted in a similar way.

  5. Just found the site after listening to an interview with Dr. Chalker-Scott about woodchip mulch which was very interesting! Is there anywhere we can ask questions?
    She did say allelopathic effects of trees like black walnut are not really an issue, however I still am hesitant to use Eucalypt mulch (one of the most common here in Australia of course) with the high oil content of Eucalypts….and wondering if she knows anything about them? thanks 🙂

    1. There is no reliable, published evidence that any plant has any allelopathic effect under real-life conditions. Lab and greenhouse pot experiments cannot be extrapolated to a complex soil environment, where microbes quickly break down organic materials including plant biochemicals that might have toxic effeccts.

  6. Hello,

    I just found your website and I love it.

    I’m interested in growing under LED lights and am engaged in an argument about leaf burn from water droplets. That’s how I found your article on the subject. I am wondering if the same applies to LED lights. It seems to me it would, but I would appreciate knowing your thoughts.

    Sincerely,

    Karla Ibsen
    La Conner, Washington

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