Susan Harris, founding member of GardenRant, is the force behind RGG.

Credit Washington, DC-based garden coach, writer, and Garden Ranter Susan Harris with hatching the idea for a collaborative site of like-minded gardening geeks. I’m just happy to have been invited.

Like garden magazines, the best gardening websites are regional, because gardening involves that darn USDA growing zone factor. RGG has been established as a sort of clearing house of helpful, content-heavy sites created by knowledgeable gardeners across a variety of zones.

The first flush of “Regional Garden Gurus” are:

• Your Truly, the Renegade Gardener, hammering down The Upper Midwest/USDA Zones 2-4
• Susan Harris, firmly presiding over The Mid-Atlantic, USDA Zones 5-7
• Lisa Mahnke, staking out The High Plains & Rocky Mountain Regions, USDA Zones 4-7
• Ginny Stibolt, cool as a breeze in Northeastern Florida, USDA Regions 8 & 9

As more experts are found, investigated, and invited to join our ragtag army, we hope to grow Regional Garden Gurus to a group of perhaps one dozen regional experts, with websites that blanket every region and growing zone across North America. Check us out, and watch for the site to expand soon.

Regional Garden Gurus

Favorite Ranter: Susan Harris

There’s trouble—yours truly gets up close and personable with garden writer and Ranter Susan Harris.

No offense to the three other fine founders of the popular garden blogsite GardenRant, but garden guru Susan is the first one I’ve had the privilege of meeting, and dish the dirt we did.

Susan and I hooked up recently in Chantilly, Virginia, while I was in town speaking at the Capital Home & Garden Show. She was polite enough to come to one of my presentations, after which we enjoyed a fine dinner and great gabfest.

Ms. Harris is quite a story. Abandoned by wolves and raised by Republicans (OK, Susan, I stole that line from Stephanie Miller, but it works, don’t you think?), Susan has hammered out quite a career and following, both as a garden writer and garden coach.

In fact, she is one of the early pioneers in that last category. Quite a cool concept: For an hourly fee, Susan will come over to your garden and show you how to do anything you’ve got in mind to accomplish that day, whether it’s planting a tree, pruning a hedge, or dividing perennials. 

“I don’t do the work for the client, I show them how to do it, then stand back and supervise,” she told me. Some clients hire her once for an hour or so, or hire her over the course of the summer, as they encounter gardening tasks at which they are not proficient. She’s already been featured in an article on garden coaches in the New York Times and has appeared on “CBS Sunday Morning.”

So what did we talk about at dinner? Oh, you know, the usual—life, love, politics (for a minute, anyway, until we both realized that was a don’t-go-there), gardening and, of course, all of you.

From reading Susan’s posts on GardenRant—freewheeling, opinionated, and always to the point—I had guessed that in person she’d be a hoot, and she didn’t disappoint. I wish I had taken notes—Susan is a forward-thinker, with a keen sense of where the gardening hobby is headed. In addition to her work at Rant, she is the brainchild behind the new Regional Garden Gurus website, while somehow managing to maintain her own terrific gardening site, Sustainable Gardening Blog.

Another sure hit by the Godfather:
PLANTHROPOLOGY
The Myths, Mysteries, and Miracles of My Garden Favorites
by Ken Druse (Hardcover, Clarkson Potter Publishers)

Oh yes, yes, yes, just in time for the winter gardening book list, just in time for Blizzard Sundays (as we call any winter day in Minnesota where you’d go cross-country skiing if the snowdrift on the other side of the door would allow you), just in time to ease my cynical mind and callous heart, and just in time for Christmas: A new book by gardening’s Godfather, Ken Druse.

What a great gig. Here, Ken, come up with a list—a long list—of the plants you grow, cherish, and admire, then write a book—a big book—with captivating stories about their history and development, their use and care, their blatant beauty and dirty little secrets. And while you’re at it, shoot the photos as well, hundreds of them, since your eye with a camera is equaled only by your wizardly way with words.

Am I gushing? Yes. For a garden writer, reading Ken Druse is like a sixteen year-old guitar player watching Eric Clapton in concert. The pace is impeccable, every note is perfect, and jeez Louise, how did he just do that?

Tales from Ken’s earliest childhood memories of his mother’s garden are juxtaposed seamlessly with tales of Captain James Cook in the 1700s. Or you may find yourself back 10,000 years, visiting our ancestors while they start domesticating livestock and cultivating the grasses to feed them. Within a few pages you meet Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher; Fibonacci, the 13th-century mathematician, and of course, Leonardo da Vinci—scientist, painter, draftsman, engineer, inventor. What do they have in common? Your garden.

As compelling as a crime novel, Planthropology just so happens to dispense more useful gardening wisdom along the way than half the books on my shelf. Whatever the topic—garden art, fragrance, bloom color, pests, pruning, propagation, design, bees, butterflies, several dozen more—Druse’s great gift as a writer has always been foremost that the reader not only learns, but learns in proper context, his words a loving and playful kick in the pants toward lasting appreciation.

Only time bestows the mantle of classic, but I sense I hold a classic in my hands.