In case you missed it there’s lots of conversations happening on the interwebs the last couple of weeks about native plants and landscaping. Check out this video by Blossom Effect and also this video by Black Forager to get caught up. They’re both beautifully worded and in my opinion, on point. But instead of getting caught up in the debate, I thought I’d use this opportunity to give my feedback on some native plants I’ve been experimenting with; the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Spoiler alert - all of my gardens with native plants are not exclusively native plants because nuance and context exist and should be considered.

The Rain Garden - Partial Shade and Damp

Gold Star Columbine - 10/10 everyone should plant this. It’s one of the first things to flower in the spring and feed the pollinators.

Southern Wood Fern - 5/10 if you have true damp shade these will really thrive but I don’t have the most ideal conditions.

Inland Sea Oats - 8/10 I really love these however; I don’t think mine get enough wind/breeze to stand up very well and live up to their full potential. If you plant these, make sure they have some wind to maximum strength!

Obedient Plant - 7/10 this will spread like wildfire which is both wonderful and also a nightmare if you don’t have time to manage it. I have lots of other plants that need to mature in the space and this wild obedient plant really chokes other things out.

This garden also has many non-native plants like roses, elephant ear (being removed this year because of changes in sun exposure), society garlic, and Spanish lavender. None are considered invasive and all are adapted perennials in my area.

Roses are adapted all over the world and while some are invasive in some areas — none of mine are. Elephant ear is a tropical plant that due to my climate will die back after first frost and overwinter in the soil and become a perennial. While Elephant Ear aren’t beneficial per say they also are not invasive — I consider them neutral. Society Garlic is a plant that’s native to Africa but well adapted to heat and drought. It’s a slow spreader and not considered invasive. It can help repel thrips within roses which is why I am planting in within my rose gardens! While Spanish lavender can drop seed and spread it tends to keep a tidy structure and therefore, not invasive. It can also be beneficial to pollinators.

The Sunset Garden - Full Sun and Dry

Coneflower - 7/10 hard to get them going and are very susceptible to fungal issues but once blooming are AMAZING.

Texas Betony - 9/10 spreads really well and provides beautiful red coral conical flowers for pollinators but it appears the hummingbirds especially love it.

Copper Canyon Daisy - 5/10 mine hasn’t bloomed yet, is yellowing some on the leaves, but is growing GREAT. I’m hoping year 2 brings more from this plant.

Winecup - TBD the spring was amazing for this plant. However, as the other ones started to grow, the winecup may have gotten beat out as I haven’t seen it for a month or two.

Pink Evening Primrose - 10/10 amazing ground cover. I actually trimmed it back the way they do in Europe so it doesn’t drop seed and it’s now coming back for a fall flush just as I intended.

Gulf Purple Muhly Grass - 10/10 this plant is making me want a grass garden of just grasses. Not only has it grown amazingly but it’s become a sweet little resting spot for butterflies.

Mexican Bush Sage - 10/10 this plant has tripled in size in it’s first few months. It’s now putting on another flush of long blooms and is going to be a great visual anchor for the space.

Standing Cypress - 7/10 I’m really loving the general vibes of this plant but want a bigger impact so I’m hoping it will drop seeds this year and the plants will be able to get nicely established and bigger/fuller next year.

Goldenrod - 4/10 this plant is likely just in the wrong place but it hasn’t grown much from when I originally planted it. I’m hoping it’s a year 2 stunner but we shall see.

Pam’s Pink Turks Cap - 10/10 another really great anchor to this space and it’s grown up 3x to what I planted originally. This one has become a huge favorite of the morning hummingbird visitors.

Flame Acanthus - another 10/10 not only with it’s growth but also because it’s a host plant for the Texan Crescent Spot Butterfly!

Skeleton Leaf Goldeneye - 10/10 I have been loving the daisy like flowers of this plant as someone who cannot usually grow such plump circular flowers in their climate.

My non-native plants in this garden are mostly roses. I have a mutabilis rose as the corner piece for my garden that is a very pollinator friendly rose and drought tolerant. I also have a white climbing rose that serves as a memorial to my late dog, Cooper. Another non-native but non-invasive plant is my African Blue Basil which is feeding the bees LIKE CRAZY right now during this incredibly hot spell.

The Butterfly Garden - Full Shade, Partial Shade, Full Sun and Dry

_{All of these are pollinator plants either as nectar or host plants!}

American Beauty Berry - 8/10 I know the beauty berry is going to be amazing in years to come but in year 1 it feels like the little engine that tried but isn’t quite making it. However it gets mega points because it’s so shade tolerant!

Twist of Lime Abelia (or any variety of Abelia) - 10/10 everyone in Texas needs an Abelia and I am convinced of that. It has these petite little leaves and is almost wire-y in nature. But in a cute way, not a sparse way. These plants can really fill in a space and will really handle the drier conditions. I will be adding a couple more of these this fall!

Oak Leaf Hydrangea - 10/10 I want 100 of them - full stop. Part of me wants a whole drift of these — think like 10. Unfortunately I only have the proper space for like 2 more. But the leaf shape and then the conical white flowers have a way of making a space lighter feeling.

Dutchman’s Pipevine - 6/10 this is growing very slowly BUT it’s growing and I love Pipevine Swallowtail Butterflies so I know long term is will be worth it. I can’t decide if I want to let it crawl on the ground or get a butterfly shaped topiary to drape it over.

Texas Mountain Laurel - 5/10 this is a really great plant to be if you’re going to be in your space for a very long time because it grows SLOW. Mine has put on barely any growth since I planted it in the very long term vision of this space, it will be a great anchor point.

Yellow Bells + Orange Bells - 10/10 amazing plant that everyone in Texas should have, my first year plants have more than doubled in size and continued to put off blooms even in the hottest of months and days.

Red Turks Cap - 10/10 another really amazing flowering plant that everyone in Texas should have. It’s been incredibly drought tolerant and continued to put off flowers that have fed the native bees!

Gregg’s Mist Flower - 8/10 this plant has struggled but that feels like a gardener problem, not a plant problem. I planted it in a very crowded area both in my butterfly garden as well as my sunset garden and it’s struggled but also survived.

Milkweed - 7/10 there are native milkweed varieties you can plant either from seed or getting them from a nursery that sells native plants. I was told very many times how the first year won’t be much so really the investment is in the second year.

Other plants in this space are a Gardenia rambling rose which is not native or invasive and will serve as an early pollinator with it’s open petaled structure.

All in all, native plants are really great. They’re well adapted and have a huge depth of beneficial properties to your local climate. That being said, I think there’s nothing wrong with having other varietals that are not “native” as long as they’re not invasive. As per usual, it’s about balance. Which social media is traditionally terrible at :)

Then I started listening to some recent interviews from Nara Smith. I am in no way a hater to be abundantly clear, this woman is a business genius in my opinion. She took her opportunity and RAN with it and for that I hand her immense respect. Her content actually inspired my first feral garden tour. I took her calming and somewhat monotone voice inspiration, used the exact music she had used, and instead of calming ASMR cooking content; I talked about the real shit happening in my garden. During that time of instagram (and still today) sometimes the algorithm will serve you videos with the same audio as ones you’ve already watched. My intention was that people who saw her video would also see mine. And millions of views and hundreds of thousands of followers later…it worked. I found my audience of people who needed a dose of reality in the world of fake social media.

Nara has been very upfront about the fact that she is:

1. not formally trained in cooking

2. she only started cooking seriously when she started making content

3. has only been doing this for 2.5 years since her content went mega viral

Her cookbook comes out in the fall which I am sure will bring in mega dollars because of just generally who she is. She’s extremely candid and open about the fact that many times when she’s making videos it’s her fist time doing these things.

This all got me thinking about perception and if we can actually learn from someone who is by definition, a novice. Also, how do we know if someone is actually experienced or if they’re just repeating something they heard somewhere once with an inordinate amount of confidence? How do we distinguish between someone selling something they barely know anything about versus someone whose experience is aged and tested over time?

My first job out of college was in advertising and marketing and since I was the youngest person at the company, social media was naturally a thing I was expected to have expertise in. My career specialized in paid advertising on social media for 5 years and I’ll be honest with you, I was very good at it. I made lots of companies a lot of money in very shady ways with old targeting strategies that are no longer available. I would travel to New York occasionally, had a job at Facebook, and regularly networked with the Austin tech crowd.

Now what I just did there is called social proof. I typed out 5 sentences convincing you that I knew what I was talking about. Let me break it down:

• “My first job out of college” — referencing my college degree which increases confidence in my higher education

• “My career specialized in” — emphasizing that this was a narrow focus and therefore increasing my perception of expertise

• “travel to New York occasionally” — subtle hint that I was so good that I was paid to travel for my services because local talent as good couldn’t be found

• “had a job at Facebook” — name dropped a large company that is a household name

• “regularly networked with the Austin tech crowd” — referenced a city largely known to be a large tech hub full of a talented workforce

In marketing, this “social proof” is the second part of the sales funnel. I swear this comes back to gardening so just stick with me here. A sales funnel works like a normal funnel. You have your most amount of people at the top and then gradually smaller amounts of people.

In the Nara Smith example, you may see her video because making chewing gum from scratch in a ball gown is so ridiculous that millions of people will watch it and you find yourself amongst the millions of folks at the top of the funnel. Then comes in the social proof and it’s subtle. Maybe you’re a mom and she says something like “my 4 kids” and all of a sudden, there’s a moment of relating. She juggles 4 kids and still looks amazing so she must be doing something you’re not. You hit the follow button and have travelled further down the funnel. Maybe you find out about her eczema that she openly talks about and then all of a sudden she’s perceived as humble. Her likability to you increases. You watch her go through life for years, all the while slowly going further down the funnel. Then boom, she announces her cookbook. You’ve spent years watching her life and building social proof and trust that she in fact, knows how to cook (I’m not saying she doesn’t). You drop down to the bottom of the funnel and purchase her cookbook.

It’s not nefarious, it’s not malicious, it’s just sales.

I could easily take myself through the exact same exercise with my audience. The bottom of my funnel looks like someone paying for a Substack subscription. You’ve built trust in me that I give gardening advice and knowledge worth paying for. Maybe it’s because you’ve followed me for years and watched me try, fail, and learn. Or maybe it’s because you trust me due to my reckless level of honesty. Another option is that you see my gardens and just think that the proof is in the pudding. Whichever way you slice it — it comes down to trust. I have socially proved to you in one way or another that I am trustworthy.

Imagine fostering that trust - perceived or real for years and then me admitting on two large stages that I was doing these things for the first time. Is that novice advice/recipe/tip worth trusting? Is it worth paying for? How do you know that it’s not a copy + paste from AI for the purpose of selling you something? You may not even care, and that’s ok too.

When it comes to gardening this whole topic is so difficult in my purview. I may be a trusted resource for hot weather or Texas gardeners but if you asked me to execute a gardening season in Pennsylvania, I’d be a disaster. I’ve been gardening on a large scale for 7 years now — is doing something successfully 7 times considered expertise? Maybe to some but not others. Does someone need higher education in that field to be a trusted expert? Losing a couple of hours to a badly written recipe by a novice is one thing but losing a whole gardening season that spans months and the hope and anticipation that builds with it, is crushing.

These are all things I think everyone should consider for themselves. Everyone’s barrier to entry’s are different and everyone’s barrier to trust is different. I feel strongly that if you have travelled to the bottom of a sales funnel, you deserve to be comfortable with this subject. Your money has immense value, treat it so and use your critical thinking skills with some careful evaluation to find your comfort level.

And finally, as always, my thoughts on the matter.

I find that a seasoned, veteran gardener will always ask more questions and usually say something like “it depends” and “in my experience”. The fastest way I can see through advice I won’t trust is when someone speaks in absolutes. Gardening is as unique as the individual and we all live nuanced lives that require more questions that lead to options and not restrictions. I don’t necessarily need someone who grew up gardening and has life knowledge or someone who is professionally educated like a horticulturist. I sometimes even find these folk’s level of knowledge can get in their way of having a present experience. I even find that garden guides for Central Texas from 15 years ago are no longer accurate due to climate change.

My personal barrier to entry before I take advice is someone who is curious, not assuming. Someone who considers nuance and context before speaking in absolutes. And someone who has failed despite their life and book knowledge on the subject. And yes, all of this does take a level of time investment into evaluating your sources. Do I trust a novice? Maybe, it depends on how they approach the conversation. Do I trust the garden elders at my local garden center? Yes, every time. Do I trust myself 10 years into my love of plants and 7 years into large scale gardening? Hell yes.

Should you trust me? I hope so but if you don’t, that’s ok too.

You are exhausted and so is your soil

Soil health is one of my large gardening passions. I’ve always felt like we all have a personal responsibility to leave our planet and our space better than we found it. For me that manifests into gardening, stewarding the soil, and all the life that comes with it. I feel like we all remember to amend our soil and mulch it in the spring but once it comes to the fall, we think she still has some gusto left. Spoiler alert - she does not. She’s tired and she needs a reset.

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I’ve been deemed “relatable” in the comments of my videos because I show you my garden in its realest and truest form. I hardly have time for weeding because there’s a deliverable at work that’s due, my kid wanted to practice “kisses” aka licking my face, and/or my friends were getting together for a birthday dinner. Or hell, probably all 3 happened in one day and the garden didn’t come first. And if we are being honest I probably only executed it all at a high level because I have an incredible husband and might’ve had a small cry in the middle of it all.

Navigating a life where gardening is a big part of my life but not my whole life has never been easy. Putting me into a silo that’s easily marketable doesn’t work well because I am a whole multi-faceted person who refuses to be someone else. And I’d argue that describes most people who garden. The Austin gardening community is strong and diverse. We are united by our love of plants and beautiful because we are all so wildly different. I know first hand from this community of wonderful people that while everyone has a different job, interest, and life path; we all need advice on how to grow a tomato. Plants and gardening is universal no matter who you are.

In this conversation it blew my mind that this person didn’t consider the millions of suburban backyard gardens that exist. The hundreds of thousands of you who do not have acres of land, live busy lives that require efficiency, and merely garden as a hobby. Gone are the days that all suburban gardeners aspire to rural country living; it’s simply not realistic for everyone. I’m going to enjoy my mortgage TODAY and put plants in the ground that bring me joy. I don’t have time to make a goddamn galette with homemade crust. I can’t fathom tediously pulling weeds and saving seeds. These are simply not things I aspire to.

And so suburban gardeners are left to aspire to what? The cooking content creator whose recipe takes too long and can’t be easily riffed on? The tradwife creator who wears white linen in a field with her perfectly woven basket and chickens? The garden/landscape designer who just finished a $50,000 garden for a person whose zip code is in a gated community? Those all feel aspirational because they allow us to live in a dream world where we don’t need a job to live. But really I think that leaves us living in discontent.

Aspiration is defined as a strong desire, ambition, or goal that motivates you to achieve something meaningful. Maybe for some people that is a $50k garden, white linen with chickens, or a 3-hour dinner. But I’d argue that’s a creation of social media because when I ask people why they started gardening they talk about something totally different. They talk about their grandparents who used to grow a backyard vegetable garden, their neighbor who grew roses, or a yearly u-pick strawberry farm they’d visit. They don’t talk about their whole live revolving around cooking and growing food. They talk about it being a small part of someones life and how that was meaningful to them. They talk about seasonality and looking forward to the slow season that brings delicious peaches, beautiful blooms, and the best tasting tomato of the year.

As I further refine who I want to be in this world and on the internet I keep coming back to relatable. Showing how the garden lifestyle fits into my life but doesn’t define it.

Making peach jam from my peach tree while sipping on my coca-cola after eating In-N-Out.

Starting vegetable seeds on my lunch break between corporate meetings that should’ve been e-mails.

Processing my fall pumpkins as pumpkin freezer waffles for when I have a mid-afternoon sweet tooth to get through my admin work.

Making homemade purees for my baby from the garden while getting a grocery order with organic baby pouches because lil homie is a big eater.

Prioritizing garden tasks because the dogs need to be walked and I need breakfast so the garden only gets 15 min of my morning.

I’m sorry that the current landscape we live in has made you feel like you need to fit into a certain box. I’m sorry that that makes you feel like you aren’t doing enough. I’m sorry that this weird world we live in has made you feel like there’s no one who understands your life. I was once described by a marketing manager as “the gardening neighbor who will invite you over to talk about gardening over coffee, or a cocktail, or a cocktail in your coffee” and I felt so seen. I hope you leave this feeling as seen as I did that day. I hope you follow me with aspiration. And I hope to always feel relatable because I’m right here with you; working, parenting, dog momming, maintaining friendships, strengthening my marriage, carving out time for my extended family, feeding everyone nutritrious food and then gardening.

Plant Notes on Basil:

1. Most varieties will get very bitter in the intense heat (like 90+) and especially if they’re putting off flowers

2. The best way to combat the above is to prune back HARD and often

And to breakdown the “adjust to taste” check this out:

1. Too acidic - add more parm or pine nuts

2. Too bitter - add olive oil

3. Not bright enough - add salt or lemon juice

Brooke’s Pesto “Recipe”

• 2 cups of basil

• 4 garlic cloves

• 1/4 cup pine nuts (I’ll sub with pecans if I have them handy)

• 1/3-1/2 cup parm

• 1/2 fresh squeezed lemon juice

• pinch of salt

Blend until desired consistency and adjust to taste. I store in a glass jar and top with a layer of olive oil to prevent browning from oxidation

Eating Pesto Without Pasta

Caprese Salad Sandwiches

I really love to warm or toast the bread for this sandwich and serve it as a “toast” aka open faced or as a closed sandwich. I start with a smear of pesto, add fresh milky mozzarella, drizzle balsamic glaze, top with a SALTED tomato from the garden, and top with arugula. Even my dad (whose more of a traditional meat sandwich guy) fell in love with this!

Pesto Aioli

I mix 1:1 (aka the same amount) of both pesto and mayo to create a pesto aioli. By definition aioli is just mayo with garlic and since pesto has garlic in it, I’m taking the W here and calling it pesto aioli. We drizzled this on top of some air fried potatoes (380 for 18 min) and it was my husbands favorite side dish of the week.

Caprese Chicken Orzo Salad

I had approximately 1/8 of a box of orzo in my pantry, an aging rotesserie chicken, a seemingly endless amount of matt’s wild cherry tomatoes, and a plan. My son is teething like something fierce and this lunch took 15 min max to throw together which was a welcomed reprieve. After I cooked the orzo, I let it cool for a bit and then mixed it with the cherry tomatoes, mozzarella pearls, pesto, and chicken. It was simple, shovel-able, and oddly comforting.

Garden Goddess-ish Dressing

It’s not a traditional Garden Goddess Dressing but it’s close enough for a busy night dinner that isn’t takeout. I really love a dinner that is all machines on a Thursday. Everyone’s tired but I really wanna save my takeout option for a lazy Saturday night. This is where I break out the rice cooker for some wild rice, air fry some salmon and broccoli, and find a flare of fun. This week that’s mixing the already made pesto with some parsley, dill, and cilantro (the latter two bought from the store because it’s too hot in texas) and a little yogurt. Boom - flare of fun for your machine dinner. Barely any real cooking but tasty all the same.

Fried Egg Pesto Toast

As your resident celiac girl I will admit, this would hit harder if you can eat gluten. A fat piece of sourdough toast toasted to golden perfection, topped with a smear of pesto and then topped with the perfect fried egg — it’s a summer breakfast to live for.

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So I wrote quietly and alone. I wrote songs that I thought rhymed and meant something, I wrote stories and poems. I even started a “newspaper” in the 4th grade called The Tiger Beat. Then in 7th grade English class my teacher talked about a writing club called “Power of the Pen”. I invited my friend to come with me and stay after school to try this new thing. We were given a prompt, paper, and then something I didn’t expect - a timer. I remember thinking to myself “who puts a time limit on creativity?!”. I did my best and kept showing up week after week, trying to train my creativity to dream and make story lines faster.

My friend excelled. She was always so wonderfully whimsical and her brain moved quickly. She’s now a professor at a well known university which is of no surprise to anyone who got to know her heart and soul. She qualified for the larger state writing competition with ease and I remember feeling happy for her and sad for me. I went with her parents to the competition to support her and as we were leaving she cried because she’d only left with a participant award. I distinctly remember saying to her “at least you got to compete” which naturally started a silly fight between 12 year olds.

It was then that I put a level of pressure and “un-fun” on creative writing. My imagination was snuffed out by an after school program that was bastardized into being a competition. You didn’t just get to be creative and let life flow through you onto paper. Creativity had to be pressurized, judged, and deemed worthy.

Then I became a gardening content creator…where my creativity is pressurized, judged, and deemed worthy (or very un-worthy by the trolls). My sister watercolor paints purely for her own enjoyment. She’s mailed me some of then and they proudly hang in my son’s room amongst old photos of family from days gone by. There’s no pressure, no judgement, and only appreciation for being considered in a creative moment and gifted that spark of joy.

I’ve been sitting on the idea of creating a Substack for quite a while. Somewhere to share what’s growing on, harsh environment gardening tips, random recipes, etc. But also stories like these that are softer and more personal. What Brooke Grows has become the feral gardening page on social media where I give you permission to fuck around and find out. What The Garden Knows is the other side. The softer side that flows like a deep breath. I have no idea what this will be, but I hope you’ll join me in it. I truly hope in my effort to free the 12 year olds writers heart that was locked away in adult pressure to compete, you can find some freedom too.