Known for her leadership with the national foodscape movement and her lively, information packed presentations, Brie Arthur is a celebrated speaker and bestselling author. With two decades of professional horticulture experience she now shares her expertise as a correspondent on the Emmy award winning PBS Television show “Growing a Greener World.” Brie is the featured speaker at the 2022 Gala In The Garden hosted by the Columbus Botanical Garden on September 15th.

By R. Caligaris

Bestselling author and horticulturist, Brie Arthur has garnered acclaim for her enthusiastic presentations and practical, out of the box gardening advice. Originally from southeastern Michigan, Brie Arthur studied Landscape Design and Horticulture at Purdue University. With more than a decade of experience as a grower and propagator, she now shares her expertise as an advocate for consumer horticulture and home gardening across America.

Brie is an ambassador for Soil3 organic compost and appears as a correspondent on the PBS Television show “Growing a Greener World”. She is President of the International Plant Propagators Society Southern Region and is on the board for the North Carolina Botanic Garden Foundation. Brie was honored as the first recipient of the American Horticultural Society's Emerging Horticultural Professional Award for her efforts in connecting a new generation to the art of science of growing.

Foodscaping is all about making the most of the square footage that is available. Discover strategies to cultivate all the plants you love in containers. Brie shares expert insights on how to design and manage container foodscapes for year-round beauty and bounty. Learn all about the best soil, fertilizers, and watering practices along with creative planting combinations. Everyone will be inspired to get busy planting food and flowers in pots after listening to this fun and informative presentation.

Brie has taken the foodscape platform into schools across the US, working with administrators, teachers, parents, and grounds management staff to create bountiful and beautiful spaces through-out campus properties. Brie spoke to SVM about how her passion for plants developed, what is foodscape, and how foodscaping is more sustainable compared to grass lawns.

You are the featured guest speaker at this year’s Botanical Garden Gala Luncheon. What will the topic of your lecture be? I am thrilled to be sharing The Foodscape Revolution with the Columbus Botanical Garden! We will cover a wide variety of ideas including simple approaches to cultivating a year-round foodscape that everyone can do no matter how much space is available. The goal is to mix beauty and bounty to maximize the available square footage.

How did your develop your passion for gardening? My passion for gardening started as a child, watching my parents and grandparents tend to their suburban properties. As a young 4-H member, I was fortunate to have hard working extension agents introduce me to many different aspects of horticulture. From sowing a seed, to harvesting fresh vegetables, and making beautiful homegrown flower arrangements, gardening really does provide endless joy!

My home foodscape has kept me busy for 11 years now and it continues to evolve and grow! Last year we purchased the neighboring property to expand the garden and offer in person experiences to guests through our Airbnb. I consider my garden to be a living laboratory and I welcome guests of all ages and experience levels to visit and learn from the plants.

Why do you think plants both inside and outside are important? Plants provide so many solutions for the modern-day society. From mitigating pollutants and absorbing excess water, to providing beauty and food for native pollinators, plants are always working to make the world a better place. Indoors or out, plants belong everywhere!

What do you think is new and exciting in the field of horticulture you want to make sure readers know? Ecological planting is a topic that has captivated my attention in recent years. This scientifically supported concept really focuses on the long-term benefits that plants provide. This includes the use of more indigenous plants and making selections based of their ability to tolerate extremes like heat, cold, drought, and flooding. It is a very exciting time to be in the horticulture field as our expertise can expand beyond beauty to think critically about the challenges society will face in the future, and how planting design can provide solutions.

You have published a few books so far, your first one was: The Foodscape Revolution . What exactly is a foodscape? Foodscaping is an easy idea of simply incorporating edible plants in with your favorite ornamental trees, shrubs, perennials, and containers that you are already growing in your home landscape. It is an important idea to raise awareness of several key things, namely how and where food can be grown and the endless opportunities our existing landscapes offer. We have more than 180 million acres of land developed in the US, and within the borders of all the common landscapes we could be producing food to help reduce the food miles crisis and eliminate food desserts in every community.

Can you give an example or two of things that can be grown together? The key with foodscaping is simple: pair plants based off their cultural requirements. What does that mean? First consider how much sun a plant needs to thrive and then think about water requirements. Most sun loving vegetables like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, basil (and so much more) will thrive when planted with flowering perennials such as phlox, milkweed, salvia, echinacea and black-eyed Susan’s. In contrast, if you live in an area with a lot of shade, you can grow edibles such as lettuce, kale, chard, arugula, and spinach alongside plants like hosta, hellebores, and coral bells.

Who are foodscapers? Is it across generations, younger or older people? Everyone has the potential to be a foodscaper, even if you only have a patio and a container. Any space no matter the size offers an opportunity to grow something. I start off all my presentations asking one simple thing: who has eaten in the last 24 hours? Once we have established that everyone, no matter age, race, religion, or economic status has indeed consumed food, I can then show why we need to all focus on the things that bring us together has a society, rather than further divide us. Having access to healthy food should not be a luxury and foodscaping is a way to help connect people to their own health and wellness through the act of growing some of your own.

How is foodscaping more sustainable compared to grass lawns? Anytime biological diversity is prioritized over monocultures the sustainability measure increases. Sprawling lawns are high maintenance in the sense that they require a lot of outputs to be successful. When you really think hard about what it takes to maintain a lawn, and what you get from that effort it is hard to even compare the value of turf to the abundance that a foodscape can offer. I would trade in weekly mowing, irrigation, fertilizer, herbicides, fungicides, and pest control for a diverse garden full of delicious food crops and flowers any day!

You didn’t suddenly wake up one morning and know everything you needed to know about sustainable food, and farming on your property. How did you come about it? My foodscape journey started when I bought my first house in the Raleigh, NC suburbs and had to navigate an HOA! They had a rule about no vegetables in the front yard, but that was the only sunny spot. I started to grow broccoli, kales, and cabbage in plain sight, right next to my Knockout Roses and hydrangeas. Before I knew it, my HOA had awarded me the “Yard of the Year” without even realizing I was growing food! It was a very empowering moment, one that I am grateful to share with others to help build their confidence in growing the food they love in the landscape boundaries they already have.

BRIE ARTHUR