Monday, September 14, 2026

News and Ideas Worth Sharing

Lee Buttala

Lee Buttala is a writer and organizational consultant. He is the former Executive Director of Seed Savers Exchange, an organization dedicated to the preservation of America’s garden and farming heritage, an Emmy Award-winning television producer of Martha Stewart Living and the creator, producer and director of Cultivating Life, a PBS series on outdoor living and gardening. He has written for The New York Times, Martha Stewart Living, New York, and Metropolitan Home. As an editor, he has worked for Saveur, Garden Design and Interview, and for the book publisher Alfred A. Knopf. He also served as the preservation program manager for the Garden Conservancy and has studied garden design at Kyoto University of Art and Design, the English Gardening School at London’s Chelsea Physic Garden and the New York Botanical Garden. He is the author and editor of the books Cultivating Life: A Guide to Outdoor Living and The Seed Garden: The Art and Practice of Seed Saving. You can also follow him on Instagram (https://www.igcol.com/user/leebuttala)

written articles

At the Dewey Hall Dahlia Festival: A new generation of growers

The crowd at Dewey Hall’s Dahlia Festival may not have been surprised by this beautiful bloom winning best in show, but they were certainly surprised by who the grower was.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Merit badges

The student, who was born in Italy, called into question our assumption that foreign plants are aggressors by asking who determines what belongs where.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Fall Flowers

Lee looks forward to Dewey Hall's Third Annual Dahlia Festival that takes place in the coming days and focuses on the variety of flowers all belonging to the single genus of dahlia.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Sharing what you know

A horticultural whisperer shared his take on what we can learn from nature to apply in our gardens, which are often anything but natural.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Make America shady again

Currently, the U.S. spends as much energy cooling and heating our homes as the continent of Africa expends on all electrical usage, so maybe a few trees could supplant some of our energy usage, should we be so inclined.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: The mean greens

Like Holly Golightly’s mean reds in Capote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” the mean greens are a generalized sense of angst and perhaps panic, not about one’s life, but about the state of one’s garden.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Learning from others

On the eve of a design symposium to be held at their home and garden, Rockland Farm, Berkshire Botanical Garden board members Madeline and Ian Hooper share the genesis of their magical landscape and how their attending classes and lectures and visiting other people’s gardens influenced it.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Grow a garden IRL (In Real Life)

For parents teaching their children to garden, it is hard to compete with the apps on their tablets and phones, such as “Farmville” and “Grow A Garden,” that grow plants and communities seemingly overnight.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Garden daydreams

Most of the great American gardens I know were not drafted into place but drifted into place, matching not only the creator’s initial interests but their evolution as a gardener.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Memorial daze

A statue of W.E.B. DuBois will be unveiled in July on the steps of the Mason Library in Great Barrington. My visit to another outdoor installation shows what public art can accomplish.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Plants that put us in good company

Daffodils happily naturalized in Berkshire County.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Time travel

With all the talk of red states and blue states and regional politics, we live in a time where we often view anything not connected to us as “other.” But, oddly, at least in the Eastern United States, we have been connected across the 40th parallel by a single mountain range—the Appalachians—that has served for eons as a path not just for the hikers we see along Route 7 in the Berkshires, but by the flora and fauna that have travelled this same pathway.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Sowing lessons for procrastinators

My method of seed sowing involves simply sprinkling seeds on the ground where they will grow and eventually flower. Much easier than elaborate indoor methods.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Cut-back cutbacks

Perhaps the plants that I am most grateful for in this moment are hellebores. Because they are not native, I feel comfortable cutting back their decaying leaves in March.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Botanical personal pronouns

As I garden this season, I hope I will ask who I am gardening for and have an answer that is not first person singular. We all do what we can.

THE SELF-TAUGHT GARDENER: Taking down fences

Heading to a meeting about creating habitat for endangered pollinator species, I started to consider how we can manage our own habitat to make us feel connected and part of a community.
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