From Columns to Clicks: A Virtual Roundtable Discussion on Navigating the New Media Landscape

A garden antique at Broccoli Hall, Amenia, NY. Photo: Daniel Brennan

Join the Garden Conservancy for a virtual roundtable exploring the evolving state of garden media. Our distinguished panelists and moderator will examine the forces shaping today’s information ecosystem and share practical guidance on finding trusted, useful, and inspiring resources for your gardening questions. 

Where can gardeners turn for reliable news and information today? What seems like a simple question has anything but a simple answer. Gardeners are more information-hungry than ever as our aesthetic sensibilities broaden, and the sources we rely on continually shift and evolve. Our questions, often driven by climate and ecology, are increasingly specific to region and context, even as many local newspapers retire longtime garden columns or disappear altogether. At the same time, other legacy media are adapting and even thriving with new niche magazines and an expanding roster of gardening titles from major book publishers.Then there’s digital sleuthing! AI-enhanced search results appear wonderfully authoritative but have been shown to hallucinate answers. And online plant databases (though invaluable) can be unwieldy, opaque, or intimidating. Blogs may be waning in popularity as Substack and social media rise, but the explosion of voices makes it harder than ever to distinguish sound advice from sponsored content. In short, garden media has reached an inflection point—and it’s time to take stock.

About the Moderator:

MARGARET ROACH is a longtime garden writer—first for Newsday newspaper, then for Martha Stewart Living (where she became the company’s EVP/Editorial Director) and the last six growing seasons for The New York Times. She also creates a website, podcast, and weekly newsletter called “A Way to Garden,” the title of her 1989 book that was reissued in 2019 in an all-new edition. Margaret has written several other books, including in 2013 The Backyard Parables. Her public-radio podcast, called A Way to Garden, is in its sixteenth year.

Panelists include:

KEVIN CLIFF (aka @theplantpapi)

ROCHELLE GREAYER

REBECCA McMACKIN

STEPHEN ORR