LEA JOHNSON is a plant ecologist whose work, she says, is driven by this question:

“All of the wild diversity of life on earth is here, with us, right now. How can we take it with us into the future?”

It’s a compelling question, and one that can motivate not just scientists like Lea, Director of Conservation at Native Plant Trust in New England, but also native-plant gardeners like us. She talked to me about where conservation and gardening intersect, and some of the challenges and the possibilities we face together.

Lea joined Native Plant Trust, the nation’s oldest native plant conservation organization, in 2025, as its Director of Conservation. At the Massachusetts-based nonprofit, she manages various conservation and restoration initiatives, including the monitoring of rare and endangered species; a rare plant seed bank with over 10 million seeds, and the Trust’s seven native plant sanctuaries in New England.

She also oversees the leading botanical resource GoBotany—one of my favorite reference websites.

Read along as you listen to the July 6, 2026 edition of my public-radio show and podcast using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on Apple Podcasts (iTunes) or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).

Margaret Roach: Hi, Lea. So it must have been an exciting first year at Native Plant Trust, yes?

Lea Johnson: Oh my goodness [laughter].

Margaret: Talk about immersion.

Lea: The things you just listed are diverse.

Margaret: Yes. An immersive landscape, as we say, in naturalistic gardening, right? Your portfolio is immersive.

Lea: Absolutely. And all of that work is work that’s done in community and I have found the community of people around this work to be just amazing and welcoming. So it’s been a very social process as well as time with plants.

Margaret: Yes. And like what I said about GoBotany, it’s really true. I’ve used it forever, because I’m in sort of the region of New England plants. I’m just below New England, technically, in New York State, but near the Berkshires of Massachusetts. And I just love it. It’s been my go-to thing, so that’s great to see it continuing to be there for gardeners like myself and others.

Lea: Yeah, I think I first started using the website myself when I was working in New York State. And it’s such a pleasure to work with Arthur Haines, who’s the taxonomic powerhouse who keeps it up to date.

Margaret: I just love right there that you get your maps, you get all the basics that you need, so I get really this overview of each species that gets me started on what I want to look deeper into and so forth.

I love your mission question that I mentioned in the introduction: How can we take the wild diversity that’s here with us now into the future? And I know even on my tiny scale as a gardener, I think about the future, too. And I think about it more all the time as the natural world seems increasingly under pressure. So just to get us started with that as your mindset, I mean, what are some of the things that are always kind of on your mind? I mean, it’s a lot. There’s a lot right now.

Lea: It’s a big question. And I think the nice thing about a question that big is that there are a lot of answers and there are a lot of strategies and opportunities to make a difference in that direction from the very small scale to the very large scale. From thinking at a regional scale like I get to do a lot right now, to thinking on the scale of a single garden. So I like that it’s a good question for zooming in and out and for thinking creatively with a lot of people about how can we combine and make complementary these different approaches.

Margaret: Because I mean, I suspect that even just at the most basic level when we’re talking about conservation versus horticulture—and I don’t mean versus as in opposed as compared to [laughter]—I suspect even in the language, the word native, native plant, has a very different definition. When I’m out shopping, either browsing the online catalogs or shopping in a nursery for a “native plant” or you are doing your conservation work, you are protecting rare and endangered plants, or the seed bank, all of this—what’s native isn’t even a universal term. Because, well, what’s native at the garden center, a lot of it is cultivars of native plants that have been cloned, have been created, asexually propagated. They’re not from seed, etc., etc., etc. It’s a whole different world. It’s a commercial product. It’s not-

Lea: I would love to see over time there being less of a divide there. I think it’s something that Uli Lorimer at Native Plant Trust and I talk about together as this effort. There’s a really exciting and energetic effort happening across the Northeast right now to improve the availability of really local, source-identified plant material for both ecological restoration and horticulture. The work of the Native Seed Network is really exciting.

And I think I would love for it to be the case that you could go to a fairly normal garden center and be able to know where the seed came from. And it’s such a big challenge to develop that whole pipeline of how does the seed get from the wild into propagation? What are the genetic considerations? How local is local, and what are the effects of doing the increase? Are we selecting for things that grow well in a farm field?

But at the same time, we have to deal with those questions, because we need a lot of plants to do ecological restoration and to add back ecological value to our home and residential and commercial landscapes as well as the more wild places. And I think the answer to what material you need may really vary. And this is another sort of interesting topic of conversation among people who are thinking about this stuff: The needs of ecological restoration or for conservation of a rare species, the considerations are different in terms of how you might move propagules around.

Margaret: I was not long ago talking to someone at Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware and they were talking about how with the cultivars that I was just mentioning versus the straight species and especially the local ecotype, the actual genetics of the local version of that plant, that the way they kind of draw the line at the moment is like near the estate house and so forth, they may use the cultivars in a more horticultural setting, but when they’re doing the big-scale restoration in their wild areas and so forth, they are seeking out and in many cases propagating the straight species, the local version, because that’s very important. Those genetics are very, very important and well-matched to the other organisms, other life of that area, yeah?

Lea: Right. And I love Mt. Cuba Center. They do some really interesting work. And it’s a beautiful place. And then there are questions related to that, about if there’s a species that… In New England we are right at the edge of the range of a number of species, like anywhere species where you’re in the middle of their range or where you’re at the northern, southern, eastern, western edge of their range. And so there are species that are very rare at the edge of their range but more common in the middle. And it makes a lot of frustration for natural heritage botanists when people are taking material from the middle of the range and moving it to the edge of the range, and then they’re like, “Was this a natural population—are these the local genetics?” It can be very confusing and complicate their work quite a bit.

Margaret: So you mentioned just a couple of minutes ago, the native seed network and I just wanted to just a real quick sentence or two of what is the Native Seed Network because that’s part of the hopeful solution for the future. Yes. Is it a collaborative project that you’re doing?

Lea: Yeah, it’s a big network of people that Native Plant Trust has been involved in since the outset that it involves farmers and botanical gardens and arboreta and seed banks and just a lot of people who are excited about native plants in a lot of different ways, thinking together about how to increase the availability and the quantity of native seed for ecological restoration and horticulture. [More on the Northeast Seed Network, and the larger Native Seed Network’s directory of all its affiliated regional projects around the U.S.] 

Margaret: Right, because demand is rising both in horticulture and for conservation/restoration and supply is not as probably as great as the demand, especially in certain areas. I mean, up till now, I say now meaning recently… When I first came to my place like 40 years ago, this piece of land, I noticed because I had already met some native plant people and been to the Midwest and met some prairie people and so forth, been to the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And I noticed there was little bluestem on my hillside and it was like here I was in New York State in the area it was. And I didn’t understand that. And then I read that there were even prairies on, I think, Long Island back in early history, thousands of years ago, and I’m like, “What?” [Laughter.] The Ice Age will do a lot of interesting things, I guess.

But what’s native and where is it native as you were talking about before? And then yet when I wanted to get more little blue stem, the only sources were and have been until recently really, in Midwestern nurseries. Do you know what I mean? Which is great that it was available, but I didn’t know anything. I didn’t understand. I’m only now in recent years understanding the complexity of all of this.

Lea: Most things in ecology are very complex [laughter].

Margaret: Indeed. I don’t know how you store it all in your head. I’m having trouble even with just the horticulture part of implementations of it [laughter].

Lea: Well, I’m a plant ecologist by training and ecology is the study of relationships. That’s really what it is, relationships between organisms and each other and organisms and the environment. So I find this kind of stuff fascinating. You have to be very, as the high school science standards like to encourage comfortable with uncertainty.

Margaret: Which is of course the name of, I think, a book by the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron.

Lea: [Laughter.] Well, I like her work, too.

Margaret: [Laughter.] Yeah, I like her work too. Right, exactly. So I know Native Plant Trust is involved in, as we’ve been talking about, research about propagating native species and how to store the seed and all these things that have to do with having enough and so forth. But when I look at classic propagation manuals or textbooks that I have on my bookshelf, admittedly some are decades old, they don’t include these plants [laughter]. They have hostas and stuff and astilbes and you know what I mean? It’s not like these are the plants that are in your basic gardener’s propagation how-to manual like sedges. It doesn’t say how to propagate the Carex or Pycnanthemum, the mountain mints, or whatever.

So is that something else you’re working on, to sort of unravel is like how do these plants, how are these plants best… I mean, not just where do we get enough seed or whatever, but also the secrets, because each plant has its own secrets really when it comes to propagation, yes?

Lea: Yeah. And I would say that there are people learning things certainly across groups of people like the Northeast Seed Network, but yeah, I think we’re certainly taking notes on everything we learn.  [Above, native seed in sieves; photo from Northeast Seed Network website.]

Margaret: And sharing them.

Lea: Yeah. And I think more sharing of that is something I definitely want to do, but yeah, there’s so much to learn. There are some manuals for native plants, but-

Margaret: Oh, I’m sure. But they’re not horticulture ones.

Lea: Right. They don’t cover everything for sure. And there are so many species, and one of the things that’s really tricky is especially with rare plants, nobody’s propagating these things. So we partner a lot with … I mean, the conservation department is very integrated with the horticulture department at Native Plant Trust when we’re working on propagating rare species out of our seed bank. We have some seeds from 1992 and we want to send them back out to help augment a population that has declined that they came from in the beginning. And so I’m very grateful to Alexis Doshas at Nasami Farm for figuring lots of things out. There’s a lot of horticultural expertise in our hort department, which I am very grateful for.

Margaret: Right, because does it require stratification, scarification—and those are just two simple things that I know about as a gardener, that some plants need—a pre-treatment of some kind, so to speak, that simulates what nature would’ve provided where they came from in their natural habitat to make them germinate and thrive. And it’s a lot of mysteries, a lot of mysteries.

You said rare plants, and of course that’s part of the mission. What are some of the plants that you are the most focused on at the moment? Are there some sort of top-of-the-list ones that-

Lea: Well, things that have gone out and gone in the ground this season: sundial lupine [Lupinus perennis], a project with the state of Vermont, working with the state botanist Grace Glynn on augmenting a population that had become very small, and also planting out into a similar habitat some seeds from a long time ago. There was a really interesting genetic study that was done in part in relationship to that, looking at how the genetics of that population had become less diverse. And then we added some diversity that was previously there when the population was bigger back in.

We have been working for a long time with a plant called Jesup’s milk-vetch [Astragalus robbinsii var. jesupii]. Bill Brumback started, well, worked on this for a very long time with Bob Popp from the State of Vermont and in collaboration with the Natural Heritage Program of New Hampshire as well.

This is a little plant that only exists in three natural populations and three introduced populations in very similar habitat, very nearby. And it clings to rocks [below, photo from GoBotany by Arthur Haines] and it gets washed away. And so the seeds that we have in the seed bank, every year there’s a meeting to discuss: Do we augment it again this year? Do we wait and see which populations need more attention? So we had some very robust plants that Alexis grew last year that were so fluffy and healthy that they actually flowered in their first year after we planted them, which doesn’t always happen. So that was a nice thing to see this.

Margaret: Interesting. So talking also again back to the overlaps, similarities and differences in horticulture and conservation. So Doug Tallamy, the University of Delaware professor, for one writes in his books about creating wildlife corridors and so on, and how our native plant gardens, though obviously very small compared to wild spaces and often sited in highly developed urban and suburban settings, they nevertheless connect disparate patches of nature and therefore are really important to the bigger picture. So even little bits pieced together to make these sort of pathways for wildlife and so forth.

So do our gardens, to your mind as an ecologist, I mean, do our gardens play a role? Are they part of the restoration picture? Do you know what I mean?

Lea: Absolutely. I mean, I have spent a lot of time in the space of urban ecology. I think it’s really important. I kind of think of it as a continuum from one end, you have preservation of relatively intact places where you have the whole interacting system has its parts and all of these relationships are intact among the many different elements of an ecosystem. And then you’ve got places where the ecological restoration is needed for a variety of reasons. There are all kinds of different things that change.

And then on the most peopled end of that spectrum, there’s so much possibility in the places where we live, where we work, and it’s all part of the same process and the same trajectory of improving the health of the ecosystems around us. And I think it’s so important to do that where we see it every day. There’s been a bunch of research that says that nature experience, especially early in your life, is really important to your connection to nature.

And that takes an urban form for most people. Eighty percent of Americans live in cities and towns. So we’re living, we’re voting, we’re thinking, we’re making decisions about what we do with land. And so I’m totally in favor of increasing biodiversity everywhere, especially connecting to the native biodiversity, the native species of the place where you live. I think it really deepens a sense of place.

I am such a fan also of learning to know the things that are all around you. It really enriches experience so much. And that’s learning to see the mullein that is growing in a crack in the driveway [laughter] and appreciating it for its enthusiasm. I think in an ecological sense, depending on what your particular place is surrounded by, that’ll make a difference to what can use it that you didn’t put there, but there is connectivity across all kinds of landscape matrix. So some organisms can move more easily across an urban environment than others. So a blue jay can actually transfer acorns quite a distance in a city, so an oak tree might travel O.K. if there are blue jays. But something like bloodroot [photo, top of page], you might have that in a remnant forest patch in a city, but it isn’t going to travel as well because it travels by ants. [Laughter.]

Margaret: I was going to say, the hungry ants like to eat the elaiosomes and get all that yummy lipid or whatever it is, that sort of fatty stuff off the elaiosomes or something.

Lea: And in the process, take the seed to their garbage pile and plant it. Yeah. Great. In the compost. Exactly. But they’re not going to take it a mile away or even a few blocks. But residential land does really cover a lot of land. And so I think we can look at that as ecological potential.

Margaret: Yeah. So just any other sort of plants or projects or anything that you want to shout out for people, or any other sort of things that you want us to be aware of as gardeners that are on your mind that you feel like can be on our mind, too, and help with answering that question that you pose as your mission statement sort of?

Lea: Well, I think what unites all the things we do with plants—plant conservation, ecology and horticulture, agriculture, depending on how you’re doing it—is that we’re caring for nature, we’re caring for the land in a way that’s focused on plants. And so I find a lot of common ground among the people who do that in a variety of different ways.

Margaret: Yes.

Lea: And I think that bringing native plants into our everyday lives can be really just wondrous and beautiful. And I particularly enjoy the element of surprise and change and seeing what else comes, as well as enjoying the plants that you invite yourself.

Margaret: Yeah. And I’m always thrilled. I’m glad you said sort of the wondrous thing, because I always thought it’s just as gardeners who sort of have the awe thing because we don’t understand enough and it feels so big to us. But when I hear research scientists and so forth, ecologists and entomologists speak about the awe factor, I know we’re all one, like all plant people. We all kind of have that same underlying feeling, which is so great.

So I’m so glad to talk to you and I hope we’re going to talk again soon. And I’m again so appreciative for the work that you do, which obviously as someone in the general vicinity, I’ve utilized so much over the years. So thank you, Lea Johnson from Native Plant Trust. Thanks for making time today.

Lea: Thank you for your work, which I also very much enjoy.

(Photos from Native Plant Trust, except as noted.)

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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 17th year in March 2026. It’s produced at Robin Hood Radio, the smallest NPR station in the nation. Listen locally in the Hudson Valley (NY)-Berkshires (MA)-Litchfield Hills (CT) Mondays at 8:30 AM Eastern, rerun at 8:30 Saturdays. Or play the July 6, 2026 show using the player near the top of this transcript. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes/Apple Podcasts or Spotify (and browse my archive of podcasts here).