Lee Buttala

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Lee Buttala

Lee Buttala is the Executive Director of Seed Savers Exchange, which is dedicated the preservation of America’s garden and farming heritage. He is an Emmy Award-winning television producer of Martha Stewart Living and was 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 (http://www.igcol.com/user/leebuttala)

Articles by Lee Buttala

The Self-Taught Gardener: Slow Flowers

Thursday, 10 Aug 2017 - Of late, a new movement, Slow Flowers, has been giving local a new dimension. Local flowers have become just as popular as their vegetable counterparts.

The Self-Taught Gardener: The lineup     

Thursday, 3 Aug 2017 - The only time plants look good set in tightly spaced rows in the garden is in an allée of trees, or in the vegetable or cutting garden. Or perhaps in Victorian bedding schemes at historic houses.

The Self-Taught Gardener: Long-term investment

Thursday, 29 Jun 2017 - So often we allow mundane garden tasks like weeding or raking up fallen leaves and spent magnolia flowers to distract us from the garden activities that would benefit us more greatly in the future.

The Self-Taught Gardener: Two for the Road

Thursday, 1 Jun 2017 - As plant explorer Dan Hinkley commented on the virtues of the native viburnum along the roadside, a new game, roadside botanizing, was born for me.

The Self-Taught Gardener: Caveat emptor

Thursday, 18 May 2017 - From last weekend’s Trade Secrets and this week’s Plants and Answers sale at Berkshire Botanical Garden to visits to local nurseries like Windy Hill and Ward’s, gardeners at this time of year are pulling green out of their wallets to bring home greens for the garden. But how do we make sure we take home what we want?

The Self-Taught Gardener: Flowering times

Thursday, 11 May 2017 - These remontant varieties provide color throughout a good portion of the season and meet one of my mother’s standards for a useful garden plant: they perform over the long haul.

The Self-Taught Gardener: Are all natives equal?

Friday, 14 Apr 2017 - On the eve of the Wildflower Festival and Plant Sale at Bartholomew’s Cobble, it is worth ruminating on how to select native plants for our gardens. And while nativism is widely discussed these days, establishing a selection policy is not easy.