HAVE YOU ever replied, “I don’t know; that’s just the way I’ve always done it” when someone asked why you performed a certain garden task in a particular way? Sometimes we stay stuck even when there’s evidence there’s a newer, better version to try. Old habits die hard.
Here’s how one friend, Matt Mattus, explained it in a recent social media post that caught my eye:
He wrote: “It’s hard to change, especially when a method becomes a nostalgic ritual.”
Indeed. Matt and I talked about some of our nostalgic rituals that we cling to, and others we’ve surrendered in favor of new-and-improved versions.
You may recall a popular conversation on the show about Christmas cactus a few months back with Matt, Senior Director of Horticulture for the American Horticultural Society. Matt gardens in Massachusetts, and is the author of various garden books, including “Mastering the Art of Vegetable Gardening” and “Mastering the Art of Flower Gardening.” He also provides consultation services both virtually and in person to help others with garden-design and plant-care issues.
Read along as you listen to the Feb. 3, 2025 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).
some of our ‘nostalgic rituals,’ with matt mattus
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Margaret Roach: How are you, Matt, and how are your nostalgic rituals?
Matt Mattus: It seems like the older I get, every ritual is nostalgic.
Margaret: Yeah. So as I alluded to in the introduction I read, it was an Instagram post you did not long ago, and it was actually about forcing branches to bring them in indoor for winter display or whatever, and how you do it now. And you were recalling how you used to do it by comparison, and it opened up that topic that you call so beautifully called “nostalgic rituals.” So to set the scene, maybe tell us the then and now version of forcing. That’s one you’ve changed, I think.
Matt: Yes, it has. Yeah. Well, I was talking about branches and beginning of January or through the month of January, up, especially up here in the North, right, Massachusetts or New York, it’s cold and snowy and you want to force some branches. I think even as a kid, I don’t know if you did this, but I would run out and cut Forsythia that forces really quickly, or any flower or sometimes even apple or crabapple or quince, and put them in bottles on the windowsill. It’s one of my earliest horticultural ventures at 12, and I’d watch them see if they would bloom.
But I would experiment and cut any shrub, lilac, even barberry, whatever I had in the garden at that time, and see if it would bloom. You learn a lot that way. Some things just seemed like they took forever and some things seemed to bloom in a week or two. As you grow as a gardener, as I did some of my very early gardening books, my mom would buy me would be a Thalassa Cruso book, and she would talk about forcing branches and I’d be like, oh, she’s saying we should pound the ends with a hammer and that would allow it to take up more water, or we should put warm water in the bottles—or there’s just a lot of myths or truths.
Margaret: Right. Iterations of advice, sort of, along the way.
Matt: And then through high school—in high school I went to an agricultural high school, so we would force trees and shrubs for the New England Flower Show in Boston. And that was exciting, and I learned that, wait, we’re forcing some big branches and we’re not pounding them. Is that right or wrong?
Margaret: It was like you took a hammer and you shattered it so it split the lower portion—split as if that helped it to suck up more water.
Matt: Yeah, it made sense, right? Just logically, oh, I’m exposing more cells. But again, you’re thinking maybe it’s damaging more cells. And also in high school, I worked at a florist and I’m like, we never pounded the branches and they still would take up water. But 30, 40 years later you read that—I’m still reading that—people are saying to pound branches, and on the other hand, I’m starting to read research where people say, no, just cut at an angle or cut an X in the bottom or don’t cut it, just cut it with sharp secateurs as soon as you bring it in the house and put it into warm water. And I’ve been doing that for 10 years now, and I never noticed a difference. They all bloom the same time.
Margaret: Yeah. It made me smile when I read that you’d moved away from the pounding. I always, at that time of year, I keep a hammer just inside the front door, the kitchen door. And right outside the kitchen door, I have a big…what do you call those, millstones? Big, huge stone millstones. I bought a pair of them that sort of flank the door. I bought them a million years ago, and they’re just these huge stones. And I would bring the branches over to there, with things that I was cutting, and before I’d go in the house to put things in water, I would get my hammer from just inside the door and I’d pound everybody right on the millstone. So it was like that was my nostalgic ritual; that was my spot that I did the deed.
Matt: Right, exactly. I used to work at a big florist in Boston part-time in college, and you would get these huge bunches of flowering quince in from the flower market, that flew in on a plane from the Netherlands, and they just had sharp cuts. They were never pounded. So you start to question these things like, yeah, maybe you’re not really exposing any more cells. If anything, you’re damaging more.
And I did research somewhere that said, don’t pound. I don’t remember where it was, but that’s when I stopped pounding. But I did kind of miss that trudging out in the snow and cutting a branch, and I’m going to pound it a little. Even my Dad, we would go pick pussy willows in end of February and put the big branches in the cellar. And maybe another myth, he always said we’d put them near the furnace in the dark because they would turn pink, which never really happened. They had a pinkish glow just because they were growing in the dark. We would pound the stems, and now I don’t. I still pick pussy willows and don’t pound them.
Margaret: So what are a couple of things that… I mean, early-blooming things are usually especially good to force. You were doing, I think you were doing witch-hazel [above] maybe in the Instagram post or something that you mentioned. Witch-hazel, I can’t remember what else you were doing. Oh, Cornus mas, the Cornelian cherry [top of page photo], which is really a dogwood.
Matt: We’ve had sort of really unpredictable irregular winters these past two or three winters. This is a colder winter, I guess, than normal, but it was a long warm fall and my witch-hazel… so for Hamamelis, there are a lot of crosses and hybrids. So I have ‘Arnold Promise,’ which is a spring-blooming witch-hazel. There are fall and mid-winter blooming ones, too. But this one typically would bloom in February, March, April even. But in November it was blooming.
Margaret: Oh my.
Matt: This is the second year in a row. It bloomed not the whole tree, but 70 percent of it was in bloom.
Margaret: Oh my goodness.
Matt: I know. And it would get cold and the petals roll up again, and biologically they’re designed that way. So I knew it would force quickly. So I often would pick at the first week of January as my recovery from the holidays, the start. And it takes about a week, a week and a half to come into full bloom. I mean, right now it’s almost in shatter mode. It blooms and then it shatters, but it comes into bloom very quickly.
And Cornus mas, if you’re not familiar with it, the Cornelian cherry, it’s a dogwood, but it doesn’t look like a dogwood. It has a small yellow flower. It’s like a dogwood that you pulled the white petals off of it, or the white bracts. But I think it’s only good for forcing, personally; it’s great. It’s a great shrub, but I plant these out along the edge of the property with other trees that you can force. I have this fantasy of putting in a cut-flower garden that’s just forcing shrubs, a row of quince, a row of-
Margaret: Yeah.
Matt: ...so you can hack them up and not cut your landscape shrubs. But they all come into bloom rather quickly this time of year in January and beginning of February. But the closer you get out, I mean when you get closer to spring, then you could start looking at the more difficult ones to force.
Margaret: Or even just like the fruit trees, if you have an apple or crabapple, those will do.
Matt: Quince is very quick. That’s why you see at posh New York hotels, you see huge quince branches. You can’t have enough of that. That comes into bloom pretty quickly in the early winter. But things like lilacs, and I had a lot of comments on my post about lilacs, where people said, I always pound the stems on lilacs. Magnolia. And these aren’t things you think you dream about forcing these, but it’s rather unsuccessful unless maybe you’re in April or just two or three-
Margaret: If it’s just before the normal bloom time.
Matt: Right. And that’s an easier time to force those.
Margaret: So at the end of that Instagram post, you said something really beautiful, and I’m going to quote it because it’s just too good, so in other words, there was no disdain for either holding on to the nostalgic ritual or letting go and doing something different.
And you said, “If it’s your precious annual ritual, keep on doing it. No one needs to know. As with so many methods in gardening, it’s all much more than knowing the perfect scientific way. Sometimes the soul needs tending, too.”
Matt: It does. Yeah. I think about this a lot, because if you follow me online, I’m often grumbling about cold-sowing poppies on the snow, or there’s a lot of myths out there that-
Margaret: Well, that’s another one, right?
Matt: Yeah.
Margaret: That’s another one that it’s as if we have to do it then. Right.
Matt: And I went down that rabbit hole trying to find out how that sowing poppy seeds on the snow started, and I think it goes right back to England, to the reverend who discovered a pink poppy growing in a field of red Shirley poppies, Papaver rhoeas, and there was a freak snowstorm that week. I looked it up on the weather; you can look up the weather of any day of the year in any town. And he had reported there was 4 inches of snow and the poppies were still alive. So I don’t know if that’s where it started in sort of the late Victorian era. But I think the original, I think a very early 1888 story in a horticultural magazine, talked about my grandmother sowing seeds on the snow of poppies, because it helped distribute the seed.
Margaret: And that’s what I always thought. I thought it was because first of all, unlike on the soil, you could see the seed, how finely or thickly you were spreading it. It was like a nice palette for sprinkling your seed. And second of all, as the snow melted, it would kind of pull them down and water it and keep it… Do you know what I mean? It was like a perfect germinating situation. [Laughter.]
Matt: They settle into the little nooks and crannies. It makes so much sense. But also on the other hand, it makes no sense at all-
Margaret: Right? It’s not necessary, but it was a thing.
Matt: Poppies grow in Afghanistan where it doesn’t snow and they germinate at 90 degrees. They’ll start germinating at 70 degrees, but not below that. So they don’t need stratification. I see this all the time.
Margaret: They don’t need a cold treatment.
Matt: They don’t need a cold treatment, but also it doesn’t harm them. So there’s nothing wrong with it. So I think if it works for you, go for it. It doesn’t work for me here, like you probably have a very crowded garden. It’s plant-heavy.
Margaret: Nah, I don’t have any plants. [Laughter.]
Matt: I know I’ve seen pictures.
I know people in Connecticut where they self-sow every year, or New Jersey; that’s terrific. But here you get a little farther north and if they germinate in the fall, they don’t survive the winter. So it’s those ones that survive through the spring, that germinate. And outside, yeah, they’ll germinate at the right time. It’s going to be 70 degrees on some March day for two or three days, and they germinate and that’s perfect for them, which does bring up the whole winter sowing thing. Winter sowing in jugs. That is definitely something that drives me crazy.
Margaret: It drives you crazy, but it’s this sort of new version—you and I more have the nostalgic ritual version, which is we like the old-fashioned sowing in community pots or in flats under some kind of hardware cloth or whatever, or wire protection to keep the rodents out, leaving the flat out in some kind of a coldframe or whatever uncovered. Let the winter do its thing. We like the old-fashioned method.
But now there’s the modern method, and it works. It works. It doesn’t please me visually or physically—the touch of it, the materials. They don’t please me in the way the other does.
Matt: No, I think what I’m seeing with the milk carton, this whole cold-season starting, people are starting plants that don’t need to be started that way or absolutely should not. Poppies, for instance, are that things don’t want root disturbance.
I mean, it is something that real serious gardeners did since the year 1900 with alpine plants or some perennials that require a real cold period to stratify the seed. But the list is not as long as people think. And when I go through the list of what people are starting in their jugs, it’s often like Rudbeckia or Pycnanthemum or Echinacea or Lobelia cardinalis or Sporobolus grasses. All these germinate without any cold stratification. So there’s no need to be sowing these in January.
Margaret: And I say to people: Do the homework, read about the plants and find out about whether they need it first so that, yeah, you match the right plant to the right tactic.
Even with after I read your Instagram post a couple weeks ago, whenever it was, I had been that morning watering my houseplants. And it was past mid-January; we were getting a few minutes of additional light here and there. The days were lengthening a teeny bit. You’re starting to feel it a little bit. It’s not quite so dire as the December and early January darkness and so forth.
And I thought to myself, oh my goodness, how many different ways have I tried to time when I’m supposed to do the right thing by the plants in terms of when am I supposed to start fertilizing them again, and when is it O.K? And it used to be, well, from fall until, I don’t know, I think late winter practically, we didn’t feed. Or sometimes people said, well, once there was a certain amount of daylength you started feeding again, but what’s the trigger? What do I believe is the right thing? Is there a right thing, or is it just use my judgment and what’s my best judgment? [Laughter.] When’s your houseplant-feeding season, for instance? I mean, do you have a time when you start again or do you do it all year long?
Matt: I’m not really good at my houseplant feeding. I’ll admit. However, I am a bit of a geek about feeding other plants, whether it’s vegetables, or I have a greenhouse, too, so I don’t fertilize the greenhouse at all in the winter except the cold-growing plants, which would be my species Cyclamen. Nerine and some of the Amaryllis—some of the winter-growing bulbs. They’re dormant in the summer, so the winter is their natural growing season.
But indoors, I suppose the right way to do it indoors would, because its temperature really affects how plants take up nutrients… And often that 70-degree point for Nitrogen and whatnot, they can’t access a lot of nutrients when it’s colder than 70. So I would think indoors the right way to do it would be a 10 percent fertilizer solution every time you water or something like that. That’s what commercial greenhouses do. They drop in a few drops whether organic or inorganic-
Margaret: Right? Weakly, weekly. [Laughter.]
Matt: The big issues with plants and health is, if you think of it like our health, it’s pH of the soil. There’s electrical conductivity that happens in the soils. You need to make sure the pH is right for that plant, for that soil, and then that allows the plant to take up certain nutrients. It’s why plants look so beautiful when they’re grown professionally in a greenhouse somewhere. They’re monitoring that all the time. And at home, of course, we just don’t do that.
So the smart way is to sort of repot annually into a fresh soil, whether it’s a compost mix or a good potting mix that’s right for that plant, because some plants want acidic soil, some don’t, and then fertilizing on a schedule. So it requires a lot of research, and you know from researching it’s so hard to weed through the conflicting information, because everything conflicts.
Margaret: Exactly. That’s what I meant. So I was thinking, oh, I remember when I settled on the “once the days start to get a little bit longer and you start to almost see the plants perk up as if they notice-”
Matt: Yeah, they are.
Margaret: “…then I start feeding again.” And that was one of the nostalgic rituals that I actually liked, because I sort of can understand it. In the same way that I feel a little better with more light. You know what I mean? In the less dark, less short days. Anyway…
Matt: It’s common sense. The camellias [above] are blooming now in the greenhouse, but once the flowers stop on the camellias, the new growth starts. And I know that’s when they need Nitrogen, because Nitrogen would be for foliar growth, and that’s only one shoot, like a rhododendron—it just gets one growth spurt and those leaves mature, and I have to make sure I give Nitrogen then. But when they’re forming their buds, then I’m giving them a more rounded feed.
Margaret: Do you have some other ones that you want to tell us, that you’ve noticed have been different? I mean, for instance, in terms of now-versus-then practices: The ones that are informed by science, I feel like these days we have so much better understanding scientifically of how things work, especially with the greater ecology. And so for things like the “leave the leaves”—being a little less fussy about our cleanup. Those are really important changes to make, I think. And I wouldn’t want to be nostalgic about that, because I think the greater good—there’s so much diversity-supporting; it’s so important, that effort.
So that’s where I definitely want to be open and not stuck to my obsessive cleanup. I mean, I still do clean up certain areas where I have tiny little ephemeral spring things or minor bulbs; little areas. I make sure they’re not under 6 inches of leaves or whatever. But yeah. But are there other ones that you sort of have the then and now thing?
Matt: Well, the cleaning up the garden thing, and we never cleaned up our garden anyway [laughter], so I have to be… I suppose that now we’ve come around full circle. But there are some things we do clean up like bearded iris, things that you have to pull the foliage off because borers will lay their eggs in the foliage in the fall.
Vegetable gardens, I still clean up all the foliage, because you have cabbage root flies that lay their eggs. So the flower gardens, the perennial borders I don’t touch. They’re in full seedheads now still, and the grasses and all that. But where we grow our food, that I do clean out because whether it’s a Brassica or tomato crop, there are a lot of pathogens that live in the stems of these plants.
Margaret: Or in any debris you leave of squash or as you say Brassicas.
Matt: Then the greenhouse, too, because that’s like a closed environment. So I don’t use any insecticides in my greenhouse unless I absolutely have to. But it’s a cold greenhouse, so we don’t really get any insect damage when it’s 40 degrees in there.
Margaret: So you’ve stuck to the sort of thorough cleanup of the edible crops, where there may be overwintering, pest or pathogens. Yeah.
Matt: Absolutely. And that’s probably where the biggest science research is right now. Let’s say, I always like to respond when I see people say I’m planting my cold-weather crops in the spring because that’s changed, like broccoli and other Brassicas.
We used to think, oh, I’m going to sow my broccoli outdoors in March or early, which my parents even used to do. And now that science has changed, especially in the North, because if you have cabbage root fly maggot or club root or any of these pathogens that live in the soil, you can navigate around those by changing your planting dates. So this is great information I get from the University of Massachusetts, their agricultural pages where you can see recommendations made to commercial growers—like farmers who are growing acres and acres and acres of broccoli—to sow seed closer to the summer solstice to beat that first hatch, even though there are seven hatches a year or whatever of certain insects. But you can navigate around that.
So because we’re more organic now, or more aware, we can time planting. And brassicas don’t want to germinate when it’s cold anyways; they’re not really a cold-weather crop. Cabbages and broccoli and Brussels sprouts are better sown in June and grown as a fall crop.
Same thing with zinnias and cosmos and anything from Central America, there’s no need to start those early. Sowing in mid-June, farmers know this, they sow every two or three weeks, but they don’t sow anything that early.
Margaret: Yeah, I mean I think especially now as we see the impact of the changing climate, that’s the other thing. I feel like I’m going to be adjusting some of what used to my rituals. I knew time-wise in my head-
Matt: To more fall crops.
Margaret: Because right now if you do some of these spring things a little too late, they’re going to bump into some intense heat like we had last year even in the North. So I may want to back up even farther, earlier, in the spring, or as you say, wait till later and do it as a fall crop. And with the heat-loving things, even tomatoes or whatever, maybe we can go a little earlier and they can be set out a little earlier and the harvest is going to come sooner and so forth. So it’s adjusting and listening and paying attention.
Matt: It is. And we’re learning to sow later for some things. I just saw that trend of… We did that at an estate I used to work at, where we’d sow tomatoes in June, the seeds in the ground, and we’ll get tomatoes. And this year I saw Burpee’s is selling direct-sow tomatoes and peppers.
Margaret: Oh my. [Laughter.]
Matt: Yeah, I’m going to experiment with that again. I think that’s interesting. But for my soul, I’m still sowing tomatoes right now, even though it’s way early, just because I have a greenhouse, but they’ll be too big to set out. But I need to smell those tomato leaves in February.
Margaret: I know, I know.
Matt: No one needs to know.
Margaret: Do you just want to list one more?
Matt: There’s a few little things. These are what I’m looking at and I want to experiment this year in the U.K. you see people posting like Sarah Raven, really well-known gardeners in the U.K., posting that I’m sowing my Cobaea seeds, cup-and-saucer vine, right now early in January if not December, because if you’ve ever grown it, it blooms late like October or just before frost. And they say they bloom earlier. And I’ve been trying to find research on this now.
I know it’s an invasive plant in the Southwest where it grows wild and it’s a perennial, so it grows a long time for a year or two or three, a short-lived perennial. But I’m wondering why. I believe it blooms by the day shortening daylength of fall. But I can’t find any data of that. But I did discover that it was grown as a greenhouse plant in New England as a winter-blooming plant, which is interesting.
Margaret: That’s one you’re going to look up and you might make a shift.
Matt: I’m going to look it up. It seems like it needs to get a certain amount of pairs of leaves before it will bloom, but it also won’t bloom until the temperatures are changing and the daylength is changing. So I don’t know if they’re gaining anything.
And also things like they would sow the seeds vertically in the soil. [Laughter.] That seems to be like, that doesn’t really make a difference. That’s pretty good.
Margaret: Well, I always enjoy talking to you, and as I said, I loved that post that you did and the idea, that phrase, you conjured of “nostalgic rituals.” So I’ve been thinking a lot about mine and which ones I’m going to keep holding on to [laughter] and which ones I’m open to easing a little bit. So thank you, and I hope I’ll talk to you again soon, Matt. Thanks.
Matt: Thanks, Margaret.
(All photos from Matt Mattus, used with permission.)
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MY WEEKLY public-radio show, rated a “top-5 garden podcast” by “The Guardian” newspaper in the UK, began its 15th year in March 2024. 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 Feb. 3, 2025 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).
