creating living willow structures, with michael dodge

I VIRTUALLY NEVER promise “fast and easy” in gardening, which involves worthwhile hard work and patience, but here’s the exception: You can create fast-growing living structures such as tunnels, domes, privacy screens and even deer-proof fences with living willows. I asked Salix expert Michael Dodge to show me how.

A little about Michael:

“That’s Michael Dodge,” I say, when I show people around the fall garden, as we pass a large group of show-offy, yellow-fruited Viburnum I enjoy all fall into winter. V. dilatatum ‘Michael Dodge’ is truly a standout plant.

But the original Michael Dodge, the one that great shrub was named to honor, is a well-known British-born plantsman whose career has taken him from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, to New York Botanical Garden, to Winterthur in Delaware, to White Flower Farm, where he was director of horticulture and of the famous catalog, spending 26 years there till 1997.

Michael moved on to further adventures, many of them with his camera in hand, but most recently it all led to his version of retirement: collecting and then disseminating 250ish species and varieties of the genus Salix, or willow.

His company, called Vermont Willow Nursery (which I am proud is an occasional advertiser), looks more like a full-blown nursery to me than retirement. We chatted on my public-radio show and podcast, discussing willows for a range of uses, from getting the garden off to extra-early bloom, to crafting living structures (top and below, a dome at Michael’s home, in active growth and before leafing out), and taking a stern hand when pruning.

Read along as you listen to the Feb. 2, 2015 show using the player below. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes or Stitcher (and browse my archive of

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