music for garden-making, from my collection

I WANT TO SHARE a secret about how to make a garden, and also a secret about myself, I guess. The secret is music. More than 25 years ago, when I first bought my then-weekend place, there was no garden here. Every Friday, I’d arrive full of youthful energy to do battle with multiflora rose, wild raspberries, barberry and spiny thistles. Besides my loppers and saw, I’d grab one of my best garden-making tools from the glove-box of the car: Al Green.

Motivational music (and a boom box) were critical garden-making tools. Both Green and Brown helped me make my garden. As in: Al and James. I mean: Who can sit still when James Brown is screaming and strutting–and besides, what’s a garden besides a giant living James Brown “Sex Machine” full of pollen and pollinators galore?

In the years since, music has intertwined with my garden passion in a different way. Noticing how many songs in so many genres speak to the seasons, storms, sunshine, birds, roses, trees, wildflowers…I’ve amassed a kind of giant “mix tape” of what I call “garden music.” (All the music-for-gardeners shows are at this link, if you want more.)

ABOUT A DECADE AGO, when I co-hosted a weekly two-hour garden call-in show on Martha Stewart’s Sirius radio channel with my friend Andrew Beckman, the connection between music and gardening resurfaced. Before and after each commercial break, we’d play a snippet of a song whose lyrics spoke to themes of nature and even the garden itself.

Over the years we did that show, I amassed a crazy stash of them, and I want to play you a few (you can hear them using the audio player below, from one January 2014 episode of my public-radio show and podcast, when I played five favorites from among