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This episode was originally published June 1, 2015 but I am replaying it because we talked about similar concepts etc on Monday’s episode with Mark Highland and I thought this would be a good fit this week. David Salman, founder and chief Horticulturist at High Country Gardens, has spent over 25 years in pursuit of better plants for eco-friendly landscapes. For decades, David has espoused using environmentally friendly practices when gardening, long before ‘organic’ became a household word. A native New Mexican, David Salman opened Santa Fe Greenhouses in 1984. It was his first retail store and he set out to transform western gardening by cultivating and growing beautiful blooming perennials, native & ornamental grasses and unique cacti & succulents. These water-wise/xeric plants attracted a loyal fan base and David changed the face of western gardening from rocks and cactus to lush, blooming eco-friendly garden habitats. With the demand for his plants extending far beyond northern New Mexico, in 1993 David started http://www.highcountrygardens.com/ (High Country Gardens), the mail-order division of Santa Fe Greenhouses. Tell us a little about yourself. Actually raised in Houston TX, I’ve been living here in New Mexico for 40 years, but technically I’m not a native. I grew up in the piney woods around Houston and that’s where I became interested in plants and started to learn about Texas native plants, my first couple of jobs in a native plant nursery and an herbarium in Houston. That kind of peaked my interest in plants but from that point on I knew it was going to be my future. Here I am many many years later in Sante Fe, still working on plants very involved not only in growing and selling plants but also in educating consumers about better ways to garden and better ways to utilize plants in our landscapes to extend their usefulness just beyond being beautiful. Tell me about your first gardening experience? I think my first serious gardening effort was in Taos, NM. I was going to high school, at Taos high I was graduating and I planted a fruit orchard in the early 1970s. There were a few successes, but mostly blistered hands, and not nearly as many as fruit and vegetables as I had hoped. That’s always part of being a gardener is being an optimist,  even in the face of difficult gardening conditions which has certainly defined gardening in Taos. It’s a very cold climate and a short season, if you’re lucky you get about 90 days frost free. It was a great learning effort. That really continues today  as far as always learning about gardening and techniques. The lowest point in New Mexico is 4000 feet, Taos is up at 7000 feet, and Sante Fe is also at 7000 feet. Elevation has it’s pluses and minuses – pleasant weather, the high elevation is very nice. It’s  typical to have a 30-40 degree temp swing between daytime highs and night time lows, but as far as growing fruits and vegetables especially ones that like it warm. What does organic gardening/earth friendly mean to you? You know it’s evolved for me, I came up through more of a traditional horticultural education. I’m a graduate of Colorado State University and my degree is in Horticultural Science. Back then in the 70s’ the emphasis was on traditional chemical based horticultural methodologies. The concepts of organic gardening were still very very fringe, and not considered mainstream. I came from a very non-organic background, and over the years as I was getting into business for myself,  I was looking into making my customers more successful, that was my introduction to organic gardening. Currently, I would say it’s a way to protect ourselves and the environment from our toxic chemicals and a way to get better results from our efforts. It’s also for me a rejection of corporate agriculture and the corporate takeover of agricultural with GMO’s and all of the toxic culture in traditional... Support this podcast