The Garden Mixer Podcast

A garden mixer is traditionally an al fresco cocktail party.

You know…milling around in uncomfortable shoes, meeting old friends, making new ones, enduring small talk in order to spark big talk, networking, laughing, and constantly glancing around for someone offering good nibbles on a platter. All with a great cocktail in hand.

Leslie and Marianne have taken the best parts of that and made a podcast.

Gardening shouldn’t be boring. Garden podcasts REALLY shouldn’t be boring. We aim to help you find the fun in what you’re doing.

Even though Marianne technically thinks fun is overrated.

We love welcoming you here to give you an idea of what The Garden Mixer is all about; but there’s nothing like listening.

Subscribe to The Garden Mixer on your favorite podcast player like Apple Podcasts or Spotify and help us get the word out to other gardeners and the garden-curious.

For the Video Edition, subscribe on YouTube, where you can watch Leslie laughing at her own internal dialogue, Marianne deepening her frown lines, and where relevant photos pop up to illustrate their [occasional] better points.

Show Notes, Links, & Laughs are available through Substack — for free. Find out about getting them sent straight to your inbox, here.

Leslie Harris

After years of independent school teaching and coaching, in 2014 Leslie Harris decided to make her avocation into her vocation. She started a gardening business that concentrated on the maintenance and installation of containers and garden beds with a wonderful crew of horticulturists.

Seven years later, she spun off her crew and began to concentrate on consulting, speaking, and her gardening podcast, Into the Garden with Leslie. In 2024 Leslie asked Marianne Willburn to join her and they created The Garden Mixer together.

She’s recently downsized her garden to a very small subdivision lot on a hillside in central Virginia, but fortunately hasn’t downsized her personality to match it.

Marianne Willburn

Marianne is a contributing editor at GardenRant, and has been a garden writer, speaker, & columnist since 2009 — writing for publications such as Better Homes and Gardens, The Wall Street Journal, American Gardener, and Horticulture magazine.

She is the author of Tropical Plants and How To Love Them and Big Dreams, Small Garden, and met her future podcast partner when Leslie interviewed her about her column for The American Gardener. They hit it off, and serendipitously cemented that friendship at a Great Dixter Symposium in the UK over numerous gin and tonics and a roaring fire.

She gardens on 10 acres in rural Northern Virginia and is permanently exhausted.

Our aim is to bring a little levity to your gardening life.

Gardening is hard work. But it is joyful work filled with miraculous moments. And you’re in it with a lot of other people all over the country, and all over the world.

We want to connect you with those people and those moments — through good books, great follows, amazing guests, and our experience as gardeners over the last…ahem.. undisclosed decades.

We LOVE to hear from you. Send your comments, suggestions, snide remarks, and gardening wisdom to comments at the garden mixer dot com.

We’d type it out, but spammers are everywhere and we’re confident you can handle the shorthand.