Pastry chef gardener knows the joy of sharing plants

I’ve never been to Marilyn Santos McNabb’s garden, but I know I’d love it, and not just because the professional pastry chef often serves delicacies to her guests.

As we repeatedly ran into each other while shopping at a nursery, we exchanged experiences with different plants. When I inquired about her experience with turtlehead (Chelone), a native perennial that I’ve not grown despite the suggestion of several gardeners, she told me it’s not only a favorite plant, but also one that she loves to share, as it bulks up nicely.

This got Marilyn talking about how she thinks that even though gardening is typically a solitary activity, the best gardens thrive on community.

Her West Chicago, Ill., garden is full of plants that have been shared with her, she said, which makes her garden that much better.

Marilyn doesn’t just look around and think of the plants she has in her garden, she thinks about the people who gave her those plants.

Sharing plants is a age-old tradition among gardeners. It is how some of the most interesting plants made it into different gardens before specialist online nurseries were around.

There is a bit of a dark side to plant sharing as well. Prolific quantities of plants to share can be a sign that a plant is aggressive and may well take over a garden in no time.

Invasive plants can also be unwittingly shared between well-meaning gardeners who don’t realize what they have.

And sometimes there are riders who sneak into a shared plant. Bishop’s weed, also known goutweed or ground elder (Aegopodium podagraria) came into my garden on a shared division of a plant and now pops up in all sorts of places where it’s not wanted.

Jumping worms, invasive earthworms that were first found in Wisconsin in 2013 and churn through the top layer of soil at a blistering pace, ruining its structure, are easily transported on plants dug from an infested garden. If you don’t have jumping worms, or don’t know if you do, washing the soil off roots of shared plants to avoid transferring cocoons is advised.

Those might seem like compelling reasons to forgo plant offerings from other gardeners, but with caution and common sense the benefits outweigh the risk.

My garden, like many others, was started from shared plants, many of which are still there more than two decades later. As a new homeowner with a miniscule gardening budget it was my ticket to color and, as it turns out, lit the spark for a gardening passion.

When I visit Madilyn’s garden — I happily accepted her generous invitation — I hope to not just partake in one of her pastries but to also hear the stories of the people behind the plants in her garden. And just maybe I’ll go home with a plant myself so that in the future I will think of the generous and friendly pastry chef gardener who invited a stranger to see her garden.