The Big Idea with Zach St. George

Something as quotidian as a local gardening column can end up being an accidental diary of a global catastrophe in the making. 

The Pitch: He Wrote a Gardening Column. He Ended Up Documenting Climate Change.

The Publication: The New York Times Magazine

The Pay: $2/word

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Here’s where we are in the world: Something as quotidian as a local gardening column can end up being an accidental diary of a global catastrophe in the making. 

In July 2021, The New York Times Magazine published a feature by Baltimore-based freelancer Zach St. George about Jeff Lowenfels. Lowenfels’ column for The Anchorage Daily News is the country’s longest-running, and through it he has documented four decades of climate change — and his increasing concerns about the environment.  

“Most people would describe it as a profile,” St. George says of the piece. “But it was a profile mostly gleaned from his own statements about what he was seeing, and about himself.” 

St. George fell into journalism in college, working for the newspaper at Humboldt State University in Northern California, then writing for the local alt-weekly. He did a master’s in journalism at UC Berkeley, with a focus on magazine writing. He’s been freelancing ever since — ”for whoever will pay me,” he says.

Though he doesn’t have a science background, St. George says his interests naturally drew him toward environmental reporting — which, by default, is now largely climate-change reporting. “I’ve always been kind of outdoorsy and, I suppose, prone to existential dread,” he told me. “So the focus on climate change suits me.”  

He’s written for The Atlantic, Outside, and Scientific American. In 2020, he published his first book, The Journeys of Trees: A Story about Forests, People, and the Future. But this article was his first for the Times. He recently shared his pitch with Study Hall, and chatted about how he first got the idea for the story, how he reported it from across the continent, and why he almost always writes longform.  

Study Hall: Where did the idea for this story come from? 

Zach St. George: I was in Anchorage and it was an unusually hot summer, it was unusually dry. Everything green was looking more brown than it should have been at that time of year. I was staying at my parents’ house and wondering if the woods around their house were dry enough to burn. It’s the first time I can remember having that thought. Usually Anchorage is so wet; it’s wetter than Seattle. 

I was over at my friend’s house and he’s a gardener. He had a book on his table called Teaming with Microbes by Jeff Lowenfels. I picked it up and was like, “No shit — that guy is still around?” My mom was a gardener, so I grew up hearing his name. And his column was in the same section as the comics. 

So I was sort of sitting there thinking, huh, it’s such an unusual summer and this guy gives advice. I didn’t know at the time how long he’d been doing it. But it kind of stuck in my head, I should hit him up and see what he has to say. At some point I did, but I was finishing up my book at the time and didn’t immediately move on it. I finished up the book in the early part of 2020 and came back to it and the pandemic came and then I was sort of thinking, How could I report this story, how could I tell this story? I realized the columns themselves might be easier. 

I guess the angle I started with was, here’s someone who gives advice about what to plant, and he’s been doing it for a really long time in a part of the country where climate change is happening the fastest. Warming is happening much faster in the high latitudes than in the lower 48. Somewhere during the editing process it also became this kind of avenue to look at how incidental long-term records happen. 

SH: When you started talking to Jeff, did you feel like you’d hit the jackpot? 

ZSG: I had the usual feeling I get when I talk to someone on the phone for the first time and I’m like, a) this is a story, and b) this is a character. Which are the elements I look for. The jackpot feelings I had were more the moments of synthesis that came when I was going through the columns. Fairly quickly I realized that it wasn’t about interviewing Jeff — it almost wasn’t about Jeff at all. It was about the record. The “aha” moments much more came as I was going through the columns and seeing something in the ’90s and realizing it was different from what he said in the ’70s. Or he’s acknowledging a change in these things. 

As a writer, I look for echoes. I’ve heard them called motifs. The place where I see them a lot in John McPhee’s writing. I think he says, basically, you set something up that will pay dividends later. With this story, there’s literally 3,000 columns. Actually, I can’t remember how many there were, and I didn’t read every single one. But I read a hell of a lot of them. That provides a lot of opportunities to see things that play out over time. 

SH: Were the columns available online? 

ZSG: Oh, such a nightmare. So I pitched the story and got the contract and then I was going on the Anchorage Daily News site and very quickly was like, “Oh shit, they only go back to 2004. I promised this story based on these columns — what do I do?” Basically the newspaper has been bought and sold many times over the years, and the only copies were in a couple of libraries in Anchorage. I’m stuck in Baltimore, Anchorage is in lockdown, and I don’t have a travel budget. I finally got my friend to drive over to Jeff’s place and he had a bunch of old scraps of newspapers with his column. They were completely out of order, they were incomplete. My friend brought them to my mom, she shipped them out in flat-rate boxes, and I spent a month going through them. 

SH: It’s kind of funny but kind of not. 

ZSG: I love archival work, digging through primary sources. I’m writing another book now and doing the same process with digital archives. I kind of just love looking at old newspaper clippings. The project I’m doing now is set in Australia and they’ve done this amazing thing of digitizing all of their country’s newspapers, going back to, like, the late 1700s. It’s this incredible resource. I think they should put that in the trillion-dollar infrastructure thing. 

SH: This pitch is long — and also very polished. Is that typical for you?  

ZSG: I think that something I’ve learned as a freelancer: That there’s always some degree of bullshit to pitches, but the less bullshit probably the better. For a feature piece it pays to have a really good idea of what the story is going to be — and also do like a third of the work that you imagine it’s going to be. It’s easier to sell, because editors are pretty good at seeing through what you’re bluffing on. And because you’re less likely to get yourself into a bad spot where you’re not able to deliver what you thought you were going to be able to. I think that this pitch is typical of the ones that sell for me. I tend not to worry about length too much. At some point I tried to keep them to a page, but then editors would come back with questions. It’s fine if you’re pitching a 3,000-word piece and the pitch is 500 words. 

SH: How much do you pitch? 

ZSG: It’s always kind of in waves. Sometimes I have several pieces in the works and several pitches out. Right now I have three pitches out, so it varies. I’m in discussions on two pieces. I’ve learned to assume that they won’t sell but maybe they will. I’m not getting my hopes up. I’m also working on this new book now, so I have plenty on my plate. 

SH: Was there a lot of back-and-forth with your editor about the pitch? 

ZSG: I think that I had pitched this editor maybe two or three times before. He was really great and he’s kind of the rare editor — in my experience — who offers feedback on pitches. The Times has some sort of  byzantine process for approving stories. He said, “This is an interesting piece, I have a couple of questions, then I’ll send it around.” Then he said, “The good news is, we want the piece. The bad news is, we want it at a slightly lower word count.” Which is pretty typical. So nothing super-strange in the process. 

SH: How long did it take for them to greenlight you? 

ZSG: Ten days, two weeks, something like that. The editor is on the quicker side to respond to things, even if it’s just to say, “Cool I’ll look at this next week.” Just getting back to you is on the unusual side. 

SH: What about the writing? And how did you approach the structure? 

ZSG: It took me like a month to write. It actually went very quickly, because my reporting process as I’m going through columns is to plop stuff in where I think it will go. And this story is just a timeline, that’s all it is, really. It’s a relatively simple structure at the bones level. It’s almost like a series of facts with dates attached to them. There wasn’t a lot of editing, and I give a lot of credit to my editor because I’m a typical writer who thinks my sentences are beautiful and wants zero help with sentences and words and only wants input on ideas and structure. The editing was really graceful. I was pretty delighted to have this piece come out and have it be 95% my words.

SH: Do you always write longform? 

ZSG: I don’t typically write anything under 1,000 words. I did a front-of-book piece for Sierra and I guess that was 850 words or something. They described it as a short Talk of the Town piece. It’s hard for me to write short. I find it harder than writing long pieces. I think part of it is maybe I’m sort of slow. I tend to like to mull stuff over and consider ways to get into things, so sometimes I feel like a short piece isn’t worth doing that for. 

I think I’m also, like many writers, prone to obsession. I get pretty into pieces and tend to sit with them for a while. I actually found that I like the book length because it’s just a big project to sink your teeth into, and you have more freedom than doing magazines. There’s not going to be 10 people getting their fingers into it. It’s your thing, for better or for worse. 

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The Pitch

THE GARDENING GURU IN THE ERA OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Jeff Lowenfels has the longest running gardening column in the country, but he’s less and less sure what advice to give his readers

Last summer, Jeff Lowenfels tells me, one of his friends successfully grew okra in Anchorage, Alaska. His tone is disbelieving, the crop shorthand for all the change he’s witnessed since he moved to the city 45 years ago, a distance between past and present he measures in vegetables—from cabbage, snow peas, and potatoes to pumpkins, tomatoes, and now, incredibly, okra. “Holy crow,” Lowenfels says. “We can grow anything!”

Gardening is a fundamentally local endeavor, an experiment in fitting plants to soil and climate. Lowenfels, 70, a retired lawyer, has been documenting this experiment since November, 1976, when he wrote his first gardening column for the Anchorage Daily News. It is now the longest-running gardening column in the United States. For more than four decades, he’s observed Alaskan gardeners’ success with new plants, tracked the lengthening expanse of frost-free days, and noted the arrival of new horticultural pests—creating, in effect, a long-term record of climate change in the part of the country changing the fastest.

For many years, he found the ever-expanding horticultural possibilities exciting. Lately, though, they’ve begun to make him uncomfortable. He documents the state’s gardening experiment, but he also helps direct it. People constantly ask his advice. I can attest to his influence. I grew up in Anchorage, and my mom is a gardener. I’ve known Jeff Lowenfels’s name since I can remember. “Jeff is really important,” says Doug Tryck, who runs a small nursery in south Anchorage. “Some people would say he’s a megalomaniac,” Tryck adds, “but he’s not.” Marion Owen, who writes a gardening column for the Kodiak Daily Mirror, agrees. “He’s very frank, he’s very honest,” she says. “There’s no fluff, and he just tells people, ‘Get off your tush!’” Lowenfels, summing up his own role among Alaska’s gardeners, tells me that, if he advises readers to piss on their lilacs, “they’ll piss on their lilacs.” Even as his stature as the state’s gardener laureate has grown, though, he’s become less confident in his answers. People “rely on the information I give them,” he says. “I’m almost to the point now where I don’t know what to say to them.”

The trouble is that the line between garden and wild, never absolute, has become fuzzy. More and more, experiments threaten to spill from the garden. Alaska’s geographic isolation and cold climate have so far helped shield it from the nonnative pests that plague more populous and temperate parts of the country. But Lowenfels worries that as rising temperatures remove physiological barriers and tempt gardeners to expand the scope of their experiments, the mistakes made in the Lower 48 could be repeated here. He’s made this mistake himself more than once, he says. Recently, he discovered that the ligularia he planted in his garden had spread into the surrounding woods.

At the same time, people have begun asking him questions about subjects beyond the garden’s edges, questions he feels has little standing to answer. Climate change is conducting the gardener’s experiment—which plants will grow where?—on a grand scale. Here, what’s happening in Alaska isn’t an echo from lower latitudes, but a preview. Already, Alaska’s floral communities are changing. This process has been mostly gradual, a subtly shifting baseline. But last summer—the summer of okra—change became suddenly and shockingly apparent. Little rain fell in South-central Alaska in May and June. On July 4th, the temperature in Anchorage reached 90 degrees, breaking the city’s previous record temperature by five degrees. By early August, plants in Anchorage and the surrounding forests were visibly ailing. Needles reddened and leaves turned brown, like autumn come early. 

When I spoke to Lowenfels in late August, he told me he was getting dozens of emails every day from people who wanted to know what they should plant to replace their dead trees and shrubs. In his August 30th column, Lowenfels mused about the role of the gardener. “Should we let nature work her own palate without interfering?” he wrote. “Is it even our right to replant these trees? … It is warm enough now to grow fantastic apple trees here, but do they belong?” Although he was writing specifically about the aftermath of Alaska’s hot, dry summer, gardeners around the world will eventually face similar questions. One thing was certain: Lowenfels didn’t want to make decisions on his own. “We MUST have community-wide discussions about this,” he wrote. “You sure don’t want a cranky, arthritic, guilt-ridden (for past advice that was non-organic), moralistic, organic garden columnist making decisions that determine what South-central communities will look like for the next 100 years.”

I’d like to write a story of ~4,000 words on Jeff Lowenfels and the role of the gardening guru in an era of climate change. I had hoped to visit Anchorage this summer, but it’s also possible to tell this story from afar. I think Lowenfels’s columns could provide a narrative frame, as they’ll offer windows into both important advances in the state’s gardening experiment and into Lowenfels’s thinking at different points in time. The community meetings he suggested in his August 30th column are also now underway. The first, in February, was held in person, and follow-up Zoom meetings are in the works. Along with native plant advocates, foresters, and nursery owners, I’ll talk to Alaskans who are unabashedly embracing the expanding range of possibilities, like Tony and Beau Burgess, owners of Blood Sweat & Food Farms in Homer. I visited them in the summer of 2018. As we walked along the edge of their farm, Tony pointed out dozens of species of nonnative seedlings they’d planted. The Burgesses didn’t expect their subjects to stay confined to the test tube, but Tony thought the escapees would solve problems, not cause them. “This is the nucleus,” he said, “out of which biodiversity can radiate and self-organize into whatever’s going to make it here.”

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