We’ve all heard this one: to shade your house in summer (and save the energy used to run fans or air-conditioners), plant a tree on the south side of the house. According to my guest this week, that’s not so much a no-brainer as it is brainless. (Though she’d never put it so rudely.) In the...

A weed-free garden sounds too good to be true, and near the end of our interview, Lee Reich (http://leereich.com/), author of Weedless Gardening (http://leereich.com/books.html), admits that it is: He does indeed weed—for about five or ten minutes a week. Five minutes, though, is close enough to...