Campuses:
Beer to get rid of slugs? Human hair to repel rabbits? Name a garden remedy, and Jeff Gillman can tell you whether it works.
The associate professor in the Department of Horticultural Science is the author of five books about gardening and the environment. His first, and most popular, is The Truth About Garden Remedies, published in 2006.
“I was watching TV one day and the host was making all these recommendations for ‘common sense’ garden solutions,” Gillman says. “So I tested some of those ideas and wrote a book about it, and it’s worked out really well for me.”
Some of the remedies Gillman writes about really do work: milk clears up blackspot on roses, for example. Others never seem to go away, even though they don’t work. “There are a lot of baking soda myths,” he says. “Some of these remedies were being suggested back in 1926. Eighty years later, they still don’t work.”
His second book, The Truth About Organic Gardening, was not a criticism of organics, as the title might suggest. “I wasn’t bashing organics,” he says. “I love organics, but let’s be honest about what’s organic and what’s not.”
Feedback from readers is largely positive, he says. “But sometimes people write to me with great points about something that I didn’t consider, and then I do what anybody should do in that situation: apologize and try to make it right.”
His third and fourth books—How Trees Die and How the Government Got in Your Backyard: Superweeds, Frankenfoods, Lawn Wars, and the (Nonpartisan) Truth About Environ-mental Policies—explored larger environmental issues. The fifth, The Real Dirt, to be published this fall, is a return to his myth-busting roots.
Gillman grew up in Pennsylvania and attended graduate school in Georgia, where he majored in entomology for his master’s degree before switching to horticultural science for his doctorate. He’s been at the University of Minnesota since 1998.
Along with writing books, Gillman teaches and conducts research on trees and shrubs; he’s also a frequent contributor to local garden publications and blogs (www.gardenprofessors.com) and is a contributing editor of Fine Gardening magazine. His books also draw frequent speaking invitations.
“When I give talks around here, I don’t usually talk about specific plants,” he says in a voice that still carries a bit of a Southern twang. “The cures are universal, and, as far as I can tell, I’ve investigated more of these crazy cures than anybody. Sometimes by conducting research myself, or with collaborators like Jeff Hahn in Entomology or Michelle Grabowski in Plant Pathology, and sometimes by reading other people’s research. People appreciate hearing what really happens when they apply a cure that sounds silly.” –Becky Beyers
