Christopher Gunnuscio

I started The Planters' Guild because most gardening advice online is confidently wrong and nobody shows their work. I wanted a place where the reasoning is visible: here's what the plant is doing, here's the published research that says so, here's what that means for the pot on your windowsill.

My background is a mix of formal education and a lot of years actually growing things. I think about plants the way you'd think about any system with inputs and constraints. Water moves through a substrate according to physics, not vibes. A root needs oxygen as much as it needs moisture. Most of what gets called a green thumb is really just someone who has learned to read those constraints and stopped fighting them.

That's the whole editorial project, really: take the science seriously, then say it plainly enough to be useful at 7am before work.

Credentials

I'm a UC Master Gardener of Santa Clara County, where I serve as President of the Advisory Board. The Master Gardener program trains volunteers to give research-based horticultural advice to the public, which is a fair description of what I'm trying to do here too, just at a different scale.

The Planters' Guild is not affiliated with that program, or with any university. It's an independent publication.

What I actually do here

I write the entries, chase down the citations, take most of the photographs, and build the site. It's a one-person operation, which has an upside and a downside. The upside is that nothing gets published that I don't personally stand behind. The downside is that it moves at the pace one person can sustain, so entries land when they're right rather than when a calendar says so.

When I get something wrong, I fix it and say what changed. How that works is written up in Sources & Methods, along with the ladder of sources I work down and what counts as good enough to publish.

Where to find the work

• Guides & Library. Every entry on the site, in one index.
• The Window Box. A short note when something new lands, once a month.
• Sources & Methods. How the research and correction process works.
• Instagram and Facebook.

Independence

Nobody pays for coverage here. If a link ever earns a commission, it's labelled where it appears and on the Recommendations page. My Master Gardener role is a volunteer position and is kept entirely separate from anything commercial the Guild does. If you ever spot something on this site that looks like it breaks that, tell me and I'll fix it.