Gardening can be tough if you don’t have a natural green thumb.
Our go-to plant experts are Austin Lohin and Caroline Gant, part of the team at Bates Nursery, a local, family-owned garden center in Whites Creek. Austin and Caroline have the uncanny timing of answering just what we’re thinking about — like why this January’s cold didn’t call for covering plants, different from the freeze in December 2022. Meet the team and let them guide you through planting this spring.
Austin Lohin is a Cheatham County native whose love of plants surpassed his first love of basketball. Graduating from MTSU’s agriculture program, he worked at different growers until landing at Bates Nursery in 2017. It wasn’t until 2020 that Austin’s reputation gained a wider audience through webinars, helpful videos on YouTube and social media and eventually the KnowDown, a weekly social media question-and-answer session, in 2022. Austin’s animated personality and down-to-earth, Tennessee-drawled delivery is captivating to watch. In his free time, Austin likes to do bonsai and boutique Japanese maple pruning and is available for hire.
Caroline Gant is a vibrant Nashville native with a long history of involvement in dance and the arts. She is a graduate of MTSU’s dance program and regularly teaches dance in town. Her love of plants started young and has bloomed to over a hundred houseplants of all types, as well as various trees, shrubs and flowers around her 6-acre Ashland City property, where she gardens constantly. Caroline and Austin became fast friends after she joined Bates in 2020, and they have been doing the KnowDown for two years running. Her background in performance was a natural fit for talking about plants in an informative and laid-back setting. Outside of Bates and dance, Caroline does houseplant consultations and installations around town. Her plant company is on Instagram.
Tyler Blankenship is an Alabama-to-Nashville transplant who came up to study art and decided to put down roots. He has a degree in photography and visual multimedia, discovering gardening along the way from reading about permaculture. He was hired the same week as Caroline in 2020 after being laid off in the pandemic and later found his artistic talents put to use creating educational content for the nursery with his predecessor. After being promoted to marketing and content direction, he received instruction to build out the media arm of Bates Nursery into what it is today, with multiple ways for anybody to find and enjoy high quality, in-depth information about gardening.
The KnowDown is a weekly question-and-answer session published to Instagram and Facebook. Every Friday, the nursery asks followers for their questions about gardening, plants and other related topics. Those questions are aggregated and answered the next day on the live morning show “Gardening Inside Out.” Then, on the following Thursday, Caroline and Austin answer them again in a rapid-fire series of story posts around the nursery.
“Gardening Inside Out” is a Saturday morning gardening show founded by David Bates that has aired since 1998. The show, currently produced by Tyler Blankenship, airs live from Bates Nursery and features David with 26-year strong cohost Josh Cary and panelists Caroline and Austin, who read and answer questions from the KnowDown in expanded form. Caroline also edits the Saturday broadcast into a shorter podcast format which airs every Wednesday on all major platforms (Apple, Spotify, Amazon, etc.).
The best ways to follow Bates Nursery are to subscribe to their YouTube channels @batesnursery and @gardeninginsideout, Instagrams @batesnursery, @gardeninginsideout and Facebooks, Bates Nursery and Gardening Inside Out. They also have the Bates Botanical Boot Camp.
Copyright ©2024 Edible Nashville. All rights reserved
