About

C.L. Fornari is a plant geek and artist who got pulled into garden communications in 1995. She is the author nine books including Hydrangea Happiness, Coffee for Roses, The Cocktail Hour Garden and Sand and Soil: Creating Beautiful Gardens on Cape Cod and the Islands. These books and others are all fully illustrated with C.L.’s photographs.

C.L. had been a regular columnist for Garden Center Magazine, and has written for Angie’s List Magazine, Prime Time Magazine, Fine Gardening, Coastal Home, Country Gardens, and American Nurseryman. 

The Garden Lady, her live radio program, has been broadcast on WCAI and WGBH every Saturday since January 2025. GardenLine, C.L.’s 2-hour live radio program was heard on Saturday mornings on WXTK for over 22 years.   For two years she was also the host of a live, call-in show on WRKO, and she was a regular contributor to The Cultivated Gardener, heard on NPR stations nationwide. Along with Ellen Zachos, C.L. was the co-host of the Plantrama podcast for six years. Plantrama was given the highest award, a Gold Metal, in the podcast category, from GardenComm International in 2019.

As a speaker, C.L. presents programs nationwide to plant societies, garden clubs, and green-industry trade shows. She’s been an on-staff educator for Hyannis Country Garden, an IGC on Cape Cod, for over twenty years. During the COVID lockdown of 2020 she presented a virtual Horticultural Happy Hour every Friday night for eight months to keep people hopeful and engaged with the life-affirming topic of plants and gardening.

C.L. was been given the Garden Communicator Award of the Year from the Perennial Plant Association, several awards for writing and broadcasting from the GardenComm International, and her book, The Cocktail Hour Garden was given a Silver award in the “How To-Self Help” category by the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

In 2015 C.L. launched the first annual Cape Cod Hydrangea Festival, a ten-day regional celebration of gardens that typically raises over $100,000.00 for local non-profits every year.

Her not-so-secret mission is to solidly keep horticulture in popular culture, and to spread joy with plants…in the meantime she loves dogs, cooking, and creating photo-generated collage, is writing a series of cozy mysteries that take place on Cape Cod.

 C.L. Fornari is a writer, speaker, artist, and radio host whose subject is plants and gardens. She transitioned from artist to garden communicator in 1995 and is now the author of nine books, including Sand and Soil: Creating Beautiful Gardens on Cape Cod and the Islands (David R. Godine),  Coffee for Roses, and Hydrangea Happiness: Planting, Pruning and Blooming published by Brandeis University Press in 2026. She hosts The Garden Lady, a live call-in program on WCAI and WGBH 89.7, the Cape and Islands NPR stations, after 22 years hosting GardenLine on WXTK and six years co-hosting the Plantrama podcast with Ellen Zachos. C.L. writes a bi-monthly column, Retail Revival, for Garden Center Magazine, and speaks widely to horticultural trade shows, garden clubs, and botanical gardens across the U.S. and Canada. In 2015 she founded the Cape Cod Hydrangea Festival which raises thousands of dollars every year for local nonprofits. She lives and gardens on Cape Cod with her husband, geologist Dan Fornari, and she’s currently writing a series of cozy mysteries that take place on Cape Cod.