Gardening in Central NJ

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Join Chris Martine who will share his immense understanding of the trees, shrubs, and vines of New Jersey and the Mid-Atlantic, with a keen focus on shrubs. Martine has written two field guides featuring illustrations by his wife, Rachel Figley-Martine, both published by the NJ Forest Service: "Trees of New Jersey and Mid-Atlantic States," which is now in its 7th edition; and "Shrubs and Vines of New Jersey and the Mid-Atlantic States," the 3rd edition of which was just published in December 2025.

When they started on the "Trees of New Jersey & the Mid-Atlantic States" back in the 1990s, the Martines’ apartment was “shrub central” – with Chris out in the field collecting specimens during the day and Rachel drawing what he brought back after she got home from her day job.

Recognizing there was limited information on the shrubs and vines of NJ and the Mid-Atlantic he was asked to create a similar field guide for those plants. The first edition of "Shrubs and Vines of New Jersey and the Mid-Atlantic States" was published out of New Jersey’s Forest Resource Education Center (FREC) in 2022. When the second edition ran out, Martine was asked to update the guide for a third edition.

He spent a few months updating nomenclature, fielding suggestions from other field botanists, and rewriting text. After several rounds of review by staff at the Forest Service, the new edition was printed in December. It’s a tribute to the couple’s partnership — and to the individuals who not only inspired the project when it began more than two decades ago, but first taught Chris some of the natural history that appears in the guide.

Chris Martine is a botanist who loves all plants, but he has a particular affinity for shrubs – so much so that some of his closest friends call him "Dr. Shrub" and his father-in-law almost never calls him anything other than "Shrubby." Much of this is because of his and his wife Rachel’s field guide "Shrubs and Vines of New Jersey and the Mid-Atlantic States" (third edition recently published), but Chris has also closely studied shrubs from as far away as Australia and as close as the Appalachian Ridge and NJ Pine Barrens. A native of Bergen County and a graduate (BS and MS) of Rutgers, Chris spent time working for the NJ Forest Service and the Mercer County Soil Conservation District before moving to the University of Connecticut to pursue a PhD in Botany. He is currently President-Elect of the Botanical Society of America and David Burpee Professor of Plant Genetics at Bucknell University, where he teaches Field Botany and other plant-related courses in the Department of Biology.

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