Esme Cabrera is an artist, a naturalist, and a born educator. Under the Instagram name “la-mamigami", Esme experiments, shares, and nurtures a plant-based art practice honoring the "miracles-of-being" that are the native plants around her. Exploring their spirit, medicine, history and culture, mathematical, scientific, and sacred patterns with curiosity and deep observation is integral to Esme's California native plant origami designs. 

Following her efforts to know these plants intimately enough to fold them provides us ALL with a portal to creatively reimagine our collective and growing ways forward. Ingenious, colorful, biodiverse, full of play, discovery, a community of sharing, and plant-and-place-centric, I cannot imagine a more powerful blessing to usher in the new year than this conversation. Enjoy!

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations.

The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Welcoming whimsy, wonder, and the work of Intimacy: Esme Cabrera Naturalist/Artist, la_mamigami

Gardens are more than collections of plants. Gardens and Gardeners are intersectional spaces and agents for positive change in our world. Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden is a weekly public radio program & podcast exploring what we mean when we garden. Through thoughtful conversations with growers, gardeners, naturalists, scientists, artists and thinkers, Cultivating Place illustrates the many ways in which gardens are integral to our natural and cultural literacy. These conversations celebrate how these interconnections support the places we cultivate, how they nourish our bodies, and feed our spirits. Take a listen.

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To kick off May, looking forward to Mother’s Day, Graduations, and the promise of Summer Gardening in general here in the US, this week we go all in for flowers in pots! with one of the world’s bright gardens and floral stars: Sarah Raven. Her newest book: A Year Full of Pots Container Flowers for All Seasons (Bloomsbury Press, 2024) notes that pots in the garden are like "bubbles in a glass of champagne.

In the past 25 years, Sarah has been a leadership voice in beautiful and productive gardening through her trial and research garden at Perch Hill, her many books and in-person educational offerings, and now through her podcast: Grow, Cook, Eat, Arrange.

What could be a better way to welcome May? Enjoy.

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations.

The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

A year full of flowers (in pots!), with the UK's Sarah Raven

The third week of April is California Native Plant week, this year being celebrated by the California Native Plant Society via 8 days of action in honor and protection of our native plant diversity.

Our celebratory action item here at Cultivating Place is being in conversation this week with Aaron Sims, Director of the Rare Plant Program for CNPS. 2024 year marks the 50th anniversary of the CNPS Rare Plant Inventory, tracking and analyzing rare plants and their status across the floristic province to help fight extinction (and subsequent biodiversity loss), to engage citizen scientists, including gardeners, across the state, and to inform land use decisions statewide.

Along with the beauty, joy, and life sustaining qualities of our native plant flora whereever we might live and garden, that is all worth celebrating.

Happy Native Plant (rare and common) Gardening to you - listen in!

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations.

The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

CA NAtive Plant Week & CNPS Rare Plant Program Aaron Sims

Following on from native plant week, this week we revisit a BEST OF conversation about some of our favorite native plant visitors: our native bumble bees. Bumble bee conservation has recently had some good news: the Xerces Society recently kicked off their newest Bumble Bee Atlas project, this time in the US Midwest. 

With that in mind, please enjoy our conversation from 2023 with Leif Richardson, Conservation Biologist with the Xerces Society, sharing so much about conservation, about bumble bees, about the nation-wide Bumble Bee Atlas projects generally, and his spearheading of the California Bumble Bee Atlas.

Bumble Bee Atlas Projects w/ Leif Richardson, Xerces Society BEST OF

Hummingbirds are a beloved and charismatic creature of the America’s, the more than 350 species of hummingbirds have coevolved with the flora of the Americas for millions of years. For this fourth week in our series of 5 episodes on our gardens as important habitat and we gardeners as important stewards of land and biodiversity, we check in on the state of things for the Hummingbird. Cultivating Place is joined in this by Dr. Susan Wethington, research scientist, Program Developer and Executive Director of the Hummingbird Monitoring Network, based in Arizona.


"Hummingbirds are unique in that every culture that lives with hummingbirds has a positive interaction with hummingbirds and it seems to me that if we can maintain hummingbird diversity in this world - because we all love them - then we have a chance to maintain biodiversity in other species that are so critical in our functioning natural world. That if we can let one animal into our hearts - the others can follow."

Dr. Susan Wethington, Executive Director, The Hummingbird Network


The hummingbirds are among our smallest of birds, but our largest – and of course avian – pollinators. These little birds, many of which migrate vast distances, need to drink more than their body weight in nectar every day, and are voracious and effective insectivore. Having co-evolved with the native flora of the Americans – including with the vast diversity of salvias, penstemons, lobelia, agastache, manzanitas, honeysuckles and more – they love nothing more than beautiful flowering native or other nectar/pollen rich plants in our gardens to help them on their way. Listen in!

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations.

The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Great garden friends: The Hummingbird Monitoring Network, Dr. Susan Wethington BEST OF

This week, with Spring and seeding season fully underway—indoors and out—we speak with gardener entrepreneur Anne Fletcher of Orta Kitchen Gardens, creators of non-toxic ceramic, self-watering Orta seed pots. 

These pots' material lives help eliminate plastic right from the start in your plants’ growing lives, seeding more circularity into our garden lives! They have a seed club, too….Listen in!

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations.

The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Seeding Circularity: Orta Kitchen Garden Seed Pots, Anne Fletcher

Cultivating Place

Welcoming whimsy, wonder, and the work of Intimacy: Esme Cabrera Naturalist/Artist, la_mamigami

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