Happy Autumn! Cultivating Place is proud to launch an occasional series from Host Abra Lee, delving into our Garden past to better understand and illuminate our Garden present and future. Sometimes we have to look back to grow forward!

This week, Abra shares her research into an intrepid and unflagging cultivator of place from our past in Virginia’s Tidewater Region: Asa Sims. A businessman, educator, floral grower, and designer, Asa was also a cofounder in 1932 of the Historic Black Garden Clubs of Virginia, then known as the Negro Garden Clubs of Virginia. Listen in!

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

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these.

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

To “leave the land better than we found it” should be the ethic of all Gardeners.

It is the North Star ethic of regenerative and organic farming leaders: Lundberg Family Rice.

Third- and fourth-generation stewards of rice, land, and planet, Bryce and Brita Lundberg join Cultivating Place this week to share why, and all that grows from that single dedication.

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

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these.

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

Erin Benzakein of Floret Flower Farm needs little introduction to most garden-minded listeners. She has been so instrumental in cultivating a flower-farming economy in our country.

Her innovative and dedicated seed research and breeding work of the past decade, however, is a whole new lens through which to appreciate her work. As we look toward the Autumnal Equinox later this month, please enjoy this favorite conversation!

Back in 2017, when I first interviewed Erin for the program & for The Earth in Her Hands, she was already a tireless advocate for local flowers and for supporting more flower farmers and local-flower florists in our everyday lives here in the US.

Through her on-farm and subsequently online flower farming Floret Workshops, for more than a decade, she has been renowned for encouraging and training eager new flower-farmer-florists in order to transform the cut flower industry from the multi-billion-dollar, large-corporate-owned international import (with little ecological or economic oversight) behemoth it had become, back into the more lovely and loving, organic, locally-based circular and community-oriented economy she envisioned it could be – and should be.

Floret - once a flower farm and training center – is now more fully (and perhaps even more beautifully) described as “a family-owned flower farm and seed company specializing in breeding new cut flower varieties for gardeners, farmers & designers.” 

They add: “ Our thriving research & education farm is dedicated to giving flower lovers the tools & information they need to grow the gardens of their dreams.”

In honor of the Autumnal Equinox, and its seeds of the next season feeling, I am so revisiting Erin on Cultivating Place – just as Floret's newest title, From Bloom to Seed, is now available for preorder!

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

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these.

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

As the season begins to show signs of turning its next page, Cultivating Place host Ben Futa heads to Vermont!

This week he's in conversation with David Jacques, also known by the internet persona "Davey Wavey". David is the owner of Frog Meadow Bed & Breakfast, a retreat for men in southern Vermont.

For nearly 20 years, David has been pursuing his passion for gardening while serving an audience (online and in person) of primarily gay men. 

In their conversation this week, they explore childhoods spent in the soil, how David’s career led to an East Coast homecoming, and a newfound connection with wild, beautiful spaces intended for healing, safety, comfort, joy, and belonging when David became the new owner and steward of Frog Meadow. Listen in!

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

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these.

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

Whitney Jaye is a florist, flower farmer, and the creative force behind Sunbird Flowers, based in Decatur, Georgia, and providing sustainably grown, beautifully curated flowers for the Atlanta area. 

Seeing her work through the lens of Black Southern folkways that (re)center agrarianism, and through the ancestral memories and practices of coastal Carolinian culture, Whitney Jaye’s work sits at the intersection of land care, history, and building community through flowers.  

This week, Cultivating Place host Abra Lee joins Whitney to explore how flowers can connect us to place, to one another, and to the simple pleasure of creating beauty with what’s growing around us. Listen in!

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

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these.

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

Alcatraz is a name rich with story, myth, and drama. It is also a dramatic sight where history, gardens, and how gardens grow us better all come together.

This week we continue our theme of gardens and cultural landscapes as a form of social care–tending to place and people. We’re joined by Shelagh Fritz, the Senior Program Manager of Alcatraz Historic Gardens, part of the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy.

For more than 20 years, Shelagh has grown with and tended this dramatic, historic, and growing garden site, and she has expansive garden goals for the future. Listen in!

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

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these.

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

Erika Rumbley and Renee Portanova are Co-Founders and Directors of The New Garden Society. Now, you may hear that phrase and think of a garden club or a plant society. But this organization’s very name invites you to consider a new angle on the words Garden + Society.

The New Garden Society is a Boston-based organization run by horticulturists, landscapers, and farmers who seek to expand green industry opportunities for their incarcerated and formerly incarcerated neighbors in greater Boston.

They believe in the transformational potential of working with plants, and in connecting incarcerated people with green-industry professions to transform landscapes within and beyond prison walls. Together, they tend to green spaces where both people and plants can flourish.

Erika and Renee join Cultivating Place host Jennifer Jewell this week to share more about their intersectional work and why it matters in growing our world better. Listen in!

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

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these.

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

All history reminds us that we are all history in the making! Garden history reminds us that we as gardeners, our gardens, our gardening, and how our culture tends to and stewards land are all that, too! 

What is the historical context of gardens in this moment-especially given some of the changes and impacts on national or public shared landscapes? What does garden history specifically teach us about this moment? 

Join us this week as Cultivating Place hosts Ben Futa and Abra Lee consider these questions through the lens of garden history and their own garden lives: from plants to quilts, from potbelly stoves to richly rewarding stories from the past. Listen in!

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

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these.

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

At the height of summer, we head to the mile-high city to think more about cultivating place at elevation: human-made and natural elevations, in the service of people and their places.

We’re in conversation with Professor Jennifer Bousselot, who leads the Green Roof and Urban Agriculture Program, Growing Food for People and Pollinators, at Colorado State University.

Dr. Bousselot is motivated by balance. The author and co-author of many titles, including Trees & Shrubs of Colorado and Trees and Shrubs of New Mexico, she has also published widely on the power (pun intended) of green roofs and agrivoltaics, a stacking-functions, mixed-use approach that combines solar power and agriculture. And that’s all while introducing students to the mix. Join us!

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

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these.

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

Allen Bush is an esteemed plantsman and lifelong advocate for the joy of gardening. He joins Cultivating Place Host Abra Lee in conversation this week to share more. From his work with Jelitto Perennial Seeds to his decades sharing rich garden stories as a Garden Rant writer, Allen’s life and work invite us to look more closely at the remarkable diversity of plants and the endless opportunities they offer for curiosity, discovery, and connection.

Through decades of sharing plants and knowledge with gardeners, he reminds us that our gardens are never truly finished; they are living places that continue to teach us, season after season, and our local garden histories matter. Listen in this week!

Cultivating Place now has a donate button!

We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these.

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