Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden

Camille Dungy is perhaps best known for her remarkable and award-winning, often environmentally focused poetry and editing of collections of environmentally focused poetry and writing by people of color exploring the intersections of gender, race, art, environment, and culture. In honor of Black History Month, we revisit this best-of conversation with Camille from May of 2023.

Just as her newest title, Soil, The Story of A Black Mother’s Garden was published by Simon & Schuster. Soil is a rich exploration into and celebration of ancestry and being an ancestor; about what it means to be human, about motherhood, writing, gardening, biodiversity, grief, beauty, joy, and above all, Soil is about the tenacious hope for better growth. Join us!

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.

In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, what they are growing in this world, and why that matters to all of us, I am pleased to be joined this week by three members of the team at The Institute for Applied Ecology – literally ecology in action. Their mission is to conserve native species and their habitats through restoration, research, and education.

They envision a world where all people and wildlands are healthy and interact positively, biological diversity flourishes, and environmental challenges are met with a social commitment to solving problems with scientific principles. And in many ways, this all comes back to an abundant and healthy seed supply.

This brings us to the Institute’s Native Seed Network and their coordination of their upcoming National Native Seed Conference, being held virtually Feb 7th and 8th.

The conference connects research, industry, land management, and restoration professionals, providing the premier opportunity to develop relationships and share information about the collection, research and development, production, and use of native plant materials. Given that gardeners are land managers in their own right, this is the kind of information that informs good garden decision-making for all of us. And I am excited to serve as the keynote speaker for the event.

Alexis Larsen, Program Director for the Institute's Plant Materials Program, Morgan Franke, the Program Coordinator for the Plant Materials Program, and Tom Kaye, the Institute’s co-founder, Executive Director, and Senior Ecologist, join Cultivating Place this week to share so much more about the past, present, and future of this important work. 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, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Did you know that grasslands account for between 20 and 40 percent of the world's land area? Generally open, fairly flat, and accessible, they exist on every continent except Antarctica. Ecologically as important as but different from other large ecoregion types such as forests or deserts, grasslands are even more vulnerable to pressure from human populations – for settling, planting, livestock, and development. Threats to natural grasslands, as well as the wildlife that live on them, include farming, overgrazing, invasive species, illegal hunting, and climate change.

At the same time, one study found California's grasslands and rangelands could store more carbon than forests because they are less susceptible to wildfires and drought. Still, less than 10 percent—of the world's grassland is currently protected in large part due to a lack of understanding of their ecological role. Which is where Dr. Justin Luong comes in.

Grassland ecosystems fill an ecological role as important as and different than our charismatic forests, our extreme deserts, and our coastal or chaparral scrub. And in fact, much of the general home garden lanscapes with their mix of perennial flowers, annual vegetables, and grasses, in many ways mimic grassland meadows.

Ecologist and educator Dr. Justin Luong of Cal Poly Humboldt joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about his journey (including being a worm wrangler) in science, practice, and education focused on biodiversity and climate resiliency, most recently through grassland restoration ecology. 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, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place, we hear the magical story of how two gardeners, separated by time, came together to grow all of our imaginations.

May Sarton was a 20th—century writer known for her poetry, novels, and personal journals illuminating the landscape of the human heart and mind.

She was also a lifelong and avid gardener. She spent the last 22 years of her life on the coast of Maine in a house and garden called Wild Knoll, now a part of the Surf Point Artist In Residence Program.

Carly Glovinski is an artist working in a wide array of mediums that balance between craft, utility, and art. 

She joins us today to tell the story of how she helped reimagine May Sarton’s former house site as a garden and to re-establish Sartons’s extant gardens using  Sarton’s well-known journal “The House by the Sea” as her guide.

It's an inspiring story of how we all existentially garden with one another in so many ways, entwined across time and space, and how we garden the past, present, and future simultaneously. Join us!

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, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

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.

We opened up 2023 here on Cultivating Place, focusing on biodiversity, and we close the year similarly, with diverse plant community thinking getting the final say. We’re in conversation with Cornwall-based ecological landscape designer Sid Hill, a land and ecological artisan who creates beautiful, abundant, and thoughtful places. Sid challenges himself, his clients, and the broader horticultural world to keep going and to go even further in rethinking and reimagining how horticulture is practiced and thought of in our world.

A believer in the ability of intentional and well-thought-out design to help our gardens help the world in moderating so many of the challenges ahead, Sid asks us to think like the plant and animal communities, as well as the indigenous human communities that are, and have been, foundational to the uniqueness of our places. He asks us to think like healthy habitats and their dynamic patterns as we look to the future – as we grow the future.

I think this plant-and-ecology-of-place-centric thinking is a perfect way to close out 2023 and herald in 2024.

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.

Collin Pine is an avid gardener, as well as an educator and writer. His first book is a work of garden-based children’s literature, The Garden Next Door. Thought-provokingly illustrated by Tiffany Everett, the detailed and specific artistry of the book adds a rich visual storyline to the already rich language-based narrative.

Just in time for the Winter Solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, The Garden Next Door, at its most philosophical, reminds us of the power of our gardens to support plant and animal life, human community, and pure delight - a delight that transcends age and the many distractions and misdirections of our time.

This lovely addition to our children’s bookshelves also reminds us that ALL of our gardens are next door to someone, and in this way, is an addition to our own existential understanding of the power of gardens and gardeners.

Happy Happy Solstice from Cultivating Place!

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.

Caribbean-born British-based writer and Gardener Marchelle Farrell is the author of Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside, Finding Home in an English Country Garden. A medical doctor by training, Marchelle’s work unflinchingly surveys her own journey to life in an English country garden and along the way unearths the hard edges but also the richness of the contributions of the African diaspora to our modern gardening world—contributions made willingly and unwillingly, seen, and unseen, acknowledged and unacknowledged.

Known as Afroliage online, Marchelle’s writing, a gardening story shared, and home deeply rooted are healing and re-integrating, in that way in which our gardens can be all of our very best health care. Uprooting is both powerfully personal and simultaneously universal. Listen in this week!

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.

In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, and what they are growing in this world, I am thrilled to be joined this week by Maria Rodale, of the Rodale Organic Gardening family.

Maria is a self-described "explorer in search of the mysteries of the universe." Author, artist, activist, and recovering CEO, she serves on the board of the Rodale Institute and is also a former board co-chair.

Throughout her career, she has advocated for the potential of organic regenerative farming to heal the damage wrought by pesticides and industrial agricultural practices. She is the author of Organic Manifesto and Scratch and is a children’s book author under the pseudonym: Mrs. Peanuckle.

Maria is a mother, grandmother, and crazy gardener who lives in Pennsylvania, right near where she was born.

This week we take a deep dive into the heart of the lessons of all of our gardens through the lens of Maria’s garden journey, documented in her newest book Love Nature Magic: Shamanic Journey’s Into the Heart of My Garden, out now from Chelsea Green Books.

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 Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Jac Semmler is a plant practitioner, a multi-disciplinary, creative, highly skilled horticulturist, and the human behind an epic new book and the Australian-based plant practice known as Super Bloom.

As our Northern Hemisphere gardens and landscapes settle into whatever their annual dormancy and winter rest might be, we head to the Southern Hemisphere in conversation with Jac Semmler.

Her philosophy (of more flowering plants, everywhere, all the time) behind her work Super Bloom gives us so much to dream about in our coming deep winter sleeps.

In this tiny lull between the mostly happy hubbub of the winter holidays, sweet flowery dreams!

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 Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.