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

In our world at this time, I give thanks for the leadership voices that ground us in innovative ways of thinking and seeing our own power for growing the world better. I thought that this week we could all use a dose of such direction and grounding. With that in mind, please enjoy this BEST OF conversation with Indigenous seed keeper and teacher, Rowen White, and writer and activist Gavin Van Horn. They are voices of reason, relationship, and responsibility in our times.

As a gardener and a human in this exact time on our planet, and in this specific season of the year - a season of communal gathering and thankfulness at the tail end of the growing season in the Northern Hemisphere, this week we celebrate Family, Kin, & Kinship.

We are joined in this conversational celebration by Gavin Van Horn and Rowen White sharing with us about a new multi-volume collection of written voices entitled "Kinship Belonging in a World of Relations" out now from the Center for Humans and Nature, based in Chicago. 

Gavin is the creative and executive director for the Center for Humans and Nature and served as co-editor on the Kinship series with Robin Wall Kimmerer and John Hausdoerffer. Rowen is a seed keeper, a mother, and a farmer from the Mohawk community. She is the educational director and lead mentor of Sierra Seeds an innovative Indigenous seed bank and land-based educational organization located in Nevada city, California. A passionate advocate for Indigenous seed and food sovereignty, Rowen is the founder of the Indigenous Seedkeepers Network and her essay "Sky Woman’s Garden" appears in Partners the third volume of the five-volume Kinship series. 

Just like all kinds of gardens, these voices raised together in this uplifting series is all about growing together in this world.

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.

This week we’re in conversation with award-winning plantsman Riz Reyes of Washington State-based RH Horticulture and Landwave Gardens.

Riz is the current Assistant Director of Heronswood Garden and started his new role in May 2022. His duties include overseeing garden staff, volunteers, organizing garden events/plant sales, teaching lectures/workshops, and assists in maintaining and redesigning prominent sections of the gardens.

From his early inspirations as a child in the Philippines to his international horticultural studies, to his rich garden career in iconic horticultural landscapes across the Pacific Northwest, to his family-oriented picture book “GROW a Family Guide to Plants and How to Grow Them” (2022) – Riz’s stories and his inherent joy in living with plants will inspire you to grow more, 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 Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Gwendolyn Wallace is a gardener, a student, a teacher, a historian, and the author of two new works of illustrated children’s literature. Joy Takes Root, and The Light She Feels Inside (both published this year) are works grounded in the human impulse to garden.

In words, stories, and images these additions to the world of children’s literature help to grow us all.

Using her own history and experience with gardens and gardening, Gwendolyn’s stories remind us (no matter our age) that our gardens raise and tend to us as much as we raise and tend to them!

As we lean into the grateful season of November and December - Enjoy.

All images courtesy of Gwendolyn Wallace, all rights reserved.

It might be just the inspiration we need to get us all planting!

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.

As we turn the calendar to November and the season to decidedly late-fall and even wintery in many places across the U.S., we look toward our fall & winter planting windows – especially good for native plants in most of our areas as long as the ground is workable.

With that in mind, this week we’re joined by two native plant enthusiasts and nursery people – Kristin Currin and Andrew Merritt of Humble Roots Nursery in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge.

Humble Roots is a native plant nursery acclaimed for its efforts in sustainability and promoting native plant passion, knowledge, and ethics across the wider ecoregions of the Pacific Northwest.

After years at this work, Kristin and Drew, as he is known, have recently shared a great deal of their knowledge even more widely with the recently published The Pacific Northwest Native Plant Primer, 225 plants for an Earth Friendly Garden, out now from Timber Press.

It might be just the inspiration we need to get us all planting!

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.

This week we continue our artistic autumnal theme in conversation with Nina Veteto, a conservationist, an artist, and an expert storyteller.

Known as Blue Ridge Botanic online and creator of the brand new Flora and Forage Podcast (and offshoot of her beloved Secrets of the Wildflowers Video series on social media).

Nina is based in North Carolina, and she joins us this week to share more about her history, her artistry, and her passion and voice for plants – from their artistic renderings to their secret stories and other wonders of our natural world. 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 Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week in this season of endings and beginnings again, we welcome back writer, backyard tender, and heartfelt observer Margaret Renkl joining us to share more about her newest, likewise heartfelt book: “The Comfort of Crows, A Backyard Year.”

Many of you will remember our previous conversation with writer and gardener Margaret Renkl about one of her previous titles, “Late Migrations.” Her opinion pieces in The New York Times document the nature of our humanity weekly. I am so pleased to welcome her back this week to share more about her newest title – what is aptly described as “a literary and nature-based devotional” from one of our favorite backyard nature devotees. Join us, 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 Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place, we return to the artistry and also the activism of our plant-loving and garden-growing lives in conversation with Olly Costello.

Through their remarkable colors and forms and interconnections made visible - from the life of the soil to the lives and forms of plants and humans right on up to the myriad stars in our galaxy-night skies - Olly draws us all together.

Olly is a white non-binary queer illustrator, food grower, honey bee tender, and a seeker of mysticism. Through their creative work – which includes both visual arts and community building and reimagining - Olly explores themes of interconnectedness, cosmology, reciprocity, queer ecology, biomimicry, and emergence. They are perennially interested in cultivating our radical imaginations to help us all shape our emergent new world – in and out of the garden. 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 Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week, we enjoy a conversation with a gardener and garden guru well- known and loved: Joe Lamp’l of the famed and award-winning Growing a Greener World on PBS and The ‘joe gardener’ Show podcast.

Growing a Greener World is not just a show name but a nearly life-long mission for Joe. While he is known for his organic vegetable gardening knowledge and advocacy, Joe likewise loves the wilder side of his place in the world and ecological function is a top priority along with his human garden community. And at the end of the day, Joe is a lot like all of us: he just loves playing in the dirt with his plant friends.

In our ongoing exploration into who gardeners are, where gardeners are, and what they are growing in this world, Joe Lamp’l joins Cultivating Place to share more about his garden life – and how he enhances ours—the rest of us “joe gardeners.” 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 Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

As we move toward October, the first a few intermittent episodes reminding us of the artistry behind our plant and garden love, the artistry underpinning mother nature herself. This week we’re in conversation with artist Libby Ellis – photographer who sees the fullness of creation in the many faces of the flowers who delight us.

Libby Ellis is a fine art photographer based on the island now known as Martha’s Vineyard homeland of the Wampanoag people and nation who named the beautiful island Noepe. Monochromoatic and often single focused Ellis’ work lands in my heart in a similar way as a Georgia O’Keeffe painting or a Dorothea Lange portrait – all of them capturing the essence of one subject while contributing insight into the workings of life itself – nature, plus the workings of humanity and its perceptions. In the case of Libby Ellis – the focal point include everyday flowers from Cosmos to musk roses, hibiscus to magnolia. And her work has been featured from various locations on Martha’s Vineyard including the Featherstone Center for the Arts and the Carnegie Museum to London’s Saatchi Gallery for the Royal Horticultural Society’s 2022 Botanical Art and Photography exhibit, from the Harvard Divinity School to large scale projection against a high rise building in Denver, CO.

Libby joins us from her studio in Edgartown MA (on the to share more about her photographic eye and gardener’s heart.

This week, a Best OF episode revisiting our conversation with Maria Popova, the creator and writer behind The Marginalian (formerly known as Brain Pickings).

For the past 16 years, The Marginalia has been a daily—perhaps even hourly—exploration of wonder in our world as seen through the lenses of how we as humans express ourselves in our own creativity, our intellectual curiosity, our sadnesses and griefs, and in our greatest loves and joys. 

Gardening and gardeners are recurrently among the human endeavors Maria has explored these many years. This is a light of a conversation in the best spirit of quantum gardening as we tend toward the fullness of Autumn’s splendor. 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 Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.