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

The garden in summer is what we all dream of: some downtime, some play time, fresh flavors, fragrances, and of course, flowers and fun.

This week we revel in the beautiful chaos of a garden-inspired life with an Oklahoma accent in the company of Linda Vater, author of The Beautiful & Edible Garden, and founder of Potager Blog on Instagram and Garden Inspired Living on Youtube.

Linda is exuberantly-spirited and as well-known for her former storybook Oklahoma Garden – its expansive front garden and deliciously designed back garden potager - as she is for her extensive and supremely elegant collection of homegrown topiary.

Now in residence in her new-old Cottage on the Hill garden, Linda is fashion-minded, fabulous, and fun in the second of our gardener’s summer vacation-themed conversations.

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.

Novelist Jane Delury describes herself as a fledgling (maybe seedling?) gardener after 8 years into gardening being part of her everyday life and loves.

This labor and love in life coincide with themes of landscapes, gardens, and gardeners becoming fully-embodied motifs and characters in her fiction writing. They show up in her first novel-in-stories, The Balcony, and in her newly released novel Hedge, gardens, gardeners, and gardening past and present from all kinds of perspectives take center stage. 

Deep into the heat of the season now, it’s always gratifying to lean into the pleasures of a good summer book. In our case, a good garden-based summer book. Hedge is steamy, dreamy, and through the setting of gardens and garden history, the story plumbs the depths of human longing, loss, and ultimately the long view. 

Jane joins Cultivating Place this first week of July to share more about her new and richly gardened novel, the research that went into it, and the garden passion and history that enlivens it. 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 before July is upon us, and thoughts of what it means to be a citizen fill our minds, hearts, and collective messaging, I am so pleased to be joined by Taylor Pennewell and Rose Hammock of the Redbud Resource Group, an advocacy organization founded in 2020 by Taylor and her cousin Madison Esposito. The Redbud Resource Group believes fiercely that intergenerational healing can occur only when Native voices are valued in every area of public life.

Taylor and Madison's “firsthand experience as modern Native people inspired" them to "create resources that support all communities" in making an often erased population visible again. “Native people are often left out of conversations on issues that impact their communities,” the Group notes, and in their work, they see the impact of this erasure regularly.

As an intervention and disruption of this pattern, the Redbud Resource Group is improving public health outcomes for Native American communities through education, research, and community partnership.

It is generative, growing, and much-needed work in our world going meaningfully beyond land acknowledgments and building bridges between Native and non-native communities. As Taylor and Rose make clear early in our conversation, you cannot separate the fate of any damage done to Native peoples from that done to native lands and plant communities; their healing and success go hand in hand as well. 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.

In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, and how they are growing our world, I am so pleased to be back in conversation this week with Day Schildkret, the founder, the ongoing creator, and re-creator of the movement and practice known as Morning Altars, bringing together nature, art, and ritual. 

Day and his work are devoted to the pursuit of impermanent beauty and how that can become nourishment for life to continue. That sounds like being a gardener to me, and the week of the Summer Solstice is the perfect time to reflect on this. 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.

National Pollinator Week is an annual celebration since 2010 in support of pollinator health that was initiated and is managed by Pollinator Partnership.

This year National Pollinator Week festivities will take place across the country June 19 – 25, 2023 and in celebration, this week on Cultivating Place we look closely at one particular group of our native pollinators the charismatic bumble bees, the more than 250 species in the genus Bombus.

Our guest this week, Leif Richardson, is an Endangered Species Conservation Biologist with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, coordinating the community science efforts behind the newest of the society’s North American Bumble Bee Atlases - this time in California.

If you’re in the Northern California listening region, mark your calendars for the mid-July opening of an in-depth and beautiful exhibit entitled Bombus: The Natural History of Bumble Bees. At Gateway Science Museum on the campus of California State University, Chico, this new exhibition interweaves current scientific research on the North American population of bumble bees, as well as over a decade of study, observations and spectacular photography by plantsman and California Bumble Bee Atlas participant John Whittlesey. Through his deeply studied lens, you will never see a bumble bee again without a deepened love and appreciation.

Listen in this week and join us in person this summer!

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.

No matter what you might call it – Rewilding, wildscaping, backyard habitats, Acts of Restorative Kindness, Native plant habitat gardening, Homegrown National Park, Perfect Earth, 2/3rds for the Birds, or Garden for Wildlife, the concepts of Conservation + Biodiversity + our Gardens wherever they might be is not a new idea, although it is newly imperative in our world.

These three concepts as a perfect trinity go back to at very least 1973 when the National Wildlife Federation kicked off its Garden for Wildlife Program. Celebrating the 50th anniversary of these programs, Cultivating Place is joined this week by Mary Phillips, since 2014 she has been the head of the NFW’s garden for wildlife and certified wildlife habitat programs. In this big anniversary year, the programs are very close to realizing 300,000 cultivated wildlife habitats and gardens.

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.

Welcome June! This week, the third and final-for-now conversation in our series on the state of seed for native ecosystem restoration through the lens of California: seed identified, site-sourced, and grown for conservation & biodiversity support. The foundational level of seed – for scales large and small, and how it grows on from there is top of mind at the Theodore Payne Foundation in Southern California, an historic conservation icon in their region through their seed banking and native plant conservation, education, and community-based work.

This week I am joined by Executive Director Evan Meyer, Seed & Bulb Program Manager Genevieve Arnold, and Horticulturist and California Native Plant Landscaper Certification instructor Alejandro Lemus to explore and celebrate more about the radical range of the Theodore Payne Foundation as it grows us into the future and normalizes the great fun of native plant landscapes. 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.

Pat Reynolds is a restoration ecologist with more than 30 years of professional experience in the design, implementation, and monitoring of habitat restoration projects, including the effective use of native seed.

He is the Director of River Partners’ Native Seed and Plant program, the former General Manager of Hedgerow Farms, and a past Associate Restoration Ecologist at H.T. Harvey & Associates.

This week we continue our series exploring conservation and biodiversity support at the foundational level of seed—for scales large and small—in conversation with Pat. Heritage Grower’s high-quality habitat seed sourcing, grow out, and distribution to restoration projects, often in collaboration with their sibling endeavor, River Partners, is a model in getting high-quality source-identified seed for the right places in the face of increasing urgency for restoration, but also increasing hope as to the impact of restoration. 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 we kick off a several-part series looking into the state of seed, specifically wildland seed, for conservation and ecological restoration in our world from various perspectives.

We start off in conversation with Andrea Williams, the Director of Biodiversity Initiatives with the California Native Plant Society, and from there, a contributor to both the proposed California Seed Strategy and the National Seed Strategy. 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.

We are now mid-May, halfway through a month of graduations, spring celebrations, and weddings, and Mother’s Day is upon us here in the US this coming weekend.

Something that all of these celebratory kinds of human-marked rituals and events have in common? We so often mark them with the best of our most loved flowers of the season.

With that as our touchstone, I am so pleased to once again be in conversation this week with Deb Prinzing, founder of the Slow Flowers movement here in the U.S. and Canada, and of The Slow Flowers Society, representing the needs, successes, stories, and voices of the floral world in the Slow Flowers Journal, in the weekly Slow Flowers Podcast, and in the annual gathering known as the Slow Flowers Summit, this year happening in Seattle, WA June 26th and 27th.

As yet another facet of her floral-focused advocacy, Deb is co-founder and Editorial Director of Bloom Imprint Books, which identifies, develops, and publishes projects that shine a light on the floral lifestyle, showcasing the stories of floral personalities, creatives, entrepreneurs, farmers, artisans, and makers.

Their newest title, “Furrow and Flour,” by sisters Sarah Kuenzi and Beth Syphers, fits right in with this week’s themes.

I don’t know how she does it all, but I am so pleased she’s back to share with us about it. 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, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.