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

Cris Sarabia is the conservation director of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy. He is also a dedicated and active member of many local land and conservation organizations in his home region of North Long Beach, in Southern California, including GreyWater Action Network, the California Native Plant Society, Pelecanus, and Puente Latino, a grassroots non-profit art, culture, and ecology organization serving the North Long beach community since 2019.

At this time of year, post-Solstice, in the midst of Hanukkah, pre-Christmas, Kwanzaa, and the New Year – I think many of us try to center ideals of clarity, connection, caring, and community. This week we have a conversation with a human whose work caring for lives out these very ideals within his many land, water, plant, and human communities. This to me, is what truly good gardening is all about in so many ways.

Many listeners will remember an earlier conversation I had with Cris on Cultivating Place in April of 2021 when Cris was the Board Chair of the California Native Plant Society and their decolonizing work. I am so pleased to be chatting more fully with Cris this week about all that he cultivates in his community-based life.

Listen in - and Happy Holidays!

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, a pre-Solstice offering for Cultivating Place listeners! Maria Popova is the creator and writer behind The Marginalian (formerly known as Brain Pickings), which, for the past 16 years, 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 near our longest night and just before we begin tending back toward the light once again. 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.

This week – we visit and learn from gardeners' past as we look to the future in conversation with Judith Tankard, a landscape historian, author, and preservation consultant. Tankard is the author or co-author of twelve illustrated books on landscape history, including her most recent publications, Beatrix Farrand: Garden Artist, Landscape Architect (Monacelli Press, 2022); Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement; and Ellen Shipman and the American Garden, winner of the 2019 J. B. Jackson Book Prize.

Across her long career, Tankard has traced and made visible the lives, struggles, and achievements of some of the most notable female garden designers and landscape architects of the early 20th century.

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.

Kier Holmes is a garden designer and writer regularly contributing to the likes of Martha Stewart, Better Homes and Gardens, Gardenista, Sonoma Magazine, Marin Magazine, and Sunset Magazine. She is also a children’s garden and science educator.

In her writing and designing, she focuses on low-cost and low-impact, chemical-free, richly textured, visually dynamic spaces full of life – all of which is well documented in her newest book: The Garden Refresh How to Give your Yard Big Impact on a Small Budget. Kier joins cultivating place this week to kick off December! Listen in.

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All images courtesy of Kier Holmes, all rights reserved.

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.

Dear All,

Rebecca Schiller is a gardener, a smallholding steward, an activist, and author of: A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention, A Memoir of Coming Home to My Neurodivergent Mind – about grounding back to land, place, and garden - even after a surprising diagnosis of severe ADHD.

Schiller’s writing and her gardening-life vividly reminds us all that being different doesn’t have to mean broken – in our minds, our hearts, or our gardens. This narrative and this discussion remind us that it is the many ways in which we pay attention in this world that shows what and whom we value and everyone and everything for which we are thankful. And it is so very often our gardens that remind us not only of where we are but who we are.

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

In this week after Veterans Day here in the U.S, and in this season clarifying that gratitude is one of the greatest gifts of the garden and the growing world, we’re in conversation with someone who knows this gift of the garden perhaps especially well.

Zepherine - Zee – Hanson is an Air Force Veteran who, after 8 years serving as a military photojournalist, took a medical retirement in 2004. As part of her own healing journey, Zephrine joined the Veterans to Farmers program in Denver, CO.

Working in partnership with the Denver Botanic Gardens, the therapeutic Veterans to Farmers program was life-changing for Zephrine, bringing together all of the things she cared most about and motivating her to found her business Hamden Farms, which connects farming, storytelling, small business incubation, underserved communities, and growing outside the box.

For her innovative work researching how to connect unused farm produce to small makers looking to craft value add products- helping to stabilize the incomes of both farmers and makers, Zephrine has won awards and recognition from the Bob Evan Heroes to CEOs program, from LinkedIn Creator Accelerator Program, from REI, and more. 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 one of our more flamboyant arboreal seasons of the year—when our charismatic woody megaflora of the Northern Hemisphere—the trees—are chorophylling down, coloring up, and turning over their foliage biomass to the soil in preparation for the winter ahead, this week we are in a conversational exploration about the scale and meaning of trees, with William (Ned) Friedman, 8th director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. Located in Jamaica Plain and Roslindale Masschuesetts, this free and open-to-the public majestic convening of trees is celebrating its 150th anniversary of growing together. The trees have so much to teach us, and we have so much to learn. 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.

Settling into November now, this week on Cultivating Place we’re in conversation with three members of the horticultural team at Filoli, a historic house and 16 acres cultivated garden in Woodside, California, where they are striving toward environmental and cultural practices to generously pay their long history of privilege forward. Just in time for the generous season in front of us.

At Filoli, gardeners are striving to meet the social and environmental moment in the best ways possible—ever adapting and evolving to experiment, include, reinterpret, and contribute more and more positively. They think not only about what to plant when but about why these spaces matter and what they have to teach us. 

Jim Salyards is the Director of the garden at Filoli, Kate Nowell is the production gardens manager, and Haley O’Connor is Filoli’s formal gardens manager. They are all with us this week to speak and share more on just these topics. 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.

Approaching All Hallow’s Eve/Halloween, Samhain, and Day of the Dead, we are entering into the season of gratitude - running from now through the Winter Solstice & the calendar’s new year.

It is a season of gathering, collection, and reflection, and Cultivating Place is in conversation this week with an artist and a green spirit in our garden care world, Louesa Roebuck, about her newest book Punk Ikebana: Reimagining the Art of Floral Design (gathering, gleaning & composing in situ), being published by Cameron + Company Books on November 8.

Louesa is a multimedia and multigenre creative, floral artist, printmaker, painter, textile designer, curator, and author. You may recall our conversation several years ago around her first book: Foraged Flora.

In Punk Ikebana, Louesa starts from a place of reverence for tradtion, in particular those of Japan, but also from a place of "peace-punk, Do-No-Harm." Ikebana, “the way of the flowers,” has been studied formally in Japan and beyond for centuries. In Punk Ikebana, Louesa explains and riffs on the art form’s classic rules—and then demonstrates how to seasonally, sensually, and meaningfully bend them. The book highlights stunning arrangements and installations that unite the cultural meanings and wise elegance of a traditional perspective with an inviting freedom from convention for anyone to feel welcome into.

This week on Cultivating Place, we continue with fall/winter planning and planting, this time with a focus on design, in conversation with Nick and Allison McCullough – of McCullough landscape & Nursery, a design, build, and maintenance firm based in New Albany, Ohio.

Their new book American Roots, Lesson and Inspiration from the Designers Reimagining our Home Gardens, is a transcontinental tour of diverse modern home garden design offering lessons and inspiration- seasoned with playfulness, passion, and purpose. 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 cultivatingplace.com.