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

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

By Jennifer JewellSociety & Culture
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Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden episodes

  • Tiny Gardens Everywhere, with MIT's Kate Brown
    Kate Brown is an MIT Distinguished Professor in the History of Science. Across her career, her research has sometimes inadvertently documented the impact of urban, often small and under-resourced gardens and gardeners in our world.
    Her new book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, compiles this research and her own lived experience of its truth and potential benefits. 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.
    59 min
  • Flora Culture with Christin Geall of Cultivated by Christin
    This week on Cultivating Place, we continue with our flower theme as we celebrate May, looking toward the most floral of celebrations, Mother’s Day in the US.
    We discuss not us as gardeners growing flowers, but rather, how flowers shape our world, our cultures, our economies, our thinking and outlooks.
    We're in conversation with Christin Geall, author of Cultivated: Elements of Floral Style. Her newest title is Flora Culture: How Flowers Shape our World. It’s a revealing and thought-provoking cultural compendium. 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.
    1 hr
  • REALLY ROSES, with Robin Jennings of Oregon-based Heirloom (Roses)
    Roses are one of those topics in the garden world: they can be polarizing or energizing. And yet, given that there are roses native to most environments of North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and humans have revered this family and genus and the hundreds of rose species for millennia, they can also be connective tissue for so much–generationally, culturally, environmentally, medicinally, and certainly, aesthetically.
    So do you love 'em, do you hate ‘em? Do you think they’re fussy, or old-school? Maybe. But in so many ways, they are a real deal OG garden staple. From beautiful flowers, medicinal natures, habitat value galore, Robin Jennings of Heirloom – formerly known as Heirloom Roses – joins us this week to share her belief that roses really are the way. 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.
    52 min
  • Between Soil and Self - A conversation with John Sonnier
    This week, Cultivating Place host Abra Lee explores diplomacy and gardens. She’s in conversation with John Sonnier, Head Gardener at the British Ambassador's residence in Washington, D.C. There since 2009, John focuses on organic and sustainable methods of care AND he has created one of the United State’s most significant historic orchid collections.
    Orchids are known for their extraordinary forms, relationships, and resilience and John, a distinguished horticulturalist, artist, and self-taught orchidist, brings us into that world – sharing what it means to grow them, care for them, and stay curious about them over time. We consider how the environment we cultivate – from gardens to shared community spaces – shape our thoughts and our lives. 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.
    54 min
  • Mid-Atlantic Regional Seed Bank (MARSB) with Ed Toth and John Price
    This week, when we think about Cultivating Place well, we get to the seed of the matter in conversation with the team at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Seed Bank, also known as MARSB. We’re in conversation with Ed Toth the Executive Director, and John Price, MARSB’s Associate Director and Native Seed Collection Coordinator.
    As a collective, MARSB is wisely managing and conserving its region’s wild seed resources, and encouraging the development of the sustainable and ethical Native Plant Material supply chain throughout the region – a gift to private and public landscapes and economies. 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.
    55 min
  • Gardens as Social Infrastructure, Gardeners as Public Servants, with Chris Felhaber
    Chris Felhaber is a gardener, a husband, and a father. Now based in the Chicago area, Chris has worked in public horticulture in a variety of capacities and with well-known organizations, including with plantsman Roy Diblik in Wisconsin, at Chanticleer Garden outside of Philadelphia, with the Perennial Plant Association, and as the host of the Native Plant Podcast.
    After nearly 2 decades working with people and places of great privilege and with people and places who would like more gardens and more garden opportunities, Chris now understands that gardens are critical social infrastructure and that gardeners are public servant leaders whose greatest tools are empathy and meeting people and places where they are.
    This is a fascinating Quantum Gardening conversation - 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.
    57 min
  • Pansies! It's What's for Spring! with Brenna Estrada
    Brenna Estrada is the owner and founder of Three Brothers Blooms, a flower farm located on 2.5 acres of Camano Island in the Pacific Northwest.
    Brenna is also the author of Pansies, How to Grow, Reimagine, and Create Beauty with Pansies and Violas, published by Timber Press just over a year ago. Brenna makes a compelling case for revisiting our relationship to pansies, and her book was CP Host Ben Futa's own gateway to growing nearly 1,000 plants from seed in 2026.
    Their conversation this week spans many topics, with pansies as a worthy and common thread. As happens often in this work, we're reminded how this process of growing plants is just as much about cultivating ourselves as it is about cultivating our places. 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.
    56 min
  • Spring's Wild Dreams, with Jen Williams
    Spring is, of course, perfect for some wild dreams about what we can and will sow in the seasons to come.
    With plants, and with ourselves. Jen Williams’ vision for her work as the founder of Wild Dreams Farm and Seed on Washington’s Vashon Island is to ensure abundance and biodiversity in our culture, and in our gardens, by growing and breeding open-pollinated vegetable, flower, and herb seeds that nourish our human and more-than-human communities.
    We revisit this best of conversation this week, just in time for some of our own wild dreaming.
    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.
    1 hr 3 min
  • Vernal Equinox Special: The Glorians, with Terry Tempest Williams
    In honor of the Vernal Equinox, and the balance we long for, we are joined this week by humanist, conservationist, Professor, and writer in residence at the Harvard Divinity School, Terry Tempest Williams.
    From her 1991 classic, Refuge, An Unnatural History of Family & Place, published in 1991, to her newest title out now from Grove Atlantic, The Glorians, Visitations from the Holy Ordinary, and the more than 100 publications in between, Terry’s writing is grounded in her love of the landscapes of the U.S. West.
    Her love and her writings profoundly expand our love for and understanding of this whole world we call home.
    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.
    1 hr
  • Vital Energy: Omar Al Shafie on Innovative Re-Thinking and Growing
    Spring is stirring, buds are swelling, and soil is warming.
    This week, we celebrate the joys of healthy living soil in conversation with Omar Al Shafie, co-founder of Northern California-based Teregen Ag, a purpose-driven, innovative soil and plant nutrient producer and researcher dedicated to advancing our collective transition toward sustainable, regenerative farming. 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.
    57 min

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

From the publisher's feed

Gardens are more than collections of plants. Gardens and Gardeners are intersectional spaces and agents for positive change in our world. Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the…