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

In this very unusual back-to-school season here in the US, we’re joined this week by Julie Cerny a gardener, an outdoor enthusiast, and educator. Her new book, The Little Gardener: Helping Children Connect with the Natural World (out now from Princeton Architectural Press) provides some unusual and inspirational guidance for parents, grandparents, caregivers, and educators who want to help children explore the natural world through gardening.

Part how-to, part teaching tool, and part inspiration, The Little Gardener shows gardeners of all ages how to envision and build their garden together by making the process an adventure to be treasured, with much to learn along the way.

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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place we’re focused on growing food and community when we’re joined by Patricia Spence, President and CEO of the Urban Farming Institute of Boston, working to grow more food, train more farmers, and build healthier communities everywhere. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Toni Gattone is a businesswoman, a master gardener, and a lifelong gardener of Italian descent. After struggling herself with a bad back, and the limitations this put on her as an active human and gardener, she began to research the idea of adaptive gardening.

Based on all that she discovered and her own experiments and adaptations in her small Bay area garden that she shares with her husband, she wrote: “The Lifelong Gardener – Garden With Ease and Joy at Any Age” (Timber Press, 2019).

In the late stages of our current growing season here in the Northern Hemisphere, and in my own mid-to-late middle age, I figure there is never a better time than now to learn more about adapting to the realities of where we are, who we are, and how to make the best of both.

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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Farmer Meg is an urban beekeeper turned flower and market grower turned farmer. Meg has been farming in NJ and NY city and state for almost a decade. Just over two years ago, she and her partner Neil migrated to upper Schoharie County NY to being to establish Meg’s dream homestead on a former dairy farm.

Biscuitwood Farm grows cut flowers, raises egg-layers on pasture, breeds Red Wattle pigs, and has small-scale soap enterprise wit their dairy goats. She is instrumental to a regionally based collaborative known the 607 CSA, and she believes firmly in abundance, the generosity of the garden, and that collaborative growing is the future. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place we get a booster shot of energy and inspiration as we enter the dog days of summer when we’re joined by Colah B. Tawkin – the voice and vibrant life force and distinctive VOICE of the Black in the Garden podcast - where Black Culture Meets Horticulture. You will not want to miss her - 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Jasna Guy is an artist whose visionary and liminal work is based in close observation of the plants and pollinators – specifically bees – of her garden and natural environments. Her ethereal representations bring heightened understanding and awareness to the miraculous life processes - like bee and flower pollination and pollinator co-evolution and mutual interdependence - going on around us everyday everywhere. 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 Play, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In the throes of high summer, Cultivating Place continues to explore the fruits of the imaginative nature of the garden. We begin a two-part series on visual artists deriving their inspiration from the garden and its diverse life, and going from there.

Jennifer is joined this week by the Australian three-dimensional paper artist Colleen Southwell whose finely drawn, detailed, and designed compositions pull from the natural and the fantastical. Part herbarium or entomological specimen displays, part pure imagination, whimsy and fine, fine handwork. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

A good read often plumbs the depths of imagination, for Matthew Hall - gardener & researcher at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand – it’s the Imagination of Plants he’s interested in, especially how and why plants are or are not positioned as central characters in the most important cultural narratives and mythologies of societies across time and place. Matthew joins Cultivating Place this week to explore Botanical Mythology. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place we take a summer amble with British-based Californian Kathryn Aalto – a historian, designer, and writer whose most recent book Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks offers all of us some much needed outdoor adventure with some admirable women of words. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In honor of the Fourth of July, Cultivating Place is joined this week by the acclaimed writer and gardener Jamaica Kincaid, whose work "My Garden (Book)" published in the late 1990s, explores how the length and depth of human history - beautiful and terrible - is a narrative fully legible in our gardens and horticulture of today. As a citizen gardener, she sees potential redemption for humanity in kindness and in striving to honor one another the best we can - in our places, with our plants. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.