Have you ever noticed how every garden has a story? No matter how many gardeners might have worked that spot: just 2 - for instance mother nature AND you, or multitudes: you and the many who known or unknown may have worked that ground before you – the land you cultivate, hike, or gaze at, has a story.

Likewise, every gardener has a story – no matter how many gardens they’ve cultivated or at what point in their lives they came to their engagement in gardening or love of natural history - there are stories there. Figuratively, these stories might take the form of haikus, a well-crafted short story, a rambling run-on sentence, or an epic novel. But as Alfred Austin famously said: Show me your garden and I’ll show you who you are.

In the first year of Cultivating Place, I heard a good lot of feedback from listeners and friends. One piece of feedback from a friend was this: “I want to hear from real home gardeners, too, what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, how they cope.”

I liked the idea of this kind of sharing – a kind of Dispatches from the Home Garden. While every garden and every gardener have this act of cultivation in common, they are all necessarily different in their living details. We all have fingerprints, and they are all unique. I think something meaningful is learned in sharing both our commonalities and our differences.

This week we’ll hear from the very friend that sent this feedback/request. She sent it more than once, so it only seemed fair that she would help to craft and kick off our Dispatches from the Home Garden story time. In the interest of full disclosure, she is one of my oldest friends in the world: Christl Findling - satellite builder and home gardener from Lookout Mountain, Colorado.

Join us!