This week, Cultivating Place welcomes Terry Richardson in conversation with Abra Lee. Terry is known to many as The Black Thumb: Orchid Care Made Simple, an intrepid, enthusiastic, and encouraging orchid rescuer, educator, and storyteller.

Terry has helped thousands of people rethink what it means to care for plants, specifically orchids! Terry’s journey began not with expertise, but with curiosity and failure. He is a self-proclaimed “black thumb,” as opposed to the more well-known "green thumb".

He began rescuing discarded orchids, specifically Phalaenopsis, and gradually learned how patience and consistency could revive even the most neglected plants. It’s a good winter's tale. Enjoy!

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.

Photos courtesy of Hudson Valley Seed Company & K Greene; Photo of K and Doug by Annie Tomlin, Modern Farmer. All rights reserved.

January is prime seed-dreaming and seed-catalogue season.

With that in mind, we’re revisiting a favorite conversation all about generosity, mutual care, good seeds, and seed people. Who doesn’t need more of all those as we continue to lay the foundation for this new year?

Ken Greene – who goes by K - is a seed person. He is the co-founder of the Hudson Valley Seed Library, which in 2004 became the first public library-based seed lending library in the US; in 2008, he went on to co-found with his partner Doug Muller, Hudson Valley Seed Company, a seed and art company focused on heirloom and open-pollinated vegetable, flower and herb seed.

Even more interested in seed literacy, sovereignty, and cultural seed rematriation, in 2016, K and Shanyn Siegel, a seed work colleague, founded the now-dormant non-profit, Seedshed, devoted to sharing and supporting the cultural, agricultural, and ecological diversity of seed.

K joins Cultivating Place this week to delve into the long view and deep relationships born of the generosity of seed – and seed people - in our garden lives. 

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.

As we continue our new year, we’re once again gaining elevation and new, growing thinking. We’re in conversation with Jim Tolstrup, Executive Director of the High Plains Environmental Center in Loveland, Colorado, where, by development design, they caringly cultivate Suburbitat.

Suburbitat is a land ethic, a mindset, and a book that all hold a vision of a built environment where suburbia and native ecosystems exist side by side and intertwined.

It is magical in all seasons! And, we can all take notes. 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.

In honor of the new year, fresh-faced and open-hearted in front of us, Abra Lee, Ben Futa, and Jennifer Jewell are together this week for a first-ever CP Host check-in. We’re chatting about what we’re looking back on, what we’re looking forward to, and what we’re looking to grow in 2026! 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.

For our final Cultivating Place episode of 2025, Abra Lee is looking forward by looking back. She’s in conversation with Philip Norman, longtime curator at the Garden Museum in London. From New Zealand to London, Philips' is a life shaped by gardens. Happy Holidays and New Year!

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.

All photos courtesy of Philip Norman, Garden Museum, London. All rights reserved.

In honor of the Winter Solstice happening this coming weekend on December 21st at 10:03 AM Pacific, we celebrate land and place-based cultivation from a foundation of cultural and spiritual care leading the way. We’re joined in this by Dr. Don Hankins, Professor of Geography and Planning at California State University, Chico.

Of Miwok ancestry, Don, for decades now, has focused on applied research of indigenous stewardship practices as a “keystone process to aid in conservation and management of resources”, particularly around the cultural use of fire and and conservation of water. Don has been involved in land management and conservation local organizations and agencies as well as federal and tribal governments. 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.

This week on Cultivating Place we celebrate one woman’s long-standing and loving cultivation of place in rural New Jersey. Janet Mavec is the steward and student of Bird Haven Farm, which after many years of learning from and loving, she now celebrates in word and image in her new place-based memoir: Bird Haven Farm the Story of An Original American Garden, written by Janet and photographed by Ngoc Minh Ngo, out now from Rizzoli Press.

This is a conversation about a beautiful, ecological, and intentional human and place collaboration to begin tying up the CP lessons of this season, and looking forward to seeding and inspiring the coming seasons! Enjoy!

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.

The Klamath Mountains are a rich site of diversity in Northern California and Southern Oregon, celebrated in Michael Kauffmann and Justin Garwood’s book The Klamath Mountains, a Natural History, from Kauffmann’s Back Country Press. 

Kauffmann’s most recent book, co-written with Matt Ritter, is California Trees, was just awarded The National Outdoor Book Award, and in honor of the seeds of that book being planted by all that Back Country Press does in this world, this week we revisit the fertile Klamath Mountains and our last conversation with Michael and Justin Garwood! Enjoy!

This week, we take a broader look at the mighty, now-undammed Klamath River and its namesake region, exploring the importance of knowing any place better from multiple perspectives for truly effective and durable conservation to be possible. 

We’re in conversation with Michael Kauffman, research plant ecologist, educator, and founder with his botanist wife Allison of the ecologically focused Backcountry Press, and Justin Garwood, Environmental Scientist for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, with a focus on fisheries.

Michael and Justin have spent the better part of the last decade curating and editing a cohort of 34 expert contributors to a new, and, really, the first comprehensive, Natural History of the Klamath Mountains, one of the most biodiverse temperate mountain ranges on earth. 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.

This week on Cultivating Place, we look towards the heart of the thankful season in memory of the enormous, fierce, and grateful soul of Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who passed from this world on October 20th, fighting for the beauty of the world right up to the end.

In his honor, we revisit our 2021 conversation with him, focusing on the sacred in the everyday and in the seasonal. 

Rabbi Waskow was the co-founder of The Shalom Center in Philadelphia, which equips spiritual leaders with the awareness and skills needed to lead a "transformed and transformative Judaism that can help create a world of peace, justice, healing for the earth, and respect for the interconnectedness of all life." 

A long-time activist for social and environmental justice, Rabbi Waskow is also the author of Seasons of our Joy, which brings reverent renewal to the ancient agricultural and season-based celebrations of the Abrahamic religions. 

Enjoy, and give thanks for such souls in this world.

Photo cover art from the 2012 Edition of Seasons of Our Joy, The Jewish Publication Society. Illustration from paper cuts by Martin Farren and Joan Benjamin-Farren; Photo of Rabbi Waskow benching Luvav from Slate.com; and Photo In Conversation, by Jennifer Jewell, 2021.

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.

“Ecological restoration is no longer a nicety, it’s a necessity,” proclaims the Blackland Collaborative, a group working to help alter cities so that they are biodiverse and inclusive, and helping heal human communities while restoring vulnerable species. Bridging science and design, the Collaborative brings people and nature home; and they believe in humans’ capacity to improve and protect. John Hart Asher is a co-founder and senior environmental designer with the Blackland Collaborative. And he understands cultivating place well as a process of constantly practicing the art of becoming a cultivator.

As we continue this month’s focus on ecological horticulture as it is practiced across the country, we welcome John Hart to the program this week. His work is currently featured in two new ecological-minded books: The Gardens of Texas, by Pam Penick, and Gardenista’s delicious and catalyzing newest title, The Low Impact Garden, by Kendra Wilson, photographed by Caitlin Atkinson.

John Hart has over 13 years of experience designing and building functional ecosystems within urban conditions. He has conducted basic research in ecological engineering, ecological restoration, and land management. His work includes: tall grass prairie restoration in an urban riparian corridor, the George W. Bush Presidential Center’s Laura W. Bush Native Texas Park, native prairie green roof design, residential pocket prairies, sustainable roadsides, and green infrastructure. Since 2019, John Hart has also served as a host of the PBS program Central Texas Gardener – and yes, he’s got a pocket prairie in his garden! 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.