Cultivating Place

Kai Wright is a gardener, but chances are good you know him as a Peabody Award-winning host, editor, and longtime journalist whose work explores the intersection of history, power, and the evolving American identity.

He is co-host of The Guardian’s new video podcast: Stateside with Kai and Carter, a current events program "striving to make sense of it all". Kai’s garden history and practice help ground him in all that sense-making.

And we could all use more good sense. Listen in this week!

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 the next conversation in our intermittent series on what regenerative cultivation looks like in our world-at many levels, Cultivating Place is speaking this week with Dr. Garrett Liles, cofounder and faculty affiliate of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture and Resilient Systems at California State University, Chico.

The Center is all about caring cultivation of place, understanding and supporting better systems, and training the next generation in the ethos and the practices.

The Center is directed by nationally recognized regenerative agriculture leader, Dr. Cynthia Daley, an educator, researcher, and advocate, who joined CSU Chico’s faculty in 1998. Between 2016 and 2019, Dr. Daley, along with Dr. Tim LaSalle and Dr. Garrett Liles, created the Center for Regenerative Agriculture & Resilient Systems.

Today, the Center is a nationally respected hub for interdisciplinary research, producer education, student engagement, and policy outreach.

Dr. Liles has been mentored by and is a colleague of Dr. Daley and Dr. LaSalle, expanding on and adding to the longstanding work of sustainable agricultural practice at Chico State–past, present, and future-for the benefit of all people and 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.

To welcome October, this week on Cultivating Place, host Ben Futa welcomes Colleen Raney of Washington State’s Songbird Seed Company and Diadem Flower Company. 

Colleen founded Songbird Seed Co., a seed company devoted to cultivating and preserving exceptional sweet peas.

What started as a personal fascination with the sweet pea became a deeper study of their history, varieties, cultivation, and extraordinary diversity.

Today, Colleen grows hundreds of sweet pea varieties each year, selecting and sharing seeds that she finds particularly beautiful, unusual, and worthy of being grown again. Her work is grounded in the belief that sweet peas need not be complicated, and there is so much to be discovered in paying attention.

Colleen publishes a bi-annual periodical, The Sweet Pea: A Garden Companion, and she is the founder of the American Sweet Pea Society.

Together, Ben and Colleen explore her early life in acting and singing, and the connection between scent, memory, and our sense of home.

We follow Colleen’s growth from tending a simple garden and growing flowers for pollinators into a full-fledged flower farm, with a particular focus on her success growing sweet peas. They also talk about stepping back, paying attention, and letting the plants tell us what they need.

At the beginning of the season for sowing many spring bloomers, we hope you join us by listening 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.

Happy Autumn! Cultivating Place is proud to launch an occasional series from Host Abra Lee, delving into our Garden past to better understand and illuminate our Garden present and future. Sometimes we have to look back to grow forward!

This week, Abra shares her research into an intrepid and unflagging cultivator of place from our past in Virginia’s Tidewater Region: Asa Sims. A businessman, educator, floral grower, and designer, Asa was also a cofounder in 1932 of the Historic Black Garden Clubs of Virginia, then known as the Negro Garden Clubs of Virginia. 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.

To “leave the land better than we found it” should be the ethic of all Gardeners.

It is the North Star ethic of regenerative and organic farming leaders: Lundberg Family Rice.

Third- and fourth-generation stewards of rice, land, and planet, Bryce and Brita Lundberg join Cultivating Place this week to share why, and all that grows from that single dedication.

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.

Erin Benzakein of Floret Flower Farm needs little introduction to most garden-minded listeners. She has been so instrumental in cultivating a flower-farming economy in our country.

Her innovative and dedicated seed research and breeding work of the past decade, however, is a whole new lens through which to appreciate her work. As we look toward the Autumnal Equinox later this month, please enjoy this favorite conversation!

Back in 2017, when I first interviewed Erin for the program & for The Earth in Her Hands, she was already a tireless advocate for local flowers and for supporting more flower farmers and local-flower florists in our everyday lives here in the US.

Through her on-farm and subsequently online flower farming Floret Workshops, for more than a decade, she has been renowned for encouraging and training eager new flower-farmer-florists in order to transform the cut flower industry from the multi-billion-dollar, large-corporate-owned international import (with little ecological or economic oversight) behemoth it had become, back into the more lovely and loving, organic, locally-based circular and community-oriented economy she envisioned it could be – and should be.

Floret - once a flower farm and training center – is now more fully (and perhaps even more beautifully) described as “a family-owned flower farm and seed company specializing in breeding new cut flower varieties for gardeners, farmers & designers.” 

They add: “ Our thriving research & education farm is dedicated to giving flower lovers the tools & information they need to grow the gardens of their dreams.”

In honor of the Autumnal Equinox, and its seeds of the next season feeling, I am so revisiting Erin on Cultivating Place – just as Floret's newest title, From Bloom to Seed, is now available for preorder!

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 the season begins to show signs of turning its next page, Cultivating Place host Ben Futa heads to Vermont!

This week he's in conversation with David Jacques, also known by the internet persona "Davey Wavey". David is the owner of Frog Meadow Bed & Breakfast, a retreat for men in southern Vermont.

For nearly 20 years, David has been pursuing his passion for gardening while serving an audience (online and in person) of primarily gay men. 

In their conversation this week, they explore childhoods spent in the soil, how David’s career led to an East Coast homecoming, and a newfound connection with wild, beautiful spaces intended for healing, safety, comfort, joy, and belonging when David became the new owner and steward of Frog Meadow. 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 see many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Whitney Jaye is a florist, flower farmer, and the creative force behind Sunbird Flowers, based in Decatur, Georgia, and providing sustainably grown, beautifully curated flowers for the Atlanta area. 

Seeing her work through the lens of Black Southern folkways that (re)center agrarianism, and through the ancestral memories and practices of coastal Carolinian culture, Whitney Jaye’s work sits at the intersection of land care, history, and building community through flowers.  

This week, Cultivating Place host Abra Lee joins Whitney to explore how flowers can connect us to place, to one another, and to the simple pleasure of creating beauty with what’s growing around us. 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.

Alcatraz is a name rich with story, myth, and drama. It is also a dramatic sight where history, gardens, and how gardens grow us better all come together.

This week we continue our theme of gardens and cultural landscapes as a form of social care–tending to place and people. We’re joined by Shelagh Fritz, the Senior Program Manager of Alcatraz Historic Gardens, part of the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy.

For more than 20 years, Shelagh has grown with and tended this dramatic, historic, and growing garden site, and she has expansive garden goals for the future. 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.

Erika Rumbley and Renee Portanova are Co-Founders and Directors of The New Garden Society. Now, you may hear that phrase and think of a garden club or a plant society. But this organization’s very name invites you to consider a new angle on the words Garden + Society.

The New Garden Society is a Boston-based organization run by horticulturists, landscapers, and farmers who seek to expand green industry opportunities for their incarcerated and formerly incarcerated neighbors in greater Boston.

They believe in the transformational potential of working with plants, and in connecting incarcerated people with green-industry professions to transform landscapes within and beyond prison walls. Together, they tend to green spaces where both people and plants can flourish.

Erika and Renee join Cultivating Place host Jennifer Jewell this week to share more about their intersectional work and why it matters in growing our world better. 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.