Cultivating Place

In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, and all that they are growing in this world, this week in particular I am delighted to be in conversation with a longtime and inspiring plants person.

Tony Spencer is the plantsman cultivator behind the Canadian-based endeavor, which for the last decade has been known as The New Perennialist. Under this name, Tony is a writer, a digital content creator, and an ecologically minded, biodiversity-replenishing planting designer self-described as "exploring the frontiers of naturalistic planting and garden design.” An inspired rooftop garden of his was awarded top honors by the Perennial Plant Association earlier this year. Listen in for some good plant medicine!

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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place, guest host Ben Futa of Botany in South Bend, Indiana, is back, this time in conversation with John Kish in the desert town of Bend, Oregon.

John is the founder and owner of Somewhere That’s Green, an indoor plant shop and home of the Greenhouse Cabaret Theatre. Per John’s vision, his work and life are a combination plant shop, performance venue, and community center. As part of the Cabaret, John is also the resident Drag Queen, also known as "Fertile Liza."

In their conversation, Ben and John explore John’s lifelong love for plants, art, and expression and how these have combined over time to create a place like no other. John is a dynamic and compassionate community leader and business owner who is actively working to cultivate a community he is proud to live in while also creating opportunities for others to thrive - embodying a new business mindset that perhaps has more in common with ecology than capitalism. Enjoy!

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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Sometimes our dreams didn’t start out as our dreams. Sometimes, our current dreams were once just seeds germinating in the crucible of time and experience leading up to what is now. For seed farmer Jen Williams, being a seed farmer situated within a small island community was not always the dream.

The dream to effect meaningful change in the world around her, started out for Jen in a realm all to prominent for most of us right now – electoral politics and the largest human structures of power in our world.

But over time, disappointments, reality check disenchantments and more importantly, surprising enchantments, Jen's desire to change the world composted and transformed itself into her current life in the soil, with the plants and their seeds, in community, on the land. Now her wildest dreams effect powerful and beautiful change in the world through her - and our - collective relationships to plants, food, beauty, and place.

I had the great joy of visiting Wild Dreams Farm & Seed this past summer, and I am so pleased to welcome Jen Williams to Cultivating Place this week on the seasonal harvest-to-winter transition, life-and-death-and-life-again-cycle celebration day of All Hallows Eve/Samhain.

Because like the seasons, and the past, present, and future realms, and our gardens - our wildest dreams are the stuff of transformation.

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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and W. EB Dubois are some of the many recognizable names of an intellectual cultural and artistic period in American history known as the Harlem Renaissance.

This week, CP Guest Host Abra Lee is in conversation with Reverend Jerri Mitchell-Lee. They enjoy a deep dive into the history of Effie Lee Newsome, another highly respected writer - and gardener - of the Harlem Renaissance. Reverend Mitchell-Lee shares more about this undersung American literary and garden figure from her unique familial perspective: Effie is her beloved great aunt.

Effie Lee Newsome was a quintessential multi-hyphenate: she was an artist, nature writer, gardener, author, naturalist, birder, and favorite poet of the Harlem Renaissance elite. Through her groundbreaking children’s book, Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors (The Associated Publishers, 1940), she became a powerful piece in the puzzle of not only the Harlem Renaissance but also American garden history. In June of 2022, a class of Landscape Architecture Students from Auburn University used the poetry and plants of Effie Lee Newsome as their inspiration for an award-winning display garden at the Philadelphia Flower Show.

Reverend Mitchell-Lee is an accomplished writer, author, and businesswoman. She has a passion for serving and continues to do so as a health educator, mental health counselor, and workshop trainer. She received her education at Sterling College, University of Kansas, Rutgers University of Medicine and Dentistry, Howard School of Theology, and Newark School of Theology. 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

The wilds of New Jersey might sound like a humorous oxymoron to many – many who don’t live in New Jersey.

Humor is one of our guests' great traits this week, along with his deep love of the plants and places making up New Jersey and its wilds—whether scrappy and unlikely roadside verges or extant majestic old-growth forests.  

Jared Rosenbaum and his wife Rachel Mackow own and operate New Jersey’s Wild Ridge Plants, an all-native, all-natural, all-nursery-propagated endeavor in Alpha, New Jersey. 

Jared is also the face and voice behind the Wild Plant Culture Podcast, and, along with documentary filmmaker Jared Flesher, Jared Rosenbaum is the host of the Rooted Series of Wild Plant videos.

A certified ecological restoration practitioner and author of Wild Plant Culture, A Guide to Restoring Native Edible and Medicinal Plant Communities, Jared has an abiding curiosity about the intersection of ecology and culture. From his deeply rooted place there in New Jersey – I am so pleased to welcome Jared to Cultivating Place this week – join us!

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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week, we’re so excited to air the first listen to one of our CP LIVE conversations, which were recorded live in front of an audience on the home ground of the Cultivators of Place with whom we are speaking.

I am so thrilled to kick the airing of this series off on my own home ground in Northern California - back in conversation with Sandy Fisher and Durl Van Alstyne of Golden State Linen, previously known as Chico Flax.

A regenerative fiber project based in California’s North State, Golden State Linen is regenerative fiber farming as a part of the Fibershed Network – and as such, they’re growing biodiversity, community, economy, and linen. Now, that is a beautiful fabric of life. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Amanda Thomsen is a horticulturist, garden designer, keynote speaker, freelance writer, backyard consultant, and author living in suburban Chicago. Amanda wants to help the world live more sustainably (but without a load of effort and twice the fun!).

Amanda has been a professional horticulturist, landscape designer, and project manager for the past twenty-plus years. Her focus is bringing rule-breaking fun, a little kitsch, and a lot of humor into an industry that is often thought of as stodgy and full of rules. Amanda speaks and gives classes at events of all sizes throughout the United States.

Many of you will remember Cultivating Place's previous conversation with Amanda Thomsen back in the spring of 2019 about her latest book, “Backyard Adventure: Get Messy, Get Wet, Build Cool Things, and Have Tons of Fun.” 

In 2022, she opened a plant shop in the small, midwestern town and Chicago suburb of Lemont, IL. Today, Amanda is back to share with us her journey to becoming a business owner, building community, and growing more than just plants. Their motto: "Practical, fun, imperfect gardens for everyone!"

It’s a fun, funny, heartbreaking, uplifting, and very candid conversation about the business of Cultivating Place, and how small plant businesses can be integral to Cultivating Place well and in community.

IN ADDITION, this is the first CP episode featuring one of our two new regular guest hosts: Ben Futa of Botany, a growing plant-based endeavor in South Bend, Indiana. Join us!

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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Dr. Alan Weakley is a career-long botanist and conservation biologist firmly rooted in the southeast region of the U.S. For a little over 23 years, Dr. Weakley has served as the director of the UNC Chapel Hill Herbarium, which since 2000 has been part of the North Carolina Botanical Garden.

Throughout his career, from his PhD work to his professorial and director duties and community engagement work, Dr. Weakley’s focus has remained on the rich biodiversity of plants and plant community systems of the Southeast. In his experience, this is one clear way to work toward conserving biodiversity writ large.

An exhibit Dr. Weakley and the Herbarium helped to create, Saving our Savannahs, Stories of the Longleaf Pine, will be on display at the North Carolina Botanical Garden through December 2024. In our conversation, Alan describes the ongoing and ever-increasing importance of herbaria and the expansive collaborative relationship possible between the UNC-Chapel Hill Herbarium and North Carolina Botanical Garden now that they are fully integrated. One example of that is this new exhibit designed to engage and educate the public about this beloved ecosystem of the Southeast. 

As he poignantly notes: “At a time of a biodiversity crisis and the sixth great extinction, herbaria are really more important than ever. And provide more critical resource than ever before... We can only move forward with conserving the biodiversity of our rich region, if we know what that biodiversity it, if we know where it is, if we know how to manage it. Ultimately we’ll end up conserving biodiversity only if the people want to, only if we care about it."

In listening to the scope of Dr. Weakley’s work and recalling his early reference to his well-loved and well used book-form Peterson Field Guides as a younger person, it occurs to me that the legacy of his work (and others like him) is much like a trusted field guide we carry with us to know more about exactly where we are. Enjoy!

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, and Google Podcast. 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 is cultivating a flower-farmer and flower-farming economy in our country. Her innovative and dedicated seed research and breeding work of the past almost decade, however, is whole new lens through which to appreciate her work.

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 pleased to once again welcome Erin to Cultivating Place – just as Floret's free seed saving mini-course launches on their website. Erin shares much more about this newest heart of Floret's growing work. Join us!

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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

One day in his mid-adulthood, at a particularly low point after many years of battling debilitating depression, Jarod K. Anderson witnessed the presence of a Great Blue Heron fishing in a creek in the woods near his home.

In the opening pages of his new book, Something in the Woods Loves You, he describes the transformative moment of meeting this “poem of ancient slowness” as a “bridge to when nature was family.”

Jarod is the poet and nature enthusiast behind the popular scripted fiction podcast The CryptoNaturalist - about real love for imaginary nature. In Something in the Woods Loves You (out this week from Hachette), Jarod poignantly shares how real nature, and its lessons as to our human place within it, was one of his primary allies along his mental health journey, helping to bring him home to himself.

Jarod joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about his love of nature, his garden life, and his thoughts on how an improved relationship with nature is key to everyone’s health (mental and physical), including the health of the planet we live on and her nature. Join us!

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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.