Cultivating Place

By Jennifer Jewell / Cultivating Place

Society & Culture Arts Natural Sciences Science & Medicine Education Government & Organizations Philosophy Higher Education Non-Profit

What's Cultivating Place about?

Gardens are more than collections of plants. Gardens and Gardeners are intersectional spaces and agents for positive change in our world. Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden is a weekly public radio program & podcast exploring what we mean when we garden. Through thoughtful conversations with growers, gardeners, naturalists, scientists, artists and thinkers, Cultivating Place illustrates the many ways in which gardens are integral to our natural and cultural literacy. These conversations celebrate how these interconnections support the places we cultivate, how they nourish our bodies, and feed our spirits. Take a listen.

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LAST EPISODE

The Miraculum and Cosmosis ...

09.28.2023

As we move toward October, the first a few intermittent episodes reminding us of the artistry behind our plant and garden love, the artistry underpinning mother nature herself. This week we’re in conversation with artist Libby Ellis – photographer who ...

Cultivating Place episodes:

09.28.2023 The Miraculum and Cosmosis With Artist Libby Ellis As we move toward October, the first a few intermittent episodes reminding us of the artistry behind our plant and garden love, the artistry underpinning mother nature herself. This week we’re in conversation with artist Libby Ellis – photographer who ...
09.28.2023 The Marginalian, with Maria Popova BEST OF This week, a Best OF episode revisiting our conversation with Maria Popova, the creator and writer behind The Marginalian (formerly known as Brain Pickings). For the past 16 years, The Marginalia has been a daily—perhaps even hourly—exploration of wonder in ...
09.21.2023 WHAT WE SOW, with guest host Dave Schlom Interviewing Jennifer Jewell On this special edition of the show, our guest will be Cultivating Place’s wonderful host, Jennifer Jewell. Jennifer has a new book out and it’s very special. A very intimate and, at the same time, global take on the natural ...
09.14.2023 The High Line of NYC, with Director of Horticulture Richard Hayden This week, our second episode on gardens and green spaces of New York City, getting us primed for The Garden Conservancy’s inaugural Garden Futures Summit being held at the New York Botanical Garden on Sept. 29th and at gardens across ...
09.07.2023 New York Green, with photographer & author Ngoc Minh Ngo To kick off September, we head to the Big Apple, where at the end of the month, the Garden Conservancy is holding its inaugural Garden Futures Summit on September 29th and 30th. In preparation, we thought we’d dedicate two episodes ...
08.31.2023 Dancing in the Dragon's Jaw Design Studio Course, UTenn, Knoxville Chad Manley is a fellow and lecturer in the School of Landscape Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Nora Jacobs and Carlos Velasco were two of the Masters of Landscape Architecture students in Chad’s spring 2023 Landscape Architecture Design ...
08.24.2023 Miami of Ohio's Institute for Environment & Sustainability Masters of Environment program Can you believe it is already back-to-school season? This week, we look at what back to school means for our lifelong learning with plants. This week, we’re in conversation with members of the Miami University of Ohio engaged with Miami’s ...
08.17.2023 Thoughtful Alchemy: Sustainable Floral Design, Shane Connolly & Co As we tend toward summer’s end, with end-of-summer and fall events and celebrations perhaps in mind, maybe even winter events in the planning, we turn this week to floristry and how and where it intersects with sustainability – and as ...
08.10.2023 Firescaping, with Dr. Adrienne Edwards and Rachel Schleiger In the throes of fire season, especially in the western regions of North America, this week, we turn to the idea of not only gardening for beauty, food, and/or habitat but also fire preparedness. We’re speaking this week with Dr. ...
08.03.2023 The Value of Native Plants for Gardens Trials, Sam Hoadley Mt. Cuba Center Sam Hoadley is the Manager of Horticultural Research at the Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware, a remarkable botanic garden and conservation center as well as one of the country’s leading research and trial gardens for native plant species as well ...
07.27.2023 Olbrich Botanical Gardens centering plants & people of Madison, Wisconsin, w/Erin Presley Erin Presley is the herb, woodland, and pond garden horticulturist at Olbrich Botanical Gardens, a 16-acre, free, public garden founded in 1952 on the shores of Lake Wonona in Madison, Wisconsin. In her position since 2014, Erin has become as ...
07.20.2023 Coming to our Senses: Wildscape, with Master Naturalist Nancy Lawson The garden in summer is at its fullest sensory delight and overwhelm – the peak of sunlight, growing hours, heat, and growth, ripening and even rotting. In this week’s conversation, embrace this sublime sensuality from various perspectives in conversation with ...
07.13.2023 The Beautiful Chaos of Garden Inspired Living, with Oklahoma-based Linda Vater The garden in summer is what we all dream of: some downtime, some play time, fresh flavors, fragrances, and of course, flowers and fun. This week we revel in the beautiful chaos of a garden-inspired life with an Oklahoma accent ...
07.06.2023 Summer Garden Good Reads: Hedge, with novelist Jane Delury Novelist Jane Delury describes herself as a fledgling (maybe seedling?) gardener after 8 years into gardening being part of her everyday life and loves. This labor and love in life coincide with themes of landscapes, gardens, and gardeners becoming fully-embodied ...
06.29.2023 Good Citizenship & Right Relationship: Going Beyond Land Acknowledgements w/ Redbud Resource Group This week before July is upon us, and thoughts of what it means to be a citizen fill our minds, hearts, and collective messaging, I am so pleased to be joined by Taylor Pennewell and Rose Hammock of the Redbud ...
06.22.2023 Impermanent Beauty: Solstice Season with Morning Altars' Day Schildkret In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, and how they are growing our world, I am so pleased to be back in conversation this week with Day Schildkret, the founder, the ongoing creator, and re-creator of ...
06.15.2023 Preparing for National Pollinator Week: The California Bumble Bee Atlas, Leif Richardson of Xerces National Pollinator Week is an annual celebration since 2010 in support of pollinator health that was initiated and is managed by Pollinator Partnership. This year National Pollinator Week festivities will take place across the country June 19 – 25, 2023 ...
06.08.2023 Garden for Wildlife Celebrating 50 Years, National Wildlife Federation's Mary Phillips No matter what you might call it – Rewilding, wildscaping, backyard habitats, Acts of Restorative Kindness, Native plant habitat gardening, Homegrown National Park, Perfect Earth, 2/3rds for the Birds, or Garden for Wildlife, the concepts of Conservation + Biodiversity + ...
06.01.2023 Normalizing Native Plant Landscape Joy, with the Theodore Payne Foundation Welcome June! This week, the third and final-for-now conversation in our series on the state of seed for native ecosystem restoration through the lens of California: seed identified, site-sourced, and grown for conservation & biodiversity support. The foundational level of ...
05.25.2023 High Value Habitat, Pat Reynolds of Heritage Growers Native Seed & Plant Pat Reynolds is a restoration ecologist with more than 30 years of professional experience in the design, implementation, and monitoring of habitat restoration projects, including the effective use of native seed. He is the Director of River Partners’ Native Seed ...
05.18.2023 Seed Strategies at Scale, Andrea Williams This week we kick off a several-part series looking into the state of seed, specifically wildland seed, for conservation and ecological restoration in our world from various perspectives. We start off in conversation with Andrea Williams, the Director of Biodiversity ...
05.11.2023 JUST IN TIME FOR MOTHER'S DAY: BLOOM! WITH THE SLOW FLOWERS SOCIETY'S DEB PRINZING We are now mid-May, halfway through a month of graduations, spring celebrations, and weddings, and Mother’s Day is upon us here in the US this coming weekend. Something that all of these celebratory kinds of human-marked rituals and events have ...
05.04.2023 SOIL: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden, with Camille Dungy As we head into the exuberance of May and towards Mother’s Day celebrations here in the U.S., this week, we speak again with award-winning poet, scholar, and University Distinguished Professor at CSU, Colorado: Camille Dungy. Her newest book, Soil: The ...
04.27.2023 BEST OF with David Rawle, Theodora Park, Charleston, S.C. As we close out April, a best of conversation from Mother’s Day 2022. Can we ever get enough nurturing energy in the world? Enjoy! David Rawle is the founder and force (with contribution and support from his wife, Carol Perkins, ...
04.27.2023 Cultivating Eden with Artist, Landscape Historian & Garden DesignerRebecca Allan This last week of April, we enjoy an art of the garden conversation with artist, historian, gardener and environmental advocate Rebecca Allan. Bronx-New York-based, Rebecca is “known for her richly layered and chromatically nuanced abstract paintings. Her work investigates watershed ...
04.20.2023 Earth Day Special: We Are The ARK with Ireland's Mary Reynolds It is now Mid-April, and this week we are celebrating both California Native Plant Week AND the week of Earth Day. Wildflowers are blooming and being admired across the country! In honor of Earth Day 2023 and all of the ...
04.13.2023 Curiosity in the Field of Dreams with Plantsman Roy Diblik Great gardens need great plants, and great plants people the world over, throughout history, have made it their lives calling to bring gardeners great plants – whether introducing native plants to the horticultural trade, selecting best garden varieties from naturally ...
04.06.2023 Prairie Up! With Plantsperson Benjamin Vogt I know the adage goes that April showers bring May flowers, but based on images from across the Northern Hemisphere – from snowdrops in Vermont, Cherry Blossoms in DC, wildflowers in California, and daffodils peeking out in parts of Colorado ...
03.30.2023 Why Women Grow, with Alice Vincent (aka Noughticulture) Alice Vincent is a multi-platform storyteller based in London, and examining with gusto and curiosity the intricacies of words and language, of what it is to be human, to be a woman, and to be always in service to the ...
03.23.2023 Tyra Shenaurlt, the W. W. Seymour Botanical Conservatory in Wright Park, Tacoma, WA For this penultimate episode of Women’s History month, Cultivating Place heads to Tacoma, Washington, to chat with Tyra Shenaurlt, horticulture resource supervisor at Metro Parks Tacoma, overseeing, among other things, a hundred fifteen-year-old glass house known as the W.W. Seymour ...
03.16.2023 The Seed Keeper(s), with Diane Wilson BEST OF This week we revisit a best-of Cultivating Place conversation focusing on seeding our imaginations—metaphorically and literally, with Diane Wilson writer, gardener, emeritus executive director of Dream of Wild Health and, more recently, emeritus executive director of The Native American Food ...
03.09.2023 Bringing Back the Natives Tour, Kathy Kramer In a continuation of Women’s History Month and our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, and what they are growing in this world, especially as it relates to improving the impact of our gardening lives on the ...
03.02.2023 Loving the Surface of the Earth: Orwell's Roses, with Rebecca Solnit In this first week of March, we kick off Women’s History Month in conversation with one of the great critical thinkers and writers of our time, Rebecca Solnit. Writer, historian, feminist, and activist, Rebecca’s long bibliography epitomizes her wide-ranging humanitarian ...
02.23.2023 Winter Keepers, Cookers, and Ciders: James Rich, orchardist and chef This last week of February, we return to our love of apples – and the warm comfort of eating and cooking with homegrown ones, a particular joy in late February when spring and summer seem close but also still too ...
02.16.2023 The Uplifting Ujaama with Bonnetta Adeeb and Nathan Kleinman Now more than halfway from the winter solstice to the spring equinox, many of us have seeds of spring and summer foods on our minds (and hearts). So, this week we continue our celebration of Black History Month, and love ...
02.09.2023 The Love Stories of Abra Lee, Atlanta, GA Love is already a theme in the work of Cultivating Place, to be sure, but with last week’s loving work around the restoration of historic apple orchards in southwestern Colorado, and this week’s episode, which I think of as the ...
02.02.2023 For the Love of Apples: The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project As February is upon us we turn from a love letter to biodiversity writ large to a labor of love in conserving the biodiversity of one iconic fruit in large part born of human labor across the ages and the ...
01.26.2023 The Klamath Mountains, A Natural History, Michael Kauffman & Justin Garwood This week we complete our 4-part conservation series kicking off 2023 by taking a broader look at the Klamath River’s namesake region and the importance of knowing any place better from multiple perspectives for the most effective and durable conservation ...
01.19.2023 The Yurok Tribe's Revegetation Planning for the Undamming of the Klamath River Seen in the overview, the 30 x 30 conservation efforts at federal and state levels are tremendous, but as the last two weeks’ conversations have made clear, it is at the landscape and local levels that these conservation efforts work ...
01.12.2023 A Voice for Plants: The California Native Plant Society & 30 x 30 conservation goals This week we continue our multi-part series on the many facets of the global 30 x 30 conservation efforts as they continue across the state of California as just one example of local, state, and national efforts aggregated. We're in ...
01.05.2023 Conserving Biodiversity & Habitat 30 x 30, with Jennifer Norris Welcome, 2023! This week Cultivating Place kicks off a multi-part series devoted to the international, national, state, and local conservation efforts collectively known as 30 x 30 – a multi-faceted commitment by governments, agencies, and localities to securely preserve 30% ...
12.29.2022 Garden Masterclass - calling all gardeners: Annie Guilfoyle & Noel Kingsbury As we look out over a new garden year this week, a conversation to help us meet our garden learning goals. Award-winning designers, writers, educators, and consummate plant-driven gardeners Annie Guillefoyle and Noel Kingsbury join us to share more about ...
12.22.2022 What it means to be a gardener, community-based restoration ecology, Cris Sarabia Cris Sarabia is the conservation director of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy. He is also a dedicated and active member of many local land and conservation organizations in his home region of North Long Beach, in Southern California, including ...
12.15.2022 A Winter Solstice offering: The Marginalian in the garden, with Maria Popova This week, a pre-Solstice offering for Cultivating Place listeners! Maria Popova is the creator and writer behind The Marginalian (formerly known as Brain Pickings), which, for the past 16 years, has been a daily—perhaps even hourly—exploration of wonder in our ...
12.08.2022 Learning from gardeners -past with Judith Tankard, Landscape Historian This week – we visit and learn from gardeners' past as we look to the future in conversation with Judith Tankard, a landscape historian, author, and preservation consultant. Tankard is the author or co-author of twelve illustrated books on landscape ...
12.01.2022 Befriending our sites with The Garden Refresh in conversation with Kier Holmes Kier Holmes is a garden designer and writer regularly contributing to the likes of Martha Stewart, Better Homes and Gardens, Gardenista, Sonoma Magazine, Marin Magazine, and Sunset Magazine. She is also a children’s garden and science educator. In her writing ...
11.24.2022 Thankful: A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention, Rebecca Schiller Dear All, Rebecca Schiller is a gardener, a smallholding steward, an activist, and author of: A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention, A Memoir of Coming Home to My Neurodivergent Mind – about grounding back to land, place, and garden - ...
11.17.2022 Healing, Gratitude & Connection with Zephrine Hanson, Hampden Farms Denver, CO In this week after Veterans Day here in the U.S, and in this season clarifying that gratitude is one of the greatest gifts of the garden and the growing world, we’re in conversation with someone who knows this gift of ...
11.10.2022 Foregrounding Plants: The Arnold Arboretum celebrates 150 In one of our more flamboyant arboreal seasons of the year—when our charismatic woody megaflora of the Northern Hemisphere—the trees—are chorophylling down, coloring up, and turning over their foliage biomass to the soil in preparation for the winter ahead, this ...
11.03.2022 The evolving public garden with members of the horticultural team at Filoli Historic House & Garden Settling into November now, this week on Cultivating Place we’re in conversation with three members of the horticultural team at Filoli, a historic house and 16 acres cultivated garden in Woodside, California, where they are striving toward environmental and cultural ...

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