John Forti is a garden historian, historic garden horticulturist, and slow food advocate. He has put his years of experience and knowledge into The Heirloom Gardener, Traditional Plants, and Skills for the Modern World – inviting us to lean into the breadth and depth of human millennia-long relationship with plant life.  

John joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about his work and this compilation, which introduces and/or reminds readers of age-old skills for a more directly lived life - from the distillation of floral essences to the uses of kelp to the relationship between the Algonquin culture’s word for the fruit that in English is known as strawberry, wuttahimneash (or heart berry), being related to the heart health associated with the fruit. 

Most importantly, however, The Heirloom Gardener, amplified by Mary Azarian’s brilliant woodcut images, encourages us to upset the apple cart of mass production and commodification and look back to the many streams of land-based wisdom still available to us in order to find a better way forward. Join us!

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The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.