In this episode, Chris is joined by Jason Myers-Benner and Christine Harris to explore their unique journeys and insights into sustainable agriculture and farming.

Jason has carried a deep passion for growing food throughout his entire life. He and his wife, Janelle, along with their children, now grow about 80% of the food they consume on their farm. One of Jason’s special interests is chicken breeding. He shares his deep understanding of the unique personalities and traits of various chicken breeds—ranging from feather patterns to foraging behavior. Jason has spent years selectively breeding chickens for specific characteristics, such as productivity, predator awareness, foraging ability, and “sexability” (the ability to easily determine a chick’s sex at birth).

After her conversation with Jason, Chris speaks with Christine Harris, Oak Spring’s Biocultural Conservation Farm Director. Unlike Jason, Christine’s passion for plants and agriculture developed later in life—during her time as a student at George Mason University. There, she became involved with the university’s organic farm and worked in the Office of Sustainability. Christine joined the Oak Spring Garden Foundation in 2019, just as the idea for the farm was beginning to take shape. Under her leadership, the farm has grown into a vibrant site focused on crops native to Appalachia and the Virginia Piedmont. The produce supports residents and guests on-site and supplies a 50-member Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program that helps fund Oak Spring’s educational and outreach efforts. Over half of the farm’s remaining harvest is donated to local food banks.

Two books are also referenced in the contiuum section of the podcast: An Oak Spring Landscape and Rokeby: A Landscape Biography both by Michael Gaige, include information about the agricultural, human, and ecological history of the landscape Oak Spring Garden Foundation sits on today.

Enjoy this episode, which highlights the meaningful agricultural work happening at Oak Spring and beyond!

Host: Chris Stafford
Oak Spring website: https://www.osgf.org/
Subscribe to the Oak Spring Newsletter: https://www.osgf.org/
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @oakspringgardenfoundation
Twitter: @oak_spring
Facebook: Oak Spring Garden Foundation

In this episode of the Oak Spring podcast, environmental writers Ariana Benson and Ashia Ajani reflect on their creative connection and shared sensibilities. The conversation opens with Ashia describing the early spring in Oakland, California, which evokes memories of their Colorado roots and a deep appreciation for urban nature. The two writers explore spring as a season of unexpected harvest—lush, pastel-toned, and filled with wonder—and reflect on the idea of “harvesting” in springtime. Their discussion weaves in the work of luminary authors like Annie Dillard and Toni Morrison, especially the recurring themes of waste, nature, and their entanglement in Song of Solomon.

The conversation then turns toward how books shift in meaning over time. In particular, Ashia and Ariana explore Black migration: the historical compulsion to flee the South, and how literature about that exodus may evolve as more people return to the region. They reflect on the cultural intimacy of the South, acknowledging its structural challenges while also recognizing its potential for transformation and community. The two share other art forms that have shaped their creative lives, with Ariana reflecting on how growing up with dance shaped her storytelling and sense of self, linking choreography to poetic form. They also touch on architecture as a function of nature and highlight how many Black writers today are reckoning with place, displacement, and home. To close, each poet reads a piece by the other, offering listeners an embodied exchange of language, movement, and mutual admiration.

Host: Chris Stafford
Oak Spring website: https://www.osgf.org/
Subscribe to the Oak Spring Newsletter:
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @oakspringgardenfoundation
Twitter: @oak_spring
Facebook: Oak Spring Garden Foundation

In this episode, we feature the voices of two Oak Springers dedicated to educating their local communities about the importance of the natural world. Through exhibitions and educational programs, our two speakers activate art and plants in ways that inspire and engage learners of all ages.

First, we hear from Mary Anne Redding, Curator at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC. Mary Anne has made it the mission of the Turchin Center to serve as a platform for exhibitions that address the urgent realities of climate change. Next, we hear from Ginger Anderson, Oak Spring’s Education and Outreach Specialist, who has been with Oak Spring for three years. Ginger works primarily with local community centers and public schools, serving K-12 students in the area. With a background as a high school teacher and a former florist, Ginger is passionate about creating engaging, hands-on experiences that inspire youth to connect with plants and the environment.

Both of these speakers are building communities of care for the natural world, and we hope you enjoy learning about their impactful work!

Host: Chris Stafford
Oak Spring website: https://www.osgf.org/
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @oakspringgardenfoundation
Twitter: @oak_spring
Facebook: Oak Spring Garden Foundation   
Produced by Hollowell Studios

In this special Black History Month episode of the podcast, host Chris Stafford sits down with two incredible women of color, Latifat Apatira and Maria Pinto, to explore their unique journeys and passions. Latifat shares her inspiring story of how she developed a deep interest in art and nature printing later in life, balancing her creative practice with a career as a practicing physician. Maria discusses her fascination with mycelia and how her growing connection to fungi has shaped her work and worldview. Both women reflect on the challenges and triumphs of being women of color in their respective fields, offering insights into their creative pursuits. This episode celebrates the power of art, science, and resilience, highlighting how these women have carved their own paths in traditionally underrepresented spaces.

View Latifat Apatira's artwork here, and read recent writing by Maria Pinto can be read here. 

Host: Chris Stafford
Oak Spring website: https://www.osgf.org/
Subscribe to the Oak Spring Newsletter:
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @oakspringgardenfoundation
Twitter: @oak_spring
Facebook: Oak Spring Garden Foundation   
Produced by Hollowell Studios

In this episode, we feature two fascinating interviews that explore the intersection of landscape, history, nature, and personal journey. First, Paul Stamper, who leads an immersive course on the grand history of Great English Estates and Landscapes at Oak Spring, takes us on a dive into the evolution of English landscapes. Paul chats with Chris about how his personal interest in landscapes and history developed, with a particular focus on the coevolution of country houses and agricultural buildings and practices. Then, we hear from Paula Whyman, author of Bad Naturalist: One Woman's Ecological Education on a Wild Virginia Mountaintop, a humorous and heartfelt memoir about restoring a piece of land in the Blue Ridge foothills. Paula reflects on her lifelong affinity for animals and the natural world, and shares how managing her property has allowed her to explore that passion—while navigating the numerous challenges and rewards of land stewardship along the way.

Visit here to sign up for Paula's monthly newsletter where she shares about new things shes doing and discovering in the mountaings and lots of photos! Tickets for Paula's book talk on Thursday, Janurary 16, 2024 at 4:30pm can be purchased here. 

To learn more about Paul's class and apply, visit here. 


Host: Chris Stafford
Oak Spring website: https://www.osgf.org/
Subscribe to the Oak Spring Newsletter:
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @oakspringgardenfoundation
Twitter: @oak_spring
Facebook: Oak Spring Garden Foundation   
Produced by Hollowell Studios

In this episode, we bring together two horticultural experts whose knowledge spans the worlds of plant science, garden design, and hands-on cultivation. Join us for two fascinating conversations with John Lonsdale, a passionate plantsman and the garden designer behind the private garden "Edgewood" in Pennsylvania, and Holly Scoggins, Ph.D., horticulturist and Associate Professor Emeritus at Virginia Tech.

John, an expert in alpine and woodland plants, shares stories from his extensive garden and travels. He gives us a peek into his 1.6-acre garden, "Edgewood," where he’s been pushing the limits of hardiness for over 40 years. John discusses his lectures on Unusual Bulbs and Woodland Treasures, taking us through the world of rare plants and their cultivation in diverse microhabitats.

Holly shares insights from her unique hybrid courses that blends remote and in-person learning, where participants explore the stunning spring or summer-flowering herbaceous plants at the heart of Bunny Mellon’s private garden. She discusses how her passion for horticulture developed as both a professional and personal exploration that allows her to experiment and play with aesthetics and plants. 

Throughout this episode, we’ll dive into the fascinating ways both Holly and John integrate scientific knowledge with real-world gardening practices. Whether you’re interested in the academic side of horticulture or looking for inspiration to enhance your own garden, this episode is sure to inspire and inform.

Information about Holly's Springtime Perennials and Annuals class can be found here
Register for John's lecture 9:00am - 12:00pm on Saturday, February 1, 2025, Unusal Bulbs here
Register for John's lecture, 9:00am - 12:00pm on Saturday, February 8, 2025, Woodland Treasures here

Host: Chris Stafford
Oak Spring website: https://www.osgf.org/
Subscribe to the Oak Spring Newsletter:
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @oakspringgardenfoundation
Twitter: @oak_spring
Facebook: Oak Spring Garden Foundation

Spring daffodils may seem like a distant dream as we head into the dormant months of winter, but now is also the time when bulb planting sets the stages for next year’s bloom. This month’s episode features two bulb experts who have led programs at Oak Spring, Jason Delaney and Sara Van Beck, in conversation with each other about the art and science of daffodils and the important role they play in the future of gardens amidst a changing climate.

Jason Delaney is a graduate of Michigan State University’s Institute of Agricultural Technology. His horticultural career began as a student laborer at MSU’s Beal Botanical Garden where his love of public gardening was planted.  Following an internship at the world-renowned Missouri Botanical Garden in 1995, he accepted a full-time position there for nearly 21 colorful years, ultimately as North Gardens Supervisor and Bulb Collections Specialist. Today, Jason owns and operates Professional Horticultural Services, and PHS Daffodils. Jason’s prized plant collections are situated on nearly four acres of family land where over 3,500 varieties of daffodils, nearly 2,000 varieties of daylilies, and over 500 historic irises are grown for small-scale commercial production, breeding, evaluation, and preservation.   Jason has been hybridizing daffodils and daylilies, and dabbling in breeding trumpet lilies and crinums, since the 1990s; a few of his cultivars are now in commercial production. Follow his adventures on Instagram, at phsdaffodils and phsdaylilies.

Sara Van Beck is a former museum curator with the National Park Service and has served as an American Daffodil Society (ADS) board member since 2004. She established the ADS Display Garden program in 2007 and then served as the ADS Historics Committee chair for eleven years. Her garden history work includes historic research for Atlanta’s Historic Oakland Cemetery, and serving on the Acquisitions Committee of the Cherokee Garden Library, Atlanta History Center. As a Corresponding Member to the Royal Horticulture Society Narcissus Classification Advisory Group, she led a three-year effort to revise the classification for tazettas. Author of Daffodils in American Gardens, 1733-1940 (2015) co-author of Daffodil in Florida: A Field Guide to the Coastal South (2004), and numerous articles published in The Daffodil Journal, The Magnolia, journal of the Southern Garden History Society, and Florida Gardening.

Host: Chris Stafford
Oak Spring website: https://www.osgf.org/
Subscribe to the Oak Spring Newsletter:
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @oakspringgardenfoundation
Twitter: @oak_spring
Facebook: Oak Spring Garden Foundation

In the words of Connie Zheng, seeds hold the past and the future.  This month's episode features interviews with Jessamine Finch and Connie Zheng who each engage with the way seeds are shared and dispersed.   Jessamine speaks about her interest in the science of the natural world, and work with saving and sharing seeds, most recently on the eastern coast of the US.  Then Chris speaks to Connie Zheng an artist whose work is influenced by the metaphorical significance of seeds.

Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born artist, writer and experimental filmmaker based out of xučyun (also known as Oakland, California). She works with maps, seeds, food, environmental histories, speculative fiction, field recordings and hand-drawn animation. Her projects frequently include participatory scenarios and seek to diagram dynamic relationships between human and more-than-human worlds, as well as the interplay between memory, culture, and place. Projects such as maps of toxic sites and environmental remediation, speculative seed exchanges, seed-making kits, mooncake design workshops and improvisational pseudo-documentaries are strategies for navigating diasporic memory, the continued weight of history, and possibilities for collective imagining amidst ongoing and future ecological transformations.

Her projects have been exhibited and screened internationally, including at the Peabody Essex Museum (Salem, MA), the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, Sa Sa Art Projects (Phnom Penh, Cambodia), Framer Framed (Amsterdam, Netherlands) and Salt Beyoğlu (Istanbul, Turkey), and her work is held in the collections of the Kadist Foundation and the David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford University. She has received fellowships and awards from the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, and the Puffin Foundation, among other organizations, and was a 2023 YBCA 100 awardee. In 2021 she published a chapter in the Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, and her essays have appeared in The Back Room at Small Press Traffic, SFMOMA’s Open Space and Errant Journal. She graduated with BAs in Economics and English from Brown University and an MFA in Art Practice from the University of California — Berkeley, and is currently a PhD Candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California — Santa Cruz.

Jessamine Finch is a botanist and seed ecologist working in plant conservation. She has held positions at Framingham State University, Native Plant Trust, and the Chicago Botanic Garden.  Jessamine holds a PhD in Plant Biology and Conservation from Northwestern University, and was the 2022 Plant Conservation Biology Fellow at Oak Spring.

Host: Chris Stafford
Oak Spring website: https://www.osgf.org/
Subscribe to the Oak Spring Newsletter:
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @oakspringgardenfoundation
Twitter: @oak_spring
Facebook: Oak Spring Garden Foundation

What does Oak Spring mean when we say we host 'researchers'? All sorts of projects are encompassed by this title! Listen to this episode to learn about two Oak Spring researchers, Kathleen (Kat) Gutierrez and Lauren Cannady. Their projects are inspired by and utilize scholarly literature, oral histories as well as everyday conversations, and of course, the Oak Spring Library collection. Kat shares about her research on the field of study of botany in the Philipines, and how botany there has been impacted by colonial influences and vernacular culture.  Lauren shares about her research on black locust, and how it was shaped by her time at Oak Spring.

Kathleen (Kat) C Gutierrez is interested in the politcs of botanical life and plant worldmaking in modern histories of the Philippines and Southeast Asia. Her first book, titled Unmaking Botany: Science and Vernacular Knowledge in the Colonial Philippines (Duke University Press, March 2025), expands the "vernacular" in the history of colonial botany and examines practical and epistemological tensions in the Philippines during the science's internationalist acceleration.

Her next project, one drawing on oral histories tentatively titled A World in a Plant, examines five plant species (e.g. the Tricyrtis imeldae, named after former First Lady Imelda Marcos) as lenses into the plant sciences in the Cold War Philippines and the neighboring decolonized states of Southeast Asia. She builds on literature that has prioritized foreign policy, dictatorship, party politics, and civil unrest to contend that plants—and the scientists behind their study—were also instrumental to regional decolonization and notions of a Southeast Asian science.

Lauren R. Cannady is a scholar working at the intersections of art and architectural history, intellectual history, and the environmental humanities. Her research and teaching explore artistic production as the material evidence of intellectual trends in early modern Europe and colonial North America. She is co-editor of Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks, which appeared in the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series in 2021, and her current research project is a book manuscript on early modern taxonomies of knowledge and the ordering of the natural world through patterned gardens and vernacular botanicals. Her research has been supported by the Huntington Library, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the Clark Art Institute, and the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte. She holds a PhD in Art History from New York University.

Host: Chris Stafford
Oak Spring website: https://www.osgf.org/
Subscribe to the Oak Spring Newsletter:
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @oakspringgardenfoundation
Twitter: @oak_spring
Facebook: Oak Spring Garden Foundation   

During this episode host Chris Stafford chats with two artists working in very specialized mediums. Goldie Poblador is an interdisicplinary artist who has been working in glass most recently. Chris and Goldie chat about Goldie's interest in glass, and the ecofeminist themes of her work. Later in the episode Chris interviews book binder, book maker, and book tool maker Brien Biedler. We hope you enjoy listening along and learning about these two artists and their work in niche mediums.

Goldie Poblador is best known for her multi-sensory installations that merge glass sculpture, scent, video and performance.   She specializes in glass flameworking, a technique primarily reserved for Western voices and which she aims to shift. Her work combines Filipino mythology with the 19th century tradition of sculpting life forms in glass as popularized by the Blaschkas. She has been exhibited internationally at such institutions as Urban Glass, 601Artspace, the Yangon Secretariat Building Knockdown Center, Islip Art Museum, The RISD museum, Cemeti Art House, Singapore Art Museum, Bangkok Art and Culture Center, Cité Internationale des Arts, Fine Art Museum of Hanoi, Lopez Memorial Museum and Library, Metropolitan Museum of Manila, The National Museum of the Filipino People and The Cultural Center of the Philippines. She has received a grant from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, a President’s Scholarship from the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Philippine AIR Prize from Alliance Française de Manille. She has completed residencies at the Corning Museum of Glass, Oak Spring Garden Foundation, Wassaic Project, The Hambidge Center, MASS MoCa, La Fragua and the Cité International des Arts. She received her BFA in Studio Arts from the University of the Philippines in 2009. In 2015, she obtained her MFA in Glass at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Brien Beidler is a bookbinder and toolmaker who explores the structure, aesthetics, and impact of pre-industrial bindings in a 21st century context. In Brien’s practice, bookbinding and toolmaking work in parallel to investigate the role books have played in the history of ideas and other facets of cultural history. In his binding, Brien is deeply inspired by the processes of historic bookbinders and uses tools and techniques that replicate the structural and visual properties of the books they made. In his toolmaking, Brien specializes in hand-engraved finishing tools and other decorative stamps for bookbinders, leatherworkers, and woodworkers. See a video of his process here. He also teaches workshops in bookbinding, gold tooling with egg glair, and finishing tool making, and is on the board of Co-Directors for the Paper and Book Intensive. Brien holds an undergraduate degree in Chemistry from the College of Charleston, where he was first introduced to bookbinding in the library’s Special Collections. He was the Director of the Bindery and Conservation Lab at the Charleston Library Society from 2012-2016 before establishing his own practice.Brien is currently based in Minneapolis, MN where he shares a studio with Wren, his curmudgeonly spaniel.

Host: Chris Stafford
Oak Spring website: https://www.osgf.org/
Subscribe to the Oak Spring Newsletter:
Email: [email protected]
Instagram: @oakspringgardenfoundation
Twitter: @oak_spring
Facebook: Oak Spring Garden Foundation