Wild Plant Culture

This conversation is with Dale Hendricks of Green Light Plants in southeastern Pennsylvania.

We delve deep into Dale's experience with rewilding the landscape, discussing permaculture approaches, biochar and soil carbon, the connection between health and food systems, and a bit about the legendary Hershey Nursery growing tree crops. We also discuss pawpaws, persimmons, honey locust, ramps and other native permaculture food crops.

Dale's a character, a very generous human being, and very sharp. I think you'll enjoy listening to our chat.

This podcast is brought to you by Wild Ridge Plants. We started Wild Ridge to offer a toolkit for the restoration of native plant communities, including a native plant nursery, botanical surveys and stewardship planning, as well as classes, hikes, presentations and publications. Check us out online at wildridgeplants.com

Here's a link some of Dale's writing on "Permaculture and Horticulture".

The music is from my lo-fi music workshop. I'm having trouble keeping up with new pieces for each podcast! I'm hoping to do some serious recording some time soon. For now, here's a snippet on slide guitar that I hope reflects Dale's folksy, energetic, friendly approach.

Today's conversation is with Julie Martin, primitive skills practitioner.

Julie teaches ancestral skills ranging from fire-starting to herbal medicine at Practical Primitive, a school in Great Meadows, NJ run by Julie and her husband Eddie Starnater. It's a fantastic place to go for workshops in a vast array of different skills.

I hope you enjoy today's conversation immersing in the forgotten fundamentals of human survival. Julie and I start the conversation by talking about processing acorns for food. We also discuss fire and its elemental place in human life, communicating with plants, building community and nature connection through primitive skills, and a whole lot more.

This podcast is brought to you by Wild Ridge Plants. We started Wild Ridge to offer a toolkit for the restoration of native plant communities, including a native plant nursery, botanical surveys and stewardship planning, as well as classes, hikes, presentations and publications. Check us out online at wildridgeplants.com

Julie and Eddie have a number of great books and DVDs, including Acorn: Recipes for the Forgotten Food, mentioned in the podcast. Check out PracticalPrimitive.com for books, DVDs, and their workshop offerings.

If you're looking for a holiday gift for a kid, take a look at my book The Puddle Garden. It's an illustrated children's story about native plants and wildlife, an early start on the idea of habitat restoration featuring an adorable young bear as well as cardinal flower, hummingbird, and many others. You can find it online at wildridgeplants.com or on thepuddlegarden.com.

Thanks for all the feedback, questions, and comments, and for the iTunes ratings too. Please keep it coming, and give me a holler at [email protected] with comments, suggestions for upcoming guests, and just to chat.

Today's theme music was a first sketch of a piece called Fish Hawk. I'll probably take the bones of it and make it into a real song someday, meanwhile it was fun to pull together a few instruments and make a quick recording.

This episode is with Dr. Daniela Shebitz, an awesomely engaged and inspiring young professor at Kean University in New Jersey.

Daniela is a plant ecologist who researches the effects of land management on culturally significant plant species and ecosystems. She is inspired by traditions that have lasted for millennia based on traditional management through anthropogenic fire and selective harvesting.

I love the way Daniela braids together ethnobotany, ecology, anthropology, and restoration. In this conversation, we talk about Daniela's research with Robin Kimmerer on Sweetgrass, about "traditional land management" and "traditional ecological knowledge" in the Northeast and in Costa Rica, about monocrop agriculture and alternatives found in traditional cultures, and about urban people finding nature connection.

A fun and inspiring conversation with ecologist Roger Latham, PhD. We talk about the geological and cultural factors that sustained Eastern grasslands and barrens historically, and techniques for their restoration today. Our conversation ranges widely, from Pleistocene megafauna to fire to Native American plant dispersal to serpentine rock and other unique geologies.

I first ran across Roger Latham on a tour of grassland restorations he led about ten years ago. Towards the end of the field trip we stopped at a massive diabase boulder field, cloaked in lichens and rock cap fern, and I still remember being spellbound as Roger broke down the chemical composition of the local geology and soils and correlated them to the plant communities found on this rock type.

Roger has a broad experience of ecology but remains locally rooted and interested in the intersection of geology and botany, publishing work on serpentine barrens, Pocono till barrens, Eastern grasslands and other exceptional habitats. Roger is a strong proponent of ecological restoration and brings both scientific rigor and a great deal of inspiring energy to the restoration of plant communities. His work on grassland, savannah, and shrubland communities in Pennsylvania, entitled Keystone Grasslands, is probably the article I've cited most in the reports, blog entries, and white papers that I've written, as it speaks to the historic extent, composition, and conditions of open, sunny plant habitats that I am drawn to as well. You can find many of Roger's publications at his website at http://www.continentalconservation.us

In the interview, we discuss Native American foodways, burning regimens, and land management, including dispersal of species like bur oak and American plum. Kerry talks about many Native words, describing words as "among the most durable fossils there are". Kerry gives a fresh read on European economy compared to Native economy, including a moving insight into seventh generational thinking and "non-thinking". Kerry gives us a preview of his present project exploring the lost history of the Hudson River estuary, speaking evocatively of the missing voices of native peoples, African slaves, women, and the ecosystem itself in colonial history.

My guest today is Leslie Sauer. Her book The Once and Future Forest inspired me to become an ecological restoration practitioner and continues to inform so much of my work propagating native plants, monitoring natural communities, and repairing degraded habitats. I'm so happy to welcome her as the very first guest on the Wild Plant Culture podcast.

Leslie Sauer, a founder emeritus of Andropogon Associates, is a pioneer in the field of restoring and managing native landscapes. Through innovative strategies and techniques, she has directed the reestablishment of natural systems in a wide range of sensitive, degraded, and developed environments. Leslie was a key player in watershed management projects including the Flood Protection Plan for the Passaic River in New Jersey and the Management Plan for the Rockaway River Watershed. Her park projects range from Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City to National Parks. Leslie was on the board of the Society for Ecological Restoration as well as an adjunct associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the landscape architecture Masters program. Her book, The Once and Future Forest (Island Press) is a guidebook for restoring and managing forest systems.

In our conversation, Leslie talks about the early days of ecological restoration, forming Andropogon Associates on a shoestring, how doing model projects didn't always have the intended effect, and about compliance vs. performance, engineers, pipelines and much more. She's a true elder in the best sense of the word and has a fiery intellect and spirit. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Leslie Sauer.