Cultivating Place

This week on Cultivating Place, guest host Abra Lee is joined in conversation by someone whose path into horticulture is both inspiring and honest—Richard M. Smith, director of the School of Professional Horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden. Richard grew up in Belle Glade, Florida—folks there call it Muck City, thanks to their deep, rich soil. And while Richard didn't start off in horticulture, that love for plants was always in him. Now his career is focused on helping people from all walks of life find their way into this field—building careers, finding purpose, and growing something meaningful. As someone who is growing more than just plants, Richard is all about access, mentorship, and ensuring the door stays open behind him. 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 and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Have you ever heard of a Moth-er? Yes, it is the moth equivalent of a birder – someone who loves and follows and studies the incredible diversity of moths. Creatures whose lives benefit ours and yet take place primarily under the cover of the dark of night. In this week of the Summer Solstice, in our seasonal period of longest days and shortest nights in the Northern Hemisphere, we pause to consider and revel in the importance—the life-nurturing, life-giving, and restorative magic of the dark. Leigh Ann Henion is the author of Night Magic, Adventures among Glowworms, Moon Gardens and other Marvels of the Dark – a beautiful road map for all of us in better knowing and appreciating the greater fullness of the lives of our places – especially those lives that bloom, grow, and come out at night. Listen in and 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.

Every year since 2007, when the US Senate passed sanctions declaring it, the third week of June is celebrated as National Pollinator Week. It is no accident that this is the same week as the Summer Solstice, when many pollinators reach their peak. Since 2017, however, the state of Colorado has celebrated June as National Pollinator Month, and this week we hear more, celebrate wins, and focus on the work remaining with two members of PPAN – Colorado's own People & Pollinators Action Network. Promotes pollinator-friendly land management and landscaping practices through community education, engagement, and advocacy to preserve biodiversity and safeguard public health. They beautifully envision a world with healthy, sustainable ecosystems where people and pollinators can thrive now and for generations to come. They conduct their world-improving work at the grassroots, municipal, and state levels, advocating for policies and practices that reduce or eliminate the use of pesticides and create and connect swaths of pollinator-safe habitat with the intent of reversing the drastic decline of pollinator populations. Joyce Kennedy, PPAN's executive director, and Emily KenCairn, director of communications and development, will join us this week to share more about how they are doing all that they are doing and how we can, too. Both of them are Gardeners with a capital G. 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.

To welcome the fullness of June, this week on Cultivating Place, guest host Ben Futa is back and in conversation with Marc Sardi, a Montreal-based scientist turned floral artist who has reinvented his relationship with the natural world, and himself, along with changing careers.  It's an authentic conversation exploring how rediscovering our most authentic relationship with plants also allows us to know ourselves, and our world, better. It's lush, it's life-affirming, and it's grounding in all the best ways. Listen in and 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. All photos are courtesy of Marc Sardi, and all rights reserved. Bio Image of Marc by Christophe Roberge, all rights reserved.

Summer makes it easy to move your body – to get out for a walk, to work in the garden, to hike, bike, stroll, boat, climb, swim, dance under the stars. Whatever calls you. But as we know, many of us – most of us? Do not move enough, and even if we do, we don't get a balanced diet of movement. Which Gardening can help with, and which physical movement, expert Katy Bowman says, is essential to a healthy body, mind, heart, and attitude. Katy is the founder of Nutritious Movement, and she joins us on Cultivating Place this week to share more. 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.

Guina Hammond is the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's program manager of sustainable communities. She is also deeply involved in her hometown of Philadelphia as a certified organic landcare professional, PHS Tree Tender, Penn State Master Gardener, and planning team member for the Mid-Atlantic Woody & Perennial Plant Conference.  In addition to that incredible list of accomplishments, Guina is a down-to-earth plant lover at heart who desires to bring gardening to the doorstep of your everyday neighbor. As the founding member of the Chester Avenue Community Garden, a PHS-supported garden, she has grown award-winning produce for the past 38 years. CP Guest Host Abra Lee is in conversation with Guina this week to learn and share more. 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.

As the summer gardening season rolls into full-throated song, the idea of who has access to the work, joy, and benefits of this practice also comes into view—and feeds what Occupational Therapist and author Jill Mays calls that "green thing inside of us all." As an occupational therapist by career and calling, over the course of her professional life, it became increasingly clear to Jill how many of the occupational therapy goals she set for her diverse clients were well met by the variety of activities, sensory stimulations, and social, mental, and physical benefits of gardening—preferably outside and in the company of others. After several years of developing gardening programs in her now-home town of Truro, MA, Jill has documented the journey of her work, research, and garden program designs for a wide range of special needs in her new book: Nurturing Nature, A Guide to Gardening for Special Needs. 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 second week of May, we welcome gardener and plantswoman Holly Shimizu. Her four decades of work in some of America's notable public gardens have tracked and traced some of the most impactful changes in public garden standards, expectations, and accountability in that same time frame. From her visionary leadership roles at the National Herb Garden, the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, and the US Botanic Garden to her current board position at the American Horticultural Society, Holly's garden life is a beautiful public-garden journey that benefits us all. 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.

This week on Cultivating Place we welcome May, with all of her floral and plant profusion, revisiting a conversation we loved with Kristin Currin and Andrew Merritt of Humble Roots Nursery in Oregon's Columbia River Gorge. Acclaimed for their native plant passions, knowledge, and integrity, Kristin and Drew are the authors of the Pacific Northwest Native Plant Primer - one of a series of such primers from around the country steering us as gardeners toward beautiful ecological gardens and place based relationships. Cheers to May and our gardens' weaving us back into the wonder of the world. Humble Roots is a native plant nursery acclaimed for its efforts in sustainability and promoting native plant passion, knowledge, and ethics across the wider eco-regions of the Pacific Northwest. The Pacific Northwest Native Plant Primer, 225 plants for an Earth Friendly Garden (Timber Press, 2023), or one of its relations might be just the inspiration we all need to get us planting in the right direction this spring and summer! 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.

Juliet Sargeant is an award-winning English garden designer who blends beauty with purpose in every space she creates. Juliet's unique background in medicine, science, and psychology gives her designs a whole new depth, focusing on wellbeing and connection. You might recognize her name from that time in 2016 when she made history as the first Black Woman garden designer to display at the Chelsea Flower Show, and her design - Modern Slavery Garden, won a Gold Medal and the People's Choice Prize.  This Earth Day week, we're celebrating Juliet's design background and digging in to her new book “Start With Soil: Simple Steps for a Thriving Garden” which publishes on May 1st from Frances Lincoln. 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.

In this holy season of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, with the earth reviving herself in greenery and flowers, birds, bees, and butterflies all around us, I am so pleased to be in conversation today with a gardener who will represent another gardener -one in the here now and one from more than a century ago, whose words resonate into the present. I believe in the future, so beautifully. John Stempien is the emeritus director of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum in South Haven, Michigan. He joins us today to share more about his garden life path, following in the footsteps of the great garden life path sown, grown, and walked on by Liberty Hyde Bailey, Jr, avid and reverent gardener, often considered to be the "father of modern [Western] horticulture” 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.

Debbie Millman has written love letters before. Her 20 years of creating and hosting the popular podcast Design Matters is just one of them. Her many books, several of them established reference books in the design and branding worlds, are among others. I am guessing she's written a few to her wife the author Roxanne Gay, who contributed recipes to Debbie's newest book. While I enjoy all good love letters, Debbie's newest love letter in book form, (launching next week - April 15th) entitled Love Letter to a Garden, is one that definitely caught my eye and ear.  I am going to wager that gardeners, young and old, new and longstanding, all feel that quickening of their pulse with Spring, sap rising, bulbs blooming, the new season all a bright shining blank page of possibility. It is a distinctive and palpable kind of love. With April and the season's annual returning sense of rejuvenation, resurrection, and regeneration, Debbie Millman's new book - Love Letter to a Garden – captures that particular passion many of us will recognize of falling in love with gardening…every single season. Debbie has accomplished in one beautiful seed-like book so much of what I have hoped to capture in 10 years of Cultivating Place – the WONDER of what it means to identify as a Gardener in our world, the EVERYTHING that Gardens bring to our lives. I am so pleased to welcome Debbie to CP this week. 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.

You might remember Cultivating Place's first conversation with Iowa-based plantsman, Kelly D. Norris, back in 2021, in celebration of his book New Naturalism, designing and planting a resilient, ecologically vibrant home garden. And we're so pleased to get him back this week in conversation with CP Guest Host Ben Futa to talk more about this current moment in naturalistic design, and Kelly's newest and very useful book: Your Natural Garden, a practical guide to caring for an ecologically vibrant home garden, which published in January of this year. Kelly is one of the leading horticulturists of this generation, and in his practice, he explores the narrative of place through site-specific plantings and landscape interventions. An award-winning author and plantsman, his eponymous design studio works in public and private places across North America. The studio annually produces the New Naturalism Academy, a virtual school for enthusiastic designers, as a commitment to continuing education and lifelong learning. He's also the founder and curator of The Public Horticulture Company, an emerging ecological landscape startup based in Des Moines, Iowa. He is the former director of horticulture and education at the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, where for eight years, he directed efforts in design, curation, programming, garden, and facility management to nearly $20 million in capital projects. We're so pleased to share his plant-driven, utterly magic, paradigm shifting work with you all again. 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 Abra Lee is in conversation with a horticultural leader with big IDEAs. Mae Lin Plummer is the Director of the IDEA Center for Public Gardens in Denver Colorado. Mae Lin's journey into gardening started in her backyard in Charlotte, NC where she simply wanted "a pretty place to throw parties." That blossomed into a full-on plant obsession and a major career shift—from banking to horticulture. Mae Lin's passion is connecting people to the natural world through gardens. Her story is filled with joy, life lessons, and a deep love for how gardens can transform lives. 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.

Happy Spring Equinox! To welcome Spring – especially this exact Spring in the US - practicing re-enchantment in our world seemed exactly the right focus. I think this is part of what Gardeners do: practice enchantment or love with the natural world we care for. We're in conversation this week with Brooke Williams: writer, naturalist, amateur conservation ecologist, thinker, observer, and walker. Based in the Great Salt Lake region of Utah with his wife, acclaimed writer Terry Tempest Williams, Brooke writes about evolution, consciousness, and his own adventures exploring both the inner and outer wilderness in our world. He is also a Gardener, and author most recently of Encountering Dragonfly, Notes on the Practice of Re-Enchantment. Dragonflies are of course among our favorite and most enchanting of companions in the garden – our built-in pest control for other insects such as mosquitos; predators who are not themselves pests in our lives. Squadrons of dragonflies patrolling the garden or wild lands in Summer are symbols everywhere of transformation and balance. For the ecological and symbolic importance of dragonflies to our human lives, I am so pleased to welcome Brooke to Cultivating Place. 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.

Tess Taylor is a self-described Poet Gardener – and if there is ever a season to feel the poetry of life in the garden and with the plants in every cell of your body, it's springtime! An award-winning poet with many collection titles to her name and editor of the life-supporting anthology Leaning Toward Light Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, Tess is also the Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, California. In honor of Women's History Month AND the vernal equinox arriving next week on March 20th,  I thought we could all use some poetic focus. I am so pleased to share this conversation with Tess forward. 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.

Dr. Margaret Funk is the curious Midwest gardener (and doctor) behind the online name Flora & Frost. Cultivating her Minnesota garden for years, like so many of us, she really dove in deep in 2020. She and her family have now converted most of their lawn into a vibrant garden with a small greenhouse, raised beds for veggies, ornamental plants, and a growing collection of native plants. As an online communicator herself, Margaret combines her love of gardening with her with her love of science AND laughter. She has a remarkable skill at presenting often complex topics in an accessible, authentic, inspiring, and entertaining way. In honor of Women's History Month, Margaret joins Guest Host Ben Futa this week on Cultivating Place - 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.

From East Africa to the World, landscape design's Wambui Ippolito by Jennifer Jewell

In celebration of Black History Month and looking forward to Women's History Month - this week we're so pleased to air another of our CP LIVE: Dialogues to Grow By conversations, recorded live in front of an audience on the home ground of the Cultivators of Place with whom we are speaking.  This week's CP LIVE recording focuses on the paradigm-shifting landscape work of Leslie Bennett, who is dedicated to beautifully designed, edible-plant-rich, culturally rooted gardens for all people AND centering Black Women in the American Landscape. It's a great pairing. The interview and gathering for it took place on an unexpectedly chilly evening in late September 2024. Still, the spirited audience of 80+ people - in full celebratory finery - was not bothered at all. And the event was also an occasion for the first public unveiling of photographic portraits by Rachel Weil of the first eight women beneficiaries of a Black Sanctuary Garden. The portraits are taken of each woman in their gardens - embodying, as Leslie described it, their full and authentic joy and liberation. The whole evening unfolded in the heart of elegant, fruit, flower filled terraced backyard garden - one of the black sanctuary gardens to date. This conversation and all it was trying to express and hold space for was richly integrated with community, with an event specific shared music playlist, with laughter and food. Cultivating Place live is a special project of CP in the form of a limited series of CP interviews done with a curated group of gardeners across the US and recorded as audio and film (by the talented filmmaker Myriam Nicodemus of EM EN) throughout 2024 and 2025. These interviews are conducted in front of an audience of the gardeners' community in order to support and recognize these gardeners' accomplishments and contributions to the greater good as a result of their human impulse to Garden. These recorded CP Live experiences will be compiled into a film documentary rolling out in 2026/2027.  The mandate for me in these experiences and interviews is to not only give voice to (as the podcast always does), but actually make visible the many diverse connections animated by the gardening impulse everywhere. What this conversation makes visible to me, and I hope to all listeners, is that gardens are food, beauty, health, and divinity. Gardens are land use. Gardens are community centers, gardens are one form of public policy made manifest by the people. Gardens are authentic joy and liberation. 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.

Many things motivate and drive us to love gardening, plants, and nature. Australia's Michael McCoy, also known as The Gardenist, is a Gardener, botanist, designer, teacher, and international garden tour guide. In his garden life, motivation always comes back to curiosity. He says: "Behind any answer are 10 more questions leading me forward in the garden, in life!” And, in his garden, "a lot of soul searching goes on." (As it should!) As The Gardenist, he considers his work a “hub for curious gardeners on a lifelong learning curve.” Here, Here! He joins us this week to share more and his enthusiastic curiosity might just spark yours! 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 Elizabeth Street Garden in New York City's Little Italy and SoHo neighborhoods is a one-acre public garden founded in 1991 by Allan Reiver, an artist and art dealer who passed in 2021. The lot on which the garden has grown these many years is owned by the city and managed by the non-profit community group, Elizabeth Street Garden. Joseph Reiver, Allan's son, is the current director of the group.  Since 2013, Joseph, along with the Garden's community, has been fighting to preserve and protect this special art and community-filled green space - one of few in this section of the city. In 2024, the Garden came under renewed threat of development, this time with increased vigor. In today's conversation between guest host Ben Futa and Joseph Reiver, we learn how the inspiring story of how the Garden is fighting back - taking a stand against the powerful interests that seek to erase more than 30 years of community, growth, and beauty. This is something of a David and Goliath story: the modest community garden with surprising strength and agility going up against the many giants of New York City bureaucracy, lobbyists, developers. And while this is the story of one green space in one city, it serves as a call to action and a cautionary tale for all green spaces in all urban areas, where they are desperately needed, incredibly valuable to the quality of life for all, and easy to lose if we're not paying attention. The Elizabeth Street Garden was featured in the 2023 book New York Green by acclaimed writer and photographer Ngoc Minh Ngo. 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.

Creativity is one of those anchors-to-windward in unsettled and worrisome times. So is a hands-on, creative project – with bonus points for working with organic materials (natural fibers, clay, or – flowers)! Just in time for Valentine's Day, and all the spring events cascading from there in the coming months, we're joined this week by a woman who has artistry, creativity, and hands-on project inspiration in spades to share with us – Passionflower Sue is our guest – and her work might be the end of January inspiration and gift to yourself you didn't know you needed – but I knew. Passionflower Sue, aka Sue McLeary, is an artist. Very specifically an artist with flowers, and she thinks you probably are too. Whether you're a professional florist, a friend helping friends with flowers, a parent helping a child (and all their friends) with their corsages and boutonnieres, or a gardener looking to have fun with flowers for your table or your hair, you're going to enjoy meeting Sue in conversation this week. With a long career in floristry, from designing to event management, to sustainable floristry advocacy and lots of teaching, Sue believes that floristry is an art form, and those of us engaged in it are artists! She “aims to offer immediately useful and relevant educational information that equips and empowers florists- allowing them to express their creativity and make what they crave to see.” She believes (and I am with her): “When we harness our creativity, we create more interesting, artful work that fills us and lifts us.” Her goal is to empower the floristry artist. And it's her “passion to help push floristry forward!” Having had the great pleasure of attending events and learning from Sue – it is my even greater pleasure to welcome her to Cultivating Place this week. 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, Guest host Abra Lee is in conversation with legendary topiary artist and star of the HGTV hit show Clipped, Mike ‘Gibby-Siz' Gibson. Mike is based out of sunny Columbia, South Carolina, where he owns and operates his own business, “Gibson Works.” Abra and Mike talk about all things Topiary arts in their lively conversation! Diving into Mike's time on HGTV's hit show Clipped, how he built his company, and where his love of the plant arts germinated. 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.

This week – in the wind, rain, snow, and fires of early 2025 so far – it is good to be able to focus on SEEDs this week – seeds remind us so tangibly of our ability to get small, to slow down into a fortified dormancy of resilience, rest, and regrowth – and the possibilities inherent in all of those states. And this week, Cultivating Place does just that in conversation with Dan Brisebois, host of The Seed Farmer Podcast and author of the newly released The Seed Farmer: A Complete Guide to Growing, Using, and Selling Your Own Seed. Dan's goal is to get everyone to grow, save, and know seeds. Based on Tourne-Sol Cooperative Farm outside of Montreal, Canada. Dan is an avid writer, thinker, and educator on seed growing, farming, and better farm management as a pathway to happier and more prosperous farms and farmers. In his experience, seed is integral to all of that. In our conversation Dan discusses his germination story in becoming a farmer, co-founding a cooperative farm, and becoming a seed farmer educator. He also shares the importance of what he calls the First Seed Mindset. 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.

Maybe your New Year's resolution was to take up gardening, or to garden more, or in a new way? Well, this week's Cultivating Place conversation is all about making time for gardening even for very busy people!  Nicole Burke, the energy force behind the online forum known as Gardenary, is with us to share more about the philosophy centered in her new book: The 5-Minute Gardener. It's the genius of compounded interest – in the garden. And Nicole's work focuses very specifically on organic, urban kitchen gardens as a way to improve our individual nutritional and physical lives - and as a way to upend the broken and addictive food system we exist within. Gardening is like any other activities or practices we value – relationships, reading, exercising, spirituality – it takes time and intention, but like all of these other valued endeavors, once the foundation is in place – it does not take all that long to see monumental results – in you and in your cultivation. A career-long garden designer, garden coach, and trainer of a network of garden consultants, Nicole Burke knows that establishing the habit of gardening is key and once it is set, you really only need 5 minutes at time to “nurture a year-round gardening habit,” which is deeply personal, meaningful, and FRUITFUL. The author of Kitchen Garden Revival and Leaves, Roots & Fruit, and previously a guest here on Cultivating Place, Nicole offers us great energy for the new seasons ahead. 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.

To ring in the New Year, this week on Cultivating Place, guest host Ben Futa is in conversation with Bo Dennis, lead farmer and designer of Dandy Ram farm, located in rural Maine. Dandy Ram is an LGBTQ+ flower farm and floral design studio that sustainably grows and designs florals for weddings and ships evergreen and floral products nationally. Dandy Ram is committed to bringing joy to the world, without ever losing sight of what a just and sustainable relationship with the land and its people looks and feels like, as well as prioritizes. With the concept of new year and fresh starts in mind, the conversation explores prioritizing rest, balance, and joy, especially given a career that is so deeply tied to the seasons. Ben and Bo talk favorite plants, community building, and living authentically. Listen in - and From all of us at Cultivating Place: Happy 2025! May it be beautiful, biodiverse, and BRAVE! From my seat, the act of being still and the art of noticing are perfect intentions for any season. 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. All images courtesy of Bo Dennis, Dandy Ram Farm. All rights reserved.

Happy Winter Solstice season! In celebration of the planetary moment of the longest night and the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, which took place on December 21st, this week we revisit a conversation about getting STILL. We hold a moment of stillness to notice and honor our places, our selves, and our many companions in time and space. We revisit our conversation with Artist/Photographer Mary Jo Hoffman all about her more than a decade-long daily photographic practice and her new book: Still: The Art of Noticing. From my seat, the act of being still and the art of noticing are perfect intentions for any season. 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.

This week, CP Guest Host Abra Lee celebrates the season in conversation with the King of Camellias, Sidney Frazier. Sidney is based out of sunny Charleston, South Carolina, where he sits as Vice President of Horticulture at Middleton Place - a historic home and garden there is believed to be the oldest landscaped garden in America. Camellias were first planted in America near the end of the 18th century in the four corners of Henry Middleton's parterre, overlooking the Ashley River. Sidney shares with us the historic legacy of Camellias at Middleton Place and gives us some fun tips and tricks on how to care for these magnificent plants. Enjoy, and Happy Winter Solstice on the 21st.  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.

Many gardeners are also collectors. Collectors of things like pots, books, seeds, and - of course - plants. Some plant collecting gardeners collect flowers, shrubs, herbs or seeds. Others collect trees – and when writer, artist and curious human Amy Stewart, award winning author of Flower Confidential, Wicked Plants, and The Drunken Botanist, ran into more and more humans who collected trees in various ways – she started to collect stories about them. In her newest book, The Tree Collectors, Tales of Arboreal Obsession (out now from Random House), which she researched, wrote and illustrated, Amy shares much of more about these tree-collecting people, including what they can teach us about trees, and about humanity - from fascinating motivations to moving outcomes. Amy Stewart's with us this week on Cultivating Place - 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week, Cultivating Place's guest host, Ben Futa, is in conversation with Katie Elzer-Peters, owner and founder of The Garden of Words, a digital marketing agency for the green industry. Katie is a lifelong plant lover, storyteller, communicator, and artist. An early love for museums and public gardens led Katie to discover what has today become her mission: empowering more plant-based businesses to thrive so that more people can discover the joy of gardening. As they write, the team at The Garden of Words used to grow only plants. Now, they still grow plants, but they also grow businesses. The conversation centers around reclaiming joy, finding balance, and changing direction. On the cusp of this winter season of rest, rejuvenation, and unpacking, this feels like a timely moment to consider what we want to bring forward, and what we want to leave behind, as we head in to a new season of abundance and growth and learning in the next few months. 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.

This week, when many in the US have time off with family and friends, we note our gratitude for Public Gardens and green spaces around our country and in our lives. Guest-Host Abra Lee is in conversation with one of North America's public garden leaders, Paul Redman. As President and Chief Executive Officer of Longwood Gardens for the last 16 years, Paul has implemented institutional and strategic reforms that have positioned the Gardens as a premier horticultural, cultural, and educational institution of the 21st Century while respecting the values of its founder, Pierre S. du Pont. The result has been nothing short of astounding with overall attendance doubling to almost 1.54 million visitors per year; an incredible climb in membership support from 17,000 to 78,000 households; and earned income has almost tripled – all in the last decade. Longwood Gardens is now North America's most visited paid public garden and the most visited paid cultural attraction in Philadelphia. In their conversation, Abra and Paul explore ideas of leadership, envisioning public gardens for the future, and fearlessness. 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.

In honor of the season of gratitude, festivities, long nights, rest, and reflection upon us, this week we revisit a BEST OF conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer, Indigenous scholar, professor, land and culture tender, MacArthur Genius Grant award winner, mother, and all around wonderful human. She is also a gardener. Her book, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions) is something of a philosophical north star for many of us, and this week Dr. Kimmerer's newest book The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World is out from Scribner press. As always with Robin's work, The Serviceberry is perhaps exactly what we collectively need at this exact moment. Its dedication reminds us that ALL FLOURISHING IS MUTUAL. 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.

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.

This week, in honor of Labor Day just passed, we venture into the world of garden preservation, history through the lens of spaces of incarceration, and how these can help all of us consider, with clearer eyes, the great diversity of ways in which the word Garden is used. We're in conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Lara, a cultural geographer and Garden Historian who is looking at the role and uses of gardens in spaces of incarceration—historic and contemporary—and what this might teach us as gardeners and as a society as we look forward and back. Dr. Lara earned her doctorate through extensive research at Mission Santa Barbara, the Gardens of Alcatraz, and Manzanar National Historic Site. 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.

At this back-to-school, change-of-seasons moment, I thought we would all enjoy a good bedtime-story vibe. Enjoy this Best of CP conversation with Gwendolyn Wallace.  Gwendolyn Wallace is a gardener, a student, a teacher, a historian, and the author of two new works of illustrated children's literature. Joy Takes Root, and The Light She Feels Inside (both published this year) are works grounded in the human impulse to garden. In words, stories, and images these additions to the world of children's literature help to grow us all. Using her own history and experience with gardens and gardening, Gwendolyn's stories remind us (no matter our age) that our gardens raise and tend to us as much as we raise and tend to them! 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.

This week, A BEST OF conversation. In this long, hot, fiery summer here in Northern CA and wet and windy summer in other parts of the country – I really needed some flowers – and thought our conversation with the UK's Shane Connolly might be just the thing. ENJOY! 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 our guest today shares, with thoughtfulness. British floral designer Shane Connolly is well-known for his world-class floristry and floral design, which gracing several weddings within the British Royal Family and the recent coronation of King Charles. While his floral design is known for this kind of high-profile event, Shane is also known as one of the preeminent ambassadors for a more sustainable, organic, local, seasonal, and low-waste floral design and floral supply industry.  Cultivating Place now has a donate button! 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.

It's back to school time – you can tell by the ads on television and radio (yes, I was watching the Olympics!) and by the displays at the stores with notebooks, pencils, backpacks, and lunch boxes being on prominent display. As you and I know, one of the best classrooms available to us all is the outdoors – from the wildlands of fields, woods, and waysides around us to more formal state and national parks and monuments, our own gardens, and very specifically, our many public gardens. Being outdoors is a great classroom, and plants are among our best teachers. Joining me this week to explore all of this and more is Sean Doherty, a gardener, a plant lover, a 25-year-career public educator: in the classroom, as a principal, and for six years as a St. Louis School's district superintendent. Sean is now the Vice President of Education at the Missouri Botanical Garden in downtown St. Louis. From school groups to mindfulness walks, botanical art, and identification classes to therapeutic horticulture, from seed banking to historic herbarium collections, this botanic garden in St. Louis continues to expand how they and we think about the phenomenal educational capacity and imperative of plants and their conservation. Join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! 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.

Late July, August, and September (the dog days of summer with the constellation Sirius high in the night sky) are perhaps the stretch of the year in most climates of the Northern Hemisphere that really show you what your garden and plants are made of (for better or worse) after months of them producing and growing under long hours of sun, high heat, and either humidity or drought. Or smoke. It's also the season when many of our most durable and prismatic shrubs are showing off to great advantage in rounded forms, seed, fruit, and foliage colors, certainly in our wildlands. And possibly in our gardens? This is where Kevin Philip Williams and Michael Guidi of the Denver Botanic Gardens come in. Their new book Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands celebrates the great diversity, incredible beauty, and many gifts and lessons that the wild shrublands of our world have to offer our gardens and cultivated landscapes—environmentally and aesthetically—no matter where you garden. I want to echo Kevin and Michael's email greeting when I invited them to be guests on Cultivating Place: Welcome to the Shrub Club! 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 Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Tim Johnson is engaged in the native plant and garden worlds on both personal and professional levels. Having worked with Seed Savers Exchange earlier in his career, Tim last joined us on Cultivating Place a few years back as Executive Director for The Botanic Garden of Smith College. Tim is a spouse, a father, a life long learner and gardener, and since January of this year, he is the CEO of the Native Plant Trust. He is leading this oldest of U.S. plant conservation organizations into its 125th year working to conserve the great biodiversity of native plants in our world starting with their place in the U.S. Northeast. We caught up with him this week to learn more about Tim's botanical journey and to discuss some of the Native Plant Trust's past, present, and future vision. This vision is both on the ground, including their part in manifesting the new Northeast Native Seed Network as foundational to shifting the possibilities for great native plant supply for all landscapes, and increasingly, this vision is in policy at all levels of local and federal government.  NPT is collaborating with other plant conservation people around the country and world, and serve as a model for how good plant stewardship can literally grow our world better. Join us this week! 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.

Working under the online name Trackless Wild, Janisse Ray is an American writer, naturalist, and environmental activist. Just about everything she does speaks to me of the largest meaning and importance of what it means to be a capital G gardener in our world. A moving storyteller, speaker, and teacher, her book titles include Ecology of A Cracker Childhood (1999), a memoir; Wild Spectacle, Seeking Wonders in A World Beyond Humans (2021), a collection of essays; Red Lanterns (2021), a collection of poems; The Woods of Fannin County (2023), a novel, and many more. Her most recent title is based on her many years teaching writing, particularly place-based creative non-fiction: Craft & Current, A Manual for Magical Writing. Her acclaimed work has earned Janisse a Pushcart Prize, an American Book Award, the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature, a Nautilus Award, and the Arlene Eisenberg Award for Writing that Matters, among other well-deserved awards. For me, the most striking aspect of her talents (expressed ardently across genres) is the precision with which she lovingly gives voice to her own place, specifically her home ground of rural South Georgia's uplands and coastal plains – and from there, the greater U.S. Southeast generally. The climatic and seasonal fluctuations and moods of the flora and fauna across mountains, and meadows, roadside verges and meandering creeks, Janisse is always documenting the lives and ground out of which places grow people. Her work Seed Underground, A Growing Revolution to Save Food (2012), was one of handful of books about the poetics and politics of seed and seed people in their places that inspired me in my writing of What We Sow, On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (2023) (along with the likes of Henry David Thoreau's posthumously-published writings on seed dispersal, and Gary Nabhan's Enduring Seed). While very much rooted in the Southeast, Janisse, like all great nature writers, gives voice to the importance of all places through her devotion to her singular place. Janisse's teaching (online and at various universities across her career) focuses on encouraging the practice of place-based, heartfelt observation and writing as a way to grow better people, and therefore as a way to durably tend to all places. Janisse joins Cultivating Place this week to explore what it means to be devoted to place - in word, action, and spirit. 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 revisit a favorite conversation from the archive, “The Comfort of Crows, A Backyard Year," with author and backyard tender and observer, Margaret Renkl. Reminding us that even on days when we feel overheated and overwhelmed, there is always some comfort, intelligence, and agency to be found among the flora and fauna of this generous planet. Many of you will remember our previous conversation with writer and gardener Margaret Renkl about one of her previous titles, “Late Migrations.” Her opinion pieces in The New York Times document the nature of our humanity weekly. I am so pleased to welcome her back this week to share more about her newest title – what is aptly described as “a literary and nature- based devotional” from one of our favorite backyard nature devotees. Join us, this week. 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.

“Are Humans Parasites sowing our own hunger, or fruit, gifts from Earth to our future? Is the edge of our lives, civilization, and species a cliff to catastrophe or a bridge to transformation?” These are the words, questions, and motivations of poet and gardener, Frederick Livingston author of Trees are Bridges to the Sky a collection of essays and poems exploring the human/climate connection. I first met Frederick when I served as keynote speaker for the National Native Seed Conference earlier this year. The conference was kicked off by an address from Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, and another by Tracy Stone-Manning, Director of the Bureau of Land Management, both of whom preceded me on the first day.  The two days of events were punctuated throughout by readings from Frederick – the Conference poet. The fact that this conference of policy makers and advocates across such a range had a Conference Poet at all, says a lot. The fact that their chosen poet was Frederick, says even more.   Frederick has studied and practiced sustainable agriculture, experiential education, and peace building across the world and he joins us this week to share more. 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 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 see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.