Cultivating Place

This week on Cultivating Place, we continue with our flower theme as we celebrate May, looking toward the most floral of celebrations, Mother’s Day in the US. We discuss not us as gardeners growing flowers, but rather, how flowers shape our world, our cultures, our economies, our thinking and outlooks. We're in conversation with Christin Geall, author of Cultivated: Elements of Floral Style. Her n...

Roses are one of those topics in the garden world: they can be polarizing or energizing. And yet, given that there are roses native to most environments of North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and humans have revered this family and genus and the hundreds of rose species for millennia, they can also be connective tissue for so much–generationally, culturally, environmentally, medicinally, and...

This week, Cultivating Place host Abra Lee explores diplomacy and gardens. She’s in conversation with John Sonnier, Head Gardener at the British Ambassador's residence in Washington, D.C. There since 2009, John focuses on organic and sustainable methods of care AND he has created one of the United State’s most significant historic orchid collections. Orchids are known for their extraordinary forms...

This week, when we think about Cultivating Place well, we get to the seed of the matter in conversation with the team at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Seed Bank, also known as MARSB. We’re in conversation with Ed Toth the Executive Director, and John Price, MARSB’s Associate Director and Native Seed Collection Coordinator. As a collective, MARSB is wisely managing and conserving its region’s wild seed...

Chris Felhaber is a gardener, a husband, and a father. Now based in the Chicago area, Chris has worked in public horticulture in a variety of capacities and with well-known organizations, including with plantsman Roy Diblik in Wisconsin, at Chanticleer Garden outside of Philadelphia, with the Perennial Plant Association, and as the host of the Native Plant Podcast. After nearly 2 decades working w...

Brenna Estrada is the owner and founder of Three Brothers Blooms, a flower farm located on 2.5 acres of Camano Island in the Pacific Northwest. Brenna is also the author of Pansies, How to Grow, Reimagine, and Create Beauty with Pansies and Violas, published by Timber Press just over a year ago. Brenna makes a compelling case for revisiting our relationship to pansies, and her book was CP Host Ben...

Spring is, of course, perfect for some wild dreams about what we can and will sow in the seasons to come. With plants, and with ourselves. Jen Williams’ vision for her work as the founder of Wild Dreams Farm and Seed on Washington’s Vashon Island is to ensure abundance and biodiversity in our culture, and in our gardens, by growing and breeding open-pollinated vegetable, flower, and herb seeds tha...

In honor of the Vernal Equinox, and the balance we long for, we are joined this week by humanist, conservationist, Professor, and writer in residence at the Harvard Divinity School, Terry Tempest Williams. From her 1991 classic, Refuge, An Unnatural History of Family & Place, published in 1991, to her newest title out now from Grove Atlantic, The Glorians, Visitations from the Holy Ordinary, and t...

Spring is stirring, buds are swelling, and soil is warming. This week, we celebrate the joys of healthy living soil in conversation with Omar Al Shafie, co-founder of Northern California-based Teregen Ag, a purpose-driven, innovative soil and plant nutrient producer and researcher dedicated to advancing our collective transition toward sustainable, regenerative farming. Listen in! Cultivating Plac...

This week on Cultivating Place, host Ben Futa is in conversation with John Little, an ecological designer and public horticulture advocate living and working in the UK. His firm, the Grass Roof Company, launched in 1998. Ever since, they have been expanding and broadening ideas around public plantings, habitat, and those who care for them. John's not-for-profit, Care, Not Capital, is training the...

This week on Cultivating Place, Abra Lee is in conversation with Laverne Brockington and Vance Davis, great nieces of Annie Mae Vann Reid, an historic florist and entrepreneur based in Darlington, South Carolina. From the 1920s to the 1960s, Annie Mae tended a thriving floral business that grew out of her hobby flower garden, and grew her community with her.  For Laverne and Vance, their aunt's le...

As the earliest signs of spring unfurl in the mild climates, think snowdrops, manzanita, the earliest narcissus, wild iris, and Daphne odora – hmmm, the earliest pollinators are paying even more attention than we are. This week, we learn more about some of our earliest and BEST native pollinating bees – the orchard mason bees. We’re in conversation with Thyra McElvie, who loves “these sweet little...

In these dark, cold days of February, when too much rain or snow, and WAY TO MUCH ICE, or not enough rain or snow, might be getting you down, we take this week, just in time for Valentine’s Day, to embrace, lean into, and love, the comforts of tea. We're in conversation with Michael Fritts, founder of Golden Feather Tea in Concow, CA, exploring some of the history and cultivation, the rituals, and...

Coming up this week on Cultivating Place, host Ben Futa is in conversation with artist & activist Gardener, Tanja Hollander. Tanja works with gardens, social practice, photography, video, and installation to understand how cultural and visual relationships help us make sense of our chaotic world. Very specifically, her Mourning Flowers and Ephemera projects bring awareness, often through flowers a...

It’s been a full year since the devastating fires in Los Angeles, CA. Many lives were lost, and many acres and homes were burned. Many gardens, cultivated spaces, and gardeners were profoundly affected. This week, Cultivating Place checks in with two humans who are cultivating their place with care in the wake of this catastrophe. Leigh Adams and Shawn Maestretti are Studio Petrichor, based in Los...

This week, Cultivating Place welcomes Terry Richardson in conversation with Abra Lee. Terry is known to many as The Black Thumb: Orchid Care Made Simple, an intrepid, enthusiastic, and encouraging orchid rescuer, educator, and storyteller. Terry has helped thousands of people rethink what it means to care for plants, specifically orchids! Terry’s journey began not with expertise, but with curiosit...

January is prime seed-dreaming and seed-catalogue season. With that in mind, we’re revisiting a favorite conversation all about generosity, mutual care, good seeds, and seed people. Who doesn’t need more of all those as we continue to lay the foundation for this new year? Ken Greene – who goes by K - is a seed person. He is the co-founder of the Hudson Valley Seed Library, which in 2004 became the...

As we continue our new year, we’re once again gaining elevation and new, growing thinking. We’re in conversation with Jim Tolstrup, Executive Director of the High Plains Environmental Center in Loveland, Colorado, where, by development design, they caringly cultivate Suburbitat. Suburbitat is a land ethic, a mindset, and a book that all hold a vision of a built environment where suburbia and nativ...

In honor of the new year, fresh-faced and open-hearted in front of us, Abra Lee, Ben Futa, and Jennifer Jewell are together this week for a first-ever CP Host check-in. We’re chatting about what we’re looking back on, what we’re looking forward to, and what we’re looking to grow in 2026! Join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'...

For our final Cultivating Place episode of 2025, Abra Lee is looking forward by looking back. She’s in conversation with Philip Norman, longtime curator at the Garden Museum in London. From New Zealand to London, Philips' is a life shaped by gardens. Happy Holidays and New Year! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to sup...

In honor of the Winter Solstice happening this coming weekend on December 21st at 10:03 AM Pacific, we celebrate land and place-based cultivation from a foundation of cultural and spiritual care leading the way. We’re joined in this by Dr. Don Hankins, Professor of Geography and Planning at California State University, Chico. Of Miwok ancestry, Don, for decades now, has focused on applied research...

This week on Cultivating Place we celebrate one woman’s long-standing and loving cultivation of place in rural New Jersey. Janet Mavec is the steward and student of Bird Haven Farm, which after many years of learning from and loving, she now celebrates in word and image in her new place-based memoir: Bird Haven Farm the Story of An Original American Garden, written by Janet and photographed by Ngo...

The Klamath Mountains are a rich site of diversity in Northern California and Southern Oregon, celebrated in Michael Kauffmann and Justin Garwood’s book The Klamath Mountains, a Natural History, from Kauffmann’s Back Country Press.  Kauffmann’s most recent book, co-written with Matt Ritter, is California Trees, was just awarded The National Outdoor Book Award, and in honor of the seeds of that boo...

This week on Cultivating Place, we look towards the heart of the thankful season in memory of the enormous, fierce, and grateful soul of Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who passed from this world on October 20th, fighting for the beauty of the world right up to the end. In his honor, we revisit our 2021 conversation with him, focusing on the sacred in the everyday and in the seasonal.  Rabbi Waskow was the c...

“Ecological restoration is no longer a nicety, it’s a necessity,” proclaims the Blackland Collaborative, a group working to help alter cities so that they are biodiverse and inclusive, and helping heal human communities while restoring vulnerable species. Bridging science and design, the Collaborative brings people and nature home; and they believe in humans’ capacity to improve and protect. John...