Cultivating Place

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

This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by medical ethnobotanist and Emory professor, Dr. Cassandra Quave who shares with us the very personal story of her quest to develop new ways to fight illness and disease through the healing powers of plants. In today’s world of synthetic pharmaceuticals, Dr. Quave belives our connection to the natural and plant world is in fact our greatest opportunity...

Emily Murphy is an ecological gardener, an educator, and an author whose two books focus on gardens of personal and communal purpose. Her 2018 book Grow What You Love, is joined this year by Grow Now: How We Can Save our Health, Communities and Planet One Garden at a Time. With the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reporting on the impacts, adaptations, and vulnerabilities and dangero...

This week is a timely and rich with agency conversation on gardens by and for refugee populations. Areti Athanasopoulos is a Denver, Colorado-based landscape architect. After many seasons studying and working around the world, and in collaboration with the International Rescue Committee’s New Roots program, and while in Denver with Denver Urban Gardens, she has recently founded her own non-profit...

Lisa Waud is a collaborative, large-scale floral and installation artist who likes to invite people in to enjoy flowers, and from there into a conversation about the world, she was the artist behind the 2015 Flower House Detroit – a floral phenomenon in downtown Detroit. Erin Preston-Johnson Bevel is an unschooling mom, a full-time lecturer at Howard University, and a “recovering lawyer” putting h...

Deep into the Winter season, with February’s full moon behind us, this week Cultivating Place is in conversation with British-based garden photographer Andrew Montgomery, about his new book Winter Gardens. Photographed by Andrew, written by Clare Foster of House & Garden UK and published by Andrew’s new imprint, Montgomery Press, Winter Gardens, in evocative images and crafted words, celebrates th...

Reports from around the globe in the last 25 years about the alarming loss of biodiversity on our planet sit heavily with every gardener I know. With that in mind and with the hope and the knowledge of the agency we as Gardeners hold in this world, I’m so pleased to be in conversation this week with two men who’ve been working and studying this very aspect of our world, in their place. In July of...

Plantlife International is a British conservation charity working nationally and internationally to save threatened wild flowers, plants, and fungi.  With more than 30 years in this work, Plantlife’s members and team of dedicated conservation experts work with landowners, businesses, conservation organizations, community groups and governments, pushing boundaries to save our rarest flora and ensur...

Coming up on Cultivating Place this week, we’re in conversation with a new generation seed farmer, Petra Page-Mann. Petra is a co-founder with her husband Matthew Goldfarb of Fruition Seeds, a young seed company with a big calling. Fruition is a team of 12 humans "cultivating over 300 varieties of certified organic vegetables, herbs & flowers to surround us all with beauty & abundance in short sea...

Judith Larner Lowry is the plantswoman behind Larner Seeds – Seeds for the California Landscape – Restoring California One Garden At A Time, founded in 1977 and still growing strong, based in Bolinas, CA.  Judith is the author of "Gardening with a Wild Heart, Restoring California’s Native Landscapes at Home," published by the University of California Press in 1999, as well as the author of "The La...

On Cultivating Place this week, as we revisit a Best Of conversation with Vivien Sansour, the heart and head behind The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library aiming to revive and share forward Palestinian seed heritage and a culture of care and gratitude. Vivien was born in Palestine and spent her early childhood in Bethlehem before she and her family immigrated to North Carolina when she was ten. She w...

As seed catalogues continue to arrive in our mailboxes and in-boxes daily, filling our notebooks and dreams, we take a behind the scenes look at an independent seed source well-known to gardeners and market growers throughout North America: Johnny’s Selected Seeds. We are in conversation with current CEO Dave Melhorn and Lauren Giroux, Director of Product Selection and Trialing Research. Johnny’s...

To welcome the new year, Cultivating Place stays with the theme of seeds – this time focusing on seeding our imaginations in conversation with Diane Wilson writer, gardener, emeritus executive director of Dream of Wild Health and, more recently, emeritus executive director of The Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. Diane has long interwoven her gardening and her advocacy work with her writi...

As a farewell to the calendar year that has been, and a welcome/seeding for the new year that will be, I am joined by seed person and agent of growing transformational change - Kellee Matsushita-Tseng. Known as Brave New Seed online, Kellee is a Yonsei (fourth generation) queer, Japanese-Chinese American, as well as the farm-garden assistant manager at the UC Santa Cruz Center for AgroEcology, and...

Gary Paul Nabhan is a gardener, an agricultural ecologist, an ethnobotanist, and an ecumenical Franciscan Brother based in Patagonia, Arizona. He is the author of a host of books covering a diversity of plant-relationship topics – from pollinators to food policy, to love letters to his favorite landscapes. The heart of his work is fed by his own lifelong enchantment with the world – and his nearly...

Winter in the Northern Hemisphere is a time of dormancy for the plant and animal kingdoms alike. While it may look relatively still and quiet, it is in fact a period of unseen activity worth looking at and learning from – for perspective and possibilities. This is our final offering for your garden-based preparations for the Winter Solstice officially occurring on December 21st at a little before...

As another offering to all of you in your gardens tending toward the Solstice in just a few weeks on December 21st, this week we are in conversation with award-winning poet and life-long home gardener Camille Dungy. Camille is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relativ...

Mike Sullivan is the author of "The trees in San Francisco", Jason Dewees is a horticulturist and author of "Designing with Palms", and Richard Turner is a designer, consultant, the Emeritus Editor of Pacific Horticulture, and co-editor of "Trees of Golden Gate Park". The three men got together in the early days of the Pandemic and put their imaginations and frustrations to work creating self-guid...

This week I’m thankful for my own garden, of course, but also for the good fresh food grown for all of us by so many hard-working souls wherever you are, from San Francisco to Cincinnati to Syracuse, and here where I am. Pyramid Farms is a small organic, integrated family farm of humans led by Matthew Martin and Lisa Carle. Famous for the carrots, and also growing more than 30 varieties of fresh p...

As a gardener and a human in this exact time on our planet, and in this specific season of the year - a season of communal gathering and thankfulness at the tail end of the growing season in the Northern Hemisphere, this week we celebrate Family, Kin, & Kinship. We are joined in this conversational celebration by Gavin Van Horn and Rowen White sharing with us about a new multi-volume collection of...

Fall and early winter are the perfect time in much of the Northern Hemisphere to plant bulbs, woody shrubs and trees, herbaceous perennials, and perennial vines in the landscape. It is also a good time to seed many spring-blooming native(and non-native) annuals. So, I thought it was just the right time of year as well to chat a little with Heather McCargo of the Wild Seed Project in Portland, Main...

Last week on Cultivating Place, we looked at Gardens and history through the lens of a historic Garden Cemetery – this week we look at Garden History through the interpretive lens of how we preserve, interpret, codify and share gardens past and present. We are in conversation with Christopher Woodward, Director of the Garden Museum in London. Garden history & Garden hindsight come together in the...

Just in time for Samhain, All Hallow’s Eve, and Day of the Dead observances, this week we explore the sacred, green and communal space of a cemetery – specifically Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts. Opened in the 1830s, Mt. Auburn was the first of a genre of so-called Garden Cemeteries in the U.S. Horticulturist Dave Barnett is the Emeritus President and CEO of Mt. Auburn. After nearly...

This week on Cultivating Place we’re in delicious conversation with Chef Dave Smoke McCluskey, founder of Corn Mafia, and a grower/producer of such traditional corn products as Longhouse Selections’ hominy, masa, and grits. Based in South Carolina, Dave is an Indigenous foods educator and member of the Mohawk Nation, who invites us all to think about the history of the ingredients in our food, esp...

As we enter the season of seed saving, of easing into dormancy, beginning to consider next season through the lens of the last season, of forward planning, this week Cultivating Place explores some big thinking for our shared future in conversation with Severine Von Tscharner Fleming, one of the women featured in The Earth in Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants. Cultiv...