Cultivating Place

In our second episode focusing on the inspiring beauty of dry gardens and the plants and people who love them, Cultivating Place is joined this week by photo journalist Saxon Holt. The sole photographer on more than 30 garden books, Saxon is also owner of the PhotoBotanic Garden library and director of the Summer-Dry Project. Saxon’s most recent book, a collaboration with writer Nora Harlow, is Ga...

As we near the close of a dry, dry season in the generally dry climates of much of the US west, this week Cultivating Place has the first of a two-episode focus on the inspiring beauty of dry gardens and the plants and people who love them. We start off with some high style in dry gardens with garden designer Daniel Nolan, owner of Daniel Nolan Design and author of Dry Gardens, High Style for Low...

Ernesto Alvarado is a Mexican-born, Southern California-based native plant and seed teacher and student. He is currently the Native Plant Nursery Assistant at the Riverside Corona Resource Conservation District where he specializes in seed and native plants for gardening and greater connection to the world around him – and us. While I told you that last week was the second in a two-part series in...

September, October, and November are traditional harvest celebration months in the Northern Hemisphere from variations on Octoberfests to those around the idea of Thanksgiving. The ancient Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot is celebrated from the full moon on September 20th to September 27th this year, with the Autumnal Equinox occurring on the 22nd. This week on Cultivating Place we enjoy the seco...

As we tend toward the Autumnal Equinox on September 22nd here in the Northern Hemisphere, we are deep in a period of time full of sacred seasonal celebrations and observances based on the cycles of the moon, of the sun, and of the growing season ending with harvest and simultaneously beginning again with the dormancy of seed and soil. Late summer to early fall holds the Islamic and Jewish New Year...

On Cultivating Place this week we celebrate (and say farewell) to the fullness of summer at its calendar-end with Labor Day weekend in full view here in the US. We do this with some moving and wonderful sounds of a summer concert series not only held in but inspired by a remarkable urban garden: the Capital Public Radio Garden at Sacramento State University, a garden of food, habitat, gathering, s...

In our final episode focusing specifically on ecologically rich and contributing gardens, we learn some innovative lessons in built ecology. Literally. Rebecca McMackin is an ecologically focused horticulturist and garden designer. For the past decade, she has been the Director of Horticulture for Brooklyn Bridge Park, an ecologically minded landscape constructed from the soil up on repurposed pos...

At a time when our gardens large and small often feel more important than ever, I think our focus on exactly what our gardens contain and consist of is also more important than ever. In this second in a three-part celebration of gardens that offer back more than they consume, I’m pleased to be speaking this week with Owen Wormser. Based in Western Massachusetts, Owen is the founder of Abound Desig...

In the heat of the dog days of summer, Cultivating Place celebrates the farms and gardens striving to not draw down resources but to contribute resources back into the world's flow of energy: fro providing shade, food, and retreat, these kinds of gardens are also replenishing rather than drawing down or polluting groundwater, they are sequestering carbon rather than spewing it, they are growing so...

This week on Cultivating Place we continue our high-elevation garden view, now in Vail, Colorado at The Betty Ford Alpine Gardens, leaders in the research and conservation of North American alpine plant communities. The Alpine Zone has long been one of interest to plant enthusiasts worldwide across time and space for the sheer admiration for and interest in these rugged and resourceful plants and...

This week on Cultivating Place we gain a little perspective with a lot of altitude as we begin a two-part series on 'Gardening at Elevation’. Isa Catto is a mother and partner, a fine and textile artist, a gardener, and a writer. Isa’s multi-faceted gardens at 8,000 ft in Woody Creek, Colorado are rooted in generations of family. in connection to community, and in love of place. Her gardens feed h...

Hannah Gardner is a gardener, writer, and mother. She is a garden designer and plantswoman with a passion for traveling the world to learn about and meet plants and their communities in their places, from Estonia to the Canaries, Northern Israel to the wildflower meadows of the United Kingdom, where she makes her home. Her longtime column in Gardens Illustrated entitled "The Outsider”, which ran f...

David Godshall is a landscape architect, gardener, and meta-garden philosopher making his way with his young family and his Terremoto Landscape Architecture design studio team in Los Angeles. The Terremoto team was featured as one of Elle Décor’s A List of designers in 2021. David’s LA home garden and his perspective on adventurous gardening and design are featured in Under Western Skies, on which...

Bonnie J Clark is a professor of anthropology at the University of Denver. Her new book "Finding Solace in the Soil, Archaeology of Gardens and Gardeners at Amache" (University Press of Colorado, 2020) traces six field seasons of her research and immersion into the lives of Japanese Americans held at the Amache prison camp, which was active on the high plains of Colorado from 1942 to 1945. With Am...

Ali Meders-Knight is a Mechoopda tribal member whose traditional and present homelands are based in interior Northern California, a mother of five, and a traditional basketweaver in Chico, CA she is also a tribal liaison working to form partnerships for federal forest stewardship contracting and tribal forestry programs authorized in the 2018 Farm Bill. She has been a Traditional Ecological Knowle...

At a time in the gardening world when we're hearing the phrase "ecologically functional gardens" and "ecological landscape design" with great regularity, Cultivating Place is pleased to be joined this week by Kelly Norris. Kelly is an avid gardener, a former nursery owner and plant breeder, and an award-winning author. Based in Des Moines Iowa, he is recently retired from his role as Director of H...

Jessica Walliser is an avid gardener and professional horticulturist – working in the business of plants and gardening since the tender age of 15. As she has matured as a gardener, so too have her understandings and passions, and she now considers herself a devoted bug lover as well as a devoted plant lover because, you know, these two groups of lives we love are wholly interdependent. Jessica is...

Through the many twists and turns of life, hers including a life-threatening battle with an auto-immune disorder and lung cancer, Claire’s organizing ethos has become: “Go Gently." An environmental advocate before turning to flowers as her life path, Claire is also the author/co-creator of a new book entitled “The Healing Power of Flowers”, which looks around the year at the meaning, magic, and me...

Debra Prinzing is the founder and leader of The Slow Flowers Society – She joins Cultivating Place in this first week of summer (after Memorial Day in the US and before the Summer Solstice in a few weeks) to share more about the many facets of her passion for being a voice for the floral world. Debra Prinzing is the founder and leader of The Slow Flowers Society. As a Seattle-based writer, speaker...

Just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a team of plant folks known as Refugia is growing connection among places and people from their beautifully designed native plant gardens and radiating out from those. This week, Cultivating Place is joined by Refugia founder Jeff Lorenz, by stewardship manager Esther Scanlon, by Lead Project Manager Ronnie Ludwig, and Melissa Nase Refugia’s lead Landsca...

Loree Bohl is the Portland Oregon-based founder and visionary gardener behind the well-known and well-loved Danger Garden Blog. In true Danger Garden fashion, Loree’s new book Fearless Gardening empowers us all to be bold, break the rules and grow what you love. Loree joins Cultivating Place this week to empower all of us with a sense of boldness in the garden. Cultivating Place now has a donate b...

This week on Cultivating Place, we have the second of a two-part series celebrating the publication of Under Western Skies in conversation with landscape architect Christie Green, of Radicle landscape architecture based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Radicle as in the first intrepid and primary growing root of a seedling and the idea of advocating for fundamental or revolutionary changes in current prac...

CAITLIN ATKINSON is a photographer of places, spaces, and all things botanical. She has been my partner this past 2 + years in creating our new book Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast, publishing on May 11 of 2021. Conceived by Caitlin, the book is really an expression of our shared love for the places and plants and plantspeople of the West crafti...

Claire Ratinon is a gardener, a writer, and a passionate advocate for the growing a food no matter where you live or how small a space you might live it. She herself first fell in love with growing her own food while living in a one-room flat. Born in Mauritius and raised in England, her horticultural work is deeply interested in how the hunger and heartache of our times, and of re-finding or root...

It’s spring in the northern hemisphere (even though snow is still making visitations to parts of North American right now), and gardeners across the hemisphere are itching to get started with their summer vegetable gardens. That age-old and annual question of “when warm summer crops can safely be planted outside" is already high on peoples' lists of garden excitements and anxieties. Cultivating Pl...