Cultivating Place

April 17 through 24th 2021 is California Native Week, designated by the California State Legislature in 2010 as an annual celebration of the fantastic diversity of plants on whom this large expanse of unique and uniquely beautiful land and history rests in so many ways. The California Floristic Province is one of the Biodiversity Hot Spots on Earth and as the most populous state in the US, Califor...

Amyrose Foll is a mother, a farmer, and a big thinker. As the executive director and founder of the multifaceted Virginia Free Farm at Spotted Pig Holler in Kents Store Virginia – she is looking to reimagine the foodshed of her world – and ours. As Spring takes hold and the warm growing season greens our northern Hemisphere gardens and farms, Amyrose sees a greater foodshed model within reach. Joi...

Just in time for spring and that itch we gardeners - new and long time - have to get the summer vegetables into the ground, Cultivating Place revisit a favorite conversation with grow-your-own revolutionary, Brie Arthur – author of the "Foodscape Revolution" and "Gardening with Grains". Her enthusiasm will get your season growing – join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you s...

Having just moved across the seasonal threshold of the Vernal Equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere, this week we continue our focus on land and land and ecology-based garden projects – this time in conversation with horticulturist and plantswoman Laura Ekasetya. I spoke with Laura late last season checking in with her on her work as Director and Head Horticulturist at the famed Lurie Garden in...

Here we are – mid-way into Women’s History Month, one year after the publication of The Earth in Her Hands. In honor of these two thresholds, this week on CP we offer out a conversation with one of the extraordinary women working in the world of plants featured in the book: Edwina Von Gal - a landscape designer based on New York’s Long Island. Having designed landscapes for the rich and famous in...

As the vernal equinox is imminent for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, a conversation on balance and our importance as humans in the balance of natural systems. Lorena Gorbet is a Mountain Maidu elder in Northeastern California, a mother, a basket weaver, a land restoration activist, and an educator. She joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about the balanced systems thinking of...

It’s the first week of March and true spring let alone summer is still a ways off for many of us. This week on Cultivating Place, we lean into the last aspects of the winter season and head North - to learn more about the enthusiastic and intrepid deep winter and season extending gardening of the inimitable Niki Jabbour. Her abundant year-round gardening on the 45th parallel will inspire anyone. J...

This week on Cultivating Place, we’re back stateside to visit with a longtime gardener and garden writer also engaged in a new level of relationship with her new plot of land. Page Dickey joins us to talk about the leaving and grieving of one garden, and the getting to know and love a new garden and its nature – all of which grows her. Her new book “Uprooted" is out now. Listen in! Cultivating Pla...

As Lunar New Year celebrations continue, we travel to Hokkaido, a northern Island of Japan to celebrate an amazing intertwining of the wild and cultivated, the sustainable and the regenerative (for land and people) at The Tokachi Millenium Forest in Hokkaido, Japan. Dan Pearson is a landscape and garden designer for whom an understanding of plant ecology along with an appreciation for natural land...

On February 12th, the Lunar New Year begins. Celebrated by Asian cultures across the globe, this week Cultivating Place speaks with Eric Hsu, a plantsman of Taiwanese descent particularly interested in following the threads of history back to the many Asian and Asian immigrant contributions to western horticulture in the US. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so muc...

This week to welcome February we revisit a favorite conversation from our last season - a good reminder to mind the way you spend your days - added together they are what will grow your life. ENJOY! Melanie Falick is a maker of many things by hand, and in her work from knitting to gardening, welding to baking, she explores the connection between what we do with our hands in our own lives and our q...

This week on Cultivating Place we lean into the spirit of the season and the traditional Jewish festival Tu B’Shevat, or New Year of the Trees in conversation with Karen Flotte, with the Mitzvah Garden at the Central Reform Congregation in St. Louis, Missouri. The New Year of the Trees seems like a perfect celebration in this time of dormancy just before the sap begins rising in most living things...

MaryLynn Mack is a renaissance woman and leading voice in the world of public gardens today. After beginning her career in the Navy, her experiences have taken her in many directions, including 16 years in Phoenix at the Desert Botanical Garden, and now as Chief Operating Officer of the South Coast Botanic Garden in Palos Verdes, Ca. In the last decade, she has served on the American Public Garden...

This week on Cultivating Place, we continue our FRESH STARTS series in conversation with a long established friend in the gardening world, Doug Tallamy. His latest book Nature’s Best Hope envisions a fresh look at and commitment to rethinking how much of suburban United States sees, uses, and cultivates their places, with an eye toward a Homegrown National Park. Join us! All photos courtesy of Dou...

To kick off the new year, Cultivating Place offers out the first in what will be an ongoing and intermittent series exploring Fresh Starts in our horticultural and gardening world. Following up on last week’s show with Duron Chavis, in which we explored some of the obstacles, hobbles and even failures of imagination in the botanic and garden world, this week we dive into a botanic garden endeavori...

In honor of the losses, griefs, revisions, and transformations in our world this last year, and in honor of the hopes we all hold in our gardens and our hearts for 2021 – we welcome today the muscular voice and vision of Duron Chavis. Duron is an urban farmer, community activist and advocate in Richmond, Virginia. His passionate voice for the power of gardening and people is loud and clear in our...

In this first week of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, Cultivating Place speaks this week with medicinal and habitat gardener Sayaka Lean of the Herb Pharm in Southern Oregon. Informed by her own Japanese cultural gardening traditions, Sayaka is the lead gardener of the Herb Pharm’s public medicinal plant display garden (the Botanical Education Garden), where she cultivates more than 500 native...

In honor of the Solstice on December 21st, Cultivating Place speaks this week with Brooklyn-born farmer/horticulturist/floral designer, activist, and daughter, Amber Tamm. Amber’s journey and work invite us to Imagine so much more in our gardened world. 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 Pla...

This week on Cultivating Place we continue our winter greening cheer in conversation with Todd Carr and Carter Harrington of Hort and Pott, a botanical studio in Upstate NY dedicated to embracing the seasons, celebrating the natural world through handcrafted botanical works, and reimagining the relationships between people and the natural world through botanically driven design. You won’t want to...

This week Cultivating Place kicks off December with a flourish in conversation with Teresa Sabankaya of the Santa Cruz-based Bonny Doon Garden Company and author of "The Posy Book – garden-inspired bouquets that tell a story" just in time for seasonal winter festivities and their greening and gifting. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the...

Join us this week on Cultivating Place for our final episode in the Seed Change series. We are in conversation with Vivien Sansour, heart and head behind The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library aiming to revive and share forward Palestinian seed heritage and culture of care and gratitude. Vivien was born in Palestine and grew up in Bethlehem and then North Carolina. She writes: “The seed, the seed, th...

This week on Cultivating Place, the third in our 4 part Seed Change series with Cheryl Birker, Seed Conservation Program Manager at California Botanic Garden and with whom we go even deeper into what it means to seed bank a biodiversity hotspot in our world. It’s all about the beauty in the tiniest of details. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening...

This week on Cultivating Place, we continue our Seed Change series with Naomi Fraga, research assistant professor of Botany at Claremont Graduate University and Director of Conservation Programs at the California Botanic Garden dedicated to conserving the rich biodiversity of the native plants of California through field research, seed banking, and education programs. Listen in! Cultivating Place...

This week on Cultivating Place we continue our Seed Change series - a nod to faith and a vote for the next growing season. We’re joined this week by Chris Bolden-Newsome and Owen Smith Taylor - of Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram's Garden and True Love Seed respectively. Farmers and culture keepers, the two protect and steward seed and seed stories - encouraging others to steward their own storie...

In this season of colliding urgencies and not infrequent dismay - the garden offers so many lessons. Among the largest of these, brought to you in the smallest of things, is the hope proffered by seeds. And seed keepers. To kick off a new series on seed keepers of the world, this week we revisit our conversation with the UK’s Clare Foster, Garden Editor of House & Garden, UK. A gardener, author, a...