Cultivating Place

This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by award winning landscape designer Judith Phillips of Albuquerque NM. Her Design Oasis, characterized by creative thinking, designing gardens, and growing plants born of her wider place in the high desert has been shifting ideas of beauty and meaning for other gardeners of the American Southwest since the 1980s. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a do...

This week on Cultivating Place we speak with British gardener and psychiatrist/psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith, whose book, "The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature", and very explicitly of gardening, explores her many years of research and findings on the physiology of the brain and the creativity and connections cultivated in the brain when gardening. In this work “of science, i...

As we continue our exploration into creativity born of the garden –I share with you today a story and model for creativity coupled with kindness. On Cultivating Place, I talk a lot about gardens, gardeners, and gardens as intersectional agents and spaces of powerful potential & positive change in our world. While I see this as true in most of my interviews, this episode with the regenerative human...

This week we kick off October with a dive into creativity – the way gardeners harness it, riff off it, and share its results forward with the larger world – and I am so pleased that our first creative in this exploration is the potter Frances Palmer, a previous guest on the program, one of the 75 women featured in my book The Earth in Her Hands, and a fantastic inspiration for any gardener maker o...

Camilla Jorvad is a photographer, a gardener, a mental health and rewilding habitat gardening advocate based on the Danish Island of Aero. Her home-farm shared with her husband and children is known as Sigridsminde – meaning in memory of Sigrid – the gardener who first established a garden on this coastal bluff before her father and mother-in-law took on its care, prior to Camilla and her family p...

Most gardens, gardeners, and gardening seasons are deeply informed first and foremost by a deep love of PLANTS. Of space, and design, and color, and food, and refuge and beauty, YES, but for many of us it all starts with a love of plants. This week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by an international gardener, designer, and horticulturist Wambui Ippolito - tracing the history of our own plant lo...

Dustin Gimbel is a landscape designer and large scale outdoor ceramic artist inspired by the botanical world and based in Southern California. In a new episode in our ongoing series about the art of the garden and art in the garden, I am pleased to welcome Dustin this week to share more about his journey working his way through school and some notable internships to this summer installing his firs...

In this very unusual back-to-school season here in the US, we’re joined this week by Julie Cerny a gardener, an outdoor enthusiast, and educator. Her new book, The Little Gardener: Helping Children Connect with the Natural World (out now from Princeton Architectural Press) provides some unusual and inspirational guidance for parents, grandparents, caregivers, and educators who want to help childre...

This week on Cultivating Place we’re focused on growing food and community when we’re joined by Patricia Spence, President and CEO of the Urban Farming Institute of Boston, working to grow more food, train more farmers, and build healthier communities everywhere. 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 Culti...

Toni Gattone is a businesswoman, a master gardener, and a lifelong gardener of Italian descent. After struggling herself with a bad back, and the limitations this put on her as an active human and gardener, she began to research the idea of adaptive gardening. Based on all that she discovered and her own experiments and adaptations in her small Bay area garden that she shares with her husband, she...

Farmer Meg is an urban beekeeper turned flower and market grower turned farmer. Meg has been farming in NJ and NY city and state for almost a decade. Just over two years ago, she and her partner Neil migrated to upper Schoharie County NY to being to establish Meg’s dream homestead on a former dairy farm. Biscuitwood Farm grows cut flowers, raises egg-layers on pasture, breeds Red Wattle pigs, and...

This week on Cultivating Place we get a booster shot of energy and inspiration as we enter the dog days of summer when we’re joined by Colah B. Tawkin – the voice and vibrant life force and distinctive VOICE of the Black in the Garden podcast - where Black Culture Meets Horticulture. You will not want to miss her - listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for list...

Jasna Guy is an artist whose visionary and liminal work is based in close observation of the plants and pollinators – specifically bees – of her garden and natural environments. Her ethereal representations bring heightened understanding and awareness to the miraculous life processes - like bee and flower pollination and pollinator co-evolution and mutual interdependence - going on around us every...

In the throes of high summer, Cultivating Place continues to explore the fruits of the imaginative nature of the garden. We begin a two-part series on visual artists deriving their inspiration from the garden and its diverse life, and going from there. Jennifer is joined this week by the Australian three-dimensional paper artist Colleen Southwell whose finely drawn, detailed, and designed composit...

A good read often plumbs the depths of imagination, for Matthew Hall - gardener & researcher at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand – it’s the Imagination of Plants he’s interested in, especially how and why plants are or are not positioned as central characters in the most important cultural narratives and mythologies of societies across time and place. Matthew joins Cultivating Place...

This week on Cultivating Place we take a summer amble with British-based Californian Kathryn Aalto – a historian, designer, and writer whose most recent book Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks offers all of us some much needed outdoor adventure with some admirable women of words. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years...

In honor of the Fourth of July, Cultivating Place is joined this week by the acclaimed writer and gardener Jamaica Kincaid, whose work "My Garden (Book)" published in the late 1990s, explores how the length and depth of human history - beautiful and terrible - is a narrative fully legible in our gardens and horticulture of today. As a citizen gardener, she sees potential redemption for humanity in...

Amy Goldman is a gardener, author-artist, and longtime advocate for seed saving, plant breeding, and heirloom fruits and vegetables. Her mission has for many years been to celebrate and catalog the magnificent diversity of standard, open-pollinated, heirloom varieties, and their conservation. Her books include The Compleat Squash – A Passionate Growers Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes, and Gourds, and...

Nadia Ruffin is an entomologist, gardener, and educator. She is the founder of Agricademy Inc and Urban Farm Sista based in Cincinnati, Ohio. A lover of bugs and all insects and life forms since she was very young, Nadia loves sharing this admiration and curiosity, with youth especially. In 2018 the Cincinnati City Council honored Nadia’s farming and agriculture initiatives, the primary focus of w...

June is traditionally a month in which many, many weddings are celebrated with family, food, and FLOWERS. With many of these weddings on hold this year due to Covid-19, we catch up with floral creative Philippa Craddock to talk about the business of floristry, the sustainability of it on several levels, and to reminisce about the lovely florals - from epic arches to the most romantic of bouquets w...

Ross Gay is a gardener - he is also an award-winning poet and a professor. A founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a food justice and joy project, Ross joins Cultivating Place this day of Thanksgiving to share more about his garden life journey, the structure of care it represents, and the unabashed gratitude and delight it brings him daily. Join us! Cultivating Place now has...

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 quality of life and sense of wellbeing. In 2015, Melanie left her 15-year corporate career in the publishing world without a completely clear sense of what she would - or wanted to do- next. Her intui...

Johanna Silver is a gardener, writer and editor, formerly the garden editor at Sunset Magazine and regular contributor to Martha Stewart Living, Better Homes & Gardens, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the author of The Bold Dry Garden, on the garden and legacy of famed California famed plantswoman Ruth Bancroft. This week she joins us to talk about her newest book: Growing Weed in the Gard...

Fallon Shea is a self-described rose devotee and roseologist currently making her life with roses in Southern California as a grower, designer, artist, and writer. She says that roses found her when she was lost at the age of 19, “tricked her into gardening” then, and have kept her happily under their spell as their devoted student ever since from pruning 10,000 roses in the field, to savoring the...

Cultivating Place kicks off the month of May - with two-episodes focused on ROSES – we start off this week before Mother’s Day here in the U.S., with a visit to David Austin Roses in conversation with Michael Marriott, senior rosarian and at David Austin for more than 35 years. He considers the rose among the most beloved of garden plants and as such a very conduit for awareness and care of garden...