Cultivating Place

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word Humane as this: Being characterized by consideration of other, compassionate. This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by Nancy Lawson author of – The Humane Gardener, Nurturing a Backyard Habitat for Wildlife. Join us! For photos visit cultivatingplace.com. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play and Stitcher.

Entryways of Civility, Pathways of Kindness: A Reflection and Social Justice Garden on the Campus of Southern Connecticut University in New Haven, CT. Originally conceived to celebrate the lives and lights of four women Alumnae of Southern Connecticut State University who were killed while trying to protect the students in their care during the course of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary...

Unprecedented – Never to Happen Again. This Zen idiom refers specifically to the transient nature of time and each and every moment no matter how seemingly mundane. This sacredness in the everyday is at the heart of our Dispatches from the Home Garden this week when we visit an American tea garden in Tivoli, New York. Join us! For photos visit cultivatingplace.com. The show is available as a podca...

Art in the garden, art from the Garden – these are concepts familiar to most gardeners and yet for many of us also perhaps still largely unplumbed. This week, we visit with Iranian-American artist and plant person, Melody Overstreet to speak more about the culture of plant and land based art and the crafting of pigments, inks, dyes and watercolors. Melody shares her cultural, artistic and plant ba...

They are in your garden by the billions, they are in your food, in your house, and all over your skin. They partner us in all we do and they make all that we do well possible to start with. Listen in to this week's Cultivating Place, when we’re joined by science and food writer Eugenia Bone to talk more about her own foray into better understanding the world of the amazing and powerful world of Mi...

The second best time to become a gardener and nature lover is right now. The first best time, is as a child. This week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by Nora McDonald and Katherine Somerville of the American Horticultural Society and by Fiona Doherty of Cornell University’s Horticulture Department and Garden Education. They talk with us about the history, impact of hopes of the American Hortic...

Happy California Native Plant Week! The California Floristic Province is home to on the order of 6,500 native plant species and there are those among us who love and want to ensure the long life of the genetics and habitats of every single one. Today, in celebration of California Native Plant Week, we’re hearing from a selection of those voices, including Native Plant Home Gardener Vincent Bellino...

On April 13th, Statesman and third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, would be 275 years old. He was also an avid and curious and acquisitive gardener and plant lover. His historic home and garden, Monticello, is an UNESCO Heritage sight, and Jefferson began designing and building Monticello at just 26 years old. With Virginia’s Historic Garden week just around the corner on April 2...

Grow what you love, it’s advice we’re given early in our gardening adventures as to how to choose what to plant, to tend and to pray over. Grow the food you love to eat, grow the flowers you love to look at or smell, grow the tree whose canopy you’d like to rest beneath. "Grow what you love" is also the title of Emily Murphy’s new book. A Northern Californian gardener, mother, educator and optimis...

Have you ever thought: that is just what the mountains taste like? That is just what the forest or the ocean must taste like? For wildcrafter Pascal Baudar, author of The New Wildcrafted Cuisine and The Wildcrafting Brewer, from Chelsea Green Publishing, what his place tastes like in a specific season is at the heart of his food and garden. Baudar works as a wild-food researcher, wild brewer, and...

Nurturing – that’s what comes to mind when I think of the work of Blanca Diaz also known as Mama Maiz. Blanca is a practicing doula and herbalist whose work takes her around the country teaching and practicing plant based healing. She nurtures new mothers as they prepare to bring new life into our world, and she nurtures plants for their wisdom, healing and beauty. She nurtures community from the...

This week on Cultivating Place, a conversation with Maria Failla, the host of Bloom & Grow Radio – a unique podcast from New York City designed specifically for indoor plant people, urban jungle dwellers, houseplant enthusiasts and succulent killers alike. Join us!

Benjamin Vogt is a next generation student of the beloved conservationist and writer Aldo Leopold and a passionate nature and garden advocate himself. In his book “A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion For An Uncertain Future” he takes the essence of Leopold’s "A Land Ethic" and brings it home to our gardens in some surprising and sometimes challenging ways. Vogt addresses why we need...

This week on Cultivating Place, Designing with Palms – in the heart of Spring Break season where those of us in colder climes might be longing for a warm, sunny, palm punctuated beach, we dig into this remarkable plant family and get above and beyond its symbolism and closer to its truer history and essence. Photographed by Caitlin Atkinson and written by Jason Dewees, the staff horticulturist at...

Most gardeners - of the indoor or outdoor variety - love (and covet) a good pot. For house plants, for focal points, for cut arrangements, for … well, just for the love of them. We might even be known to over-collect, over-indulge, over-spend, and overly adore the best of our pots. And I am a gardener taken with the handcrafted pots of Claire Bandfield, a self-taught artist living in Camas, Washin...

The healing power of gardens and nature is well known to almost anyone who gardens and has been recorded by gardeners, landscape designers and medical practitioners as far back as antiquity. This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by Dr. Clare Cooper Marcus, a leader in the field of evidence based research, education and design of what are alternatively known as healing gardens and therapeutic...

This week on Cultivating Place, we talk land and water with Hunter Ten Broeck of WaterWise Landscapes Inc. in Albuquerque, NM. No matter where we live, or how differently our land and our water supplies and sources may look, our gardens and our nature love are wholly interdependent with these two much larger elemental forces. For 25 years Hunter has been working in his garden design, garden crafti...

Danger! Home gardener, garden communicator and blogger Loree Bohl, loves a garden with stand-out foliage and bold form. But pay attention to where you’re going, or as her mail carrier and her little dog Lila both know - it can be dangerous out there! As Loree writes on her blog: "Nice plants are boring – my love is for plants that can hurt you. Agave, yucca, anything with a spike or spur!” Join us...

Last week we talked "Little House on the Prairie" and this week we visit the grassland prairies and plains of Kansas. According to the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve in Kansas and the Ladybird Johnson Wildflower center in Texas, Tallgrass prairie once covered between 170 to 250 million acres of North America – making it the largest ecosystem in the country. By 1860, the vast majority was deve...

This week on Cultivating Place, we’re celebrating the February 7th birthday of Laura Ingalls Wilder with Author and historian Marta McDowell. Her newest book is: "The World of Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Frontier Landscapes that Inspired the Little House Books” (Timber Press, 2017) – a surprising plant and environmental journey. Laura Ingalls Wilder is a name familiar to most Americans born and rais...

This week on Cultivating Place our next in the occasional series of Dispatches from the Home Garden - this time through the lens of a regional newspaper's gardening columnist. Every region needs a paper and at least 1 regionally knowledgeable gardening columnist - Laura Christman was that person in Redding, California for the many years of her long career. "Perhaps you are familiar with the term "...

This week on Cultivating Place we start off the new year with some thoughts on life and our gardens as feasts for the senses, with an eye toward life-long learning and encouraging our own senses of adventure - with purpose. Sarah Statham of Simply by Arrangement has a passion for bringing fine seasonal flowers (grown, arranged and photographed) to the North of England – and the world. She shares w...

Georgia O’Keeffe is known as the innovative mother of modernism in the art world. She was also a gardener. O’Keeffe's garden in Abiquiu, NM has always moved me as a visionary, gardener’s garden - one of those gardens of the mind, the hands, the heart and a place. To end 2017 with a flourish, exploring the nature of this human gardening impulse, and entering our own next turns on this great globe,...

This week on Cultivating Place, a lesson in garden history seen through the lens of holiday decorations and traditions from seasons past when we’re joined by Laura Viancor, Head of Horticulture, from historic Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Virginia. Join us for the greens and other festive things. Happy holidays.

This week before the Winter Solstice, Cultivating Place is exploring and appreciating the many benefits and beauty of winter’s bountiful darkness – in our gardens and in our wildlands. Join us to listen to the conversation with Keith Ashley and Amanda Gormley of the International Dark-Sky Association, two passionate people within a global organization working to protect natural darkness as the pre...