Cultivating Place

This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by gardener, author, activist and entomologist, Doug Tallamy. Ten years ago, his first book "Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in our Gardens," made clear how important our own home gardens and landscapes COULD be to improving the outlook for insects, birds and all other wildlife – indeed for the very future and health of our plane...

As we knock on the door of December, and the garden and its greenery call out to us in very different ways than they do in other seasons of the year, this week on Cultivating Place, we speak with British Gardener, Horticulturist and Floral designer Thomas Broom-Hughes of Thomas Bloom floristry and Petersham Nurseries. He has garden-gathered visions of luxurious winter beauty and traditions to shar...

The late autumn into winter months – from the Harvest Moon rising in October to the Winter Solstice on December 21st and through the beginning of the new calendar year, mark traditional seasons of gratitude, of giving thanks, and of offerings of generous service. For me, my garden itself and my gardening practice are my very best, most consistent acts of both gratitude and service to the world – a...

The right tools can make all the difference in our lives and in our work. This is as true in gardening as in all other aspects of life. This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by Dorian Winslow, president of Womanswork, a 35-year-old company which almost 33 years ago now introduced the first work and garden gloves designed specifically for women. Join us.

The 13th century Persian poet Rumi famously wrote: “Let the beauty you love be what you do, there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.” Ryland Engelhart and Finian Makepeace took these words to heart and in 2013 founded Kiss the Ground. Named in honor of the famed poem, Kiss the Ground works to restore soils worldwide by promoting and developing models that accelerate the adoption of...

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 we’re joined by Uk based garden designer Jinny Blom, whose new book is entitled “The Thoughtful Gardener: an intelligent approach to garden design”. After 17 years and more than 250 gardens designed around the globe, Jinny shares with us her thoughtful, creative, musical and heartfelt perspective and process. Join us! You can download or subscribe to the Cultivating...

No matter where you live, the native plants of that area help define the beauty, history and meaning of all life there – from the soil, to the birds and bugs and mammals – four legged and two legged. On Cultivating Place this week we’re joined by the California Native Plant Society to hear more about the state of our native plants and their upcoming Conservation Conference Jan. 30-Feb. 3, 2018. Jo...

This week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by a gardener who lives and works beneath the great, big beautiful Sky of Austin, Texas –one of many real gardening epi-centers in our country. Linda Lehmusvirta is a home gardener and gardening advocate in Austin, and as the Producer of a weekly program on KLRU-TV, PBS in Austin she is most well known as The Central Texas Gardener. Join us. Read more a...

Elizabeth Lawrence was one of the grand dames of American horticulture in the 1900s. She was not only an avid gardener, but the first trained and licensed woman landscape architect out of the landscape architecture program at University of North Carolina, Raleigh. She designed, gardened and experimented with planting zones enthusiastically in her Charlotte, North Carolina, home and garden from the...

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...

In the realm of gardenways and traditional garden design being inextricably interwoven with a culture, for me the garden design and techniques, and gardens associated with Japanese culture stand out. This week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by Leslie Buck whose new book, “Cutting Back: My Apprenticeship in the Gardens of Kyoto,” recounts her experience during a three-month intensive apprentice...

When you hear the phrase "gardens of the wild, wild west," what comes to mind? For gardener, author and radio host Mary Ann Newcomer of Boise, Idaho, there’s a long history of intrepid plants, gardens and gardeners that come before her — from the first peoples to the settlers who traveled West as pioneers in the 1800s. On Cultivating Place this week, Mary Ann (AKA The Dirt Diva on the Boise radio...

Leslie Bennett is a garden designer of both English and Jamaican descent working out of Oakland, CA. With a Jamaican-born husband, a two year old son, and knowledgeable, passionate views about the importance of cultural heritage, on cultivating Place this week, Leslie shares her journey navigating the marriage of beauty, function, cultural property and the radical activism of gardening. Join us!

Late summer is fire season in the American West. A part of life. This week Cultivating Place speaks with Gary Ferguson, author of "Land on Fire: The New Reality of Wildfire in the West," a collection of scientific lectures about wildfire, which at their best serve as a window into the larger issue of our relationship to the natural world.

In my experience, no home and garden are just perfect. And yet, they are just right if we bring the right perspective. Author and gardener Marianne Willburn shares this belief and she joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about her own gardening journey, and lessons learned from her book Big Dreams, Small Gardens. In this life, we might be tempted to wait to plant our garden until we thi...

This week on Cultivating Place we hear the next in our series of Dispatches from the Home Garden, this time from a north Seattle neighborhood where artist, gardener and aspiring vermicompost farmer Emily Wilkins tends to composting worms, awkward old maidens of shrubs. She starts and ends her days in the garden with in the company of family and some of her favorite friends – the plants, the worms...

This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by Uk based garden designer Jinny Blom, whose new book is entitled “The Thoughtful Gardener: an intelligent approach to garden design”. After 17 years and more than 250 gardens designed around the globe, Jinny shares with us her thoughtful, creative, musical and heartfelt perspective and process. Join us!

There's something to be said for having deep and historic roots to one region – one gardening and natural history home. I have an admiration for gardeners who’ve been born and raised in the historic home territories of their families before them, who have been working their own gardens for 20, 40 or 60 years. I have yet to live and work in the same garden for more than 7 years. And while I do envy...

In life, there are generalists and there are specialists. This week on Cultivating Place, we’re speaking with botanist Dr. Ben Grady about his work with ornamental buckwheats and the upcoming Eriogonum Society conference in Weed, California. While you may not be familiar with the genus Eriogonum, I can promise you, once you meet these beautiful resilient native flowering plants, you’ll know they’r...

It is full on summer. Perhaps you are in the very middle of summer holidays here at mid-July. If you are like me, there is a special anticipation to the books of summer we choose to companion us on holiday, at least one of which has to be a garden book. The world of garden writing includes lushly photographed coffee table books, how-to books and garden literature, among others. This week on Cultiv...

Over the past year of Cultivating Place interviews, we’ve heard references to the importance of the Smithsonian Gardens archives for the research of such historians, writers and gardeners as Marta McDowell while writing "All the President’s Gardens", as Andrea Wulf while she was writing "Founding Gardeners" and "The Invention of Nature", and as Ryder Ziebarth as she was working to document and pre...

This week on Cultivating Place, a conversation with a home gardener who has moved not just gardens, but continents and hemispheres. As we just reached the height of sunlight with our summer solstice, she eased into her winter. She shares a gardening story of learning, community and adaptability. Pen Pender is a gardener, mother, wife, voracious reader, community activist, bee keeper, cook and novi...

Next week – June 28 to July 4 – our country is celebrating American Flowers Week, celebrating American-grown flowers in 50 states. In celebration, Debra Prinzing, the founder of what’s known as the Slow Flowers LLC — who we interviewed last July — has organized a Slow Flowers Summit in Seattle, Washington on Sunday, July 2. There will be speakers and activities – shared food, shared flowers and sh...

In our last Cultivating Place "Dispatches from the Home Garden," we heard from a young gardener experiencing her first garden dislocation/relocation in Sacramento, California. This week – in many ways in honor of Father’s Day — we hear from another home gardener, this time in New Jersey and this time on the same land her grandparents cultivated and which she and her husband, with the steady help a...