Cultivating Place

January is prime seed-dreaming and seed-catalogue season. With that in mind, we’re revisiting a favorite conversation all about generosity, mutual care, good seeds, and seed people. Who doesn’t need more of all those as we continue to lay the foundation for this new year? Ken Greene – who goes by K - is a seed person. He is the co-founder of the Hudson Valley Seed Library, which in 2004 became the...

As we continue our new year, we’re once again gaining elevation and new, growing thinking. We’re in conversation with Jim Tolstrup, Executive Director of the High Plains Environmental Center in Loveland, Colorado, where, by development design, they caringly cultivate Suburbitat. Suburbitat is a land ethic, a mindset, and a book that all hold a vision of a built environment where suburbia and nativ...

In honor of the new year, fresh-faced and open-hearted in front of us, Abra Lee, Ben Futa, and Jennifer Jewell are together this week for a first-ever CP Host check-in. We’re chatting about what we’re looking back on, what we’re looking forward to, and what we’re looking to grow in 2026! Join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'...

For our final Cultivating Place episode of 2025, Abra Lee is looking forward by looking back. She’s in conversation with Philip Norman, longtime curator at the Garden Museum in London. From New Zealand to London, Philips' is a life shaped by gardens. Happy Holidays and New Year! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to sup...

In honor of the Winter Solstice happening this coming weekend on December 21st at 10:03 AM Pacific, we celebrate land and place-based cultivation from a foundation of cultural and spiritual care leading the way. We’re joined in this by Dr. Don Hankins, Professor of Geography and Planning at California State University, Chico. Of Miwok ancestry, Don, for decades now, has focused on applied research...

This week on Cultivating Place we celebrate one woman’s long-standing and loving cultivation of place in rural New Jersey. Janet Mavec is the steward and student of Bird Haven Farm, which after many years of learning from and loving, she now celebrates in word and image in her new place-based memoir: Bird Haven Farm the Story of An Original American Garden, written by Janet and photographed by Ngo...

The Klamath Mountains are a rich site of diversity in Northern California and Southern Oregon, celebrated in Michael Kauffmann and Justin Garwood’s book The Klamath Mountains, a Natural History, from Kauffmann’s Back Country Press.  Kauffmann’s most recent book, co-written with Matt Ritter, is California Trees, was just awarded The National Outdoor Book Award, and in honor of the seeds of that boo...

This week on Cultivating Place, we look towards the heart of the thankful season in memory of the enormous, fierce, and grateful soul of Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who passed from this world on October 20th, fighting for the beauty of the world right up to the end. In his honor, we revisit our 2021 conversation with him, focusing on the sacred in the everyday and in the seasonal.  Rabbi Waskow was the c...

“Ecological restoration is no longer a nicety, it’s a necessity,” proclaims the Blackland Collaborative, a group working to help alter cities so that they are biodiverse and inclusive, and helping heal human communities while restoring vulnerable species. Bridging science and design, the Collaborative brings people and nature home; and they believe in humans’ capacity to improve and protect. John...

Dr Jared Barnes is a big G gardener – and has been since his earliest expressions of self as a toddler. Now a professor of horticulture at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, Jared is also a writer under the name of Meristem and the host of the Plantastic podcast. He wants everyone’s expression of self to include a love of plants and place. In fact, he wants us to see them, k...

This week on Cultivating Place, Host Ben Futa is in conversation with Rebecca McMackin, a dedicated public servant working in the context of ecological horticulture. Rebecca is on a mission to empower more people to grow more plants in more places while cultivating empathy, compassion, and advocacy for the natural world. We last heard from Rebecca here on CP in 2021, and a lot has happened in her...

This week we finish up Artober on CP, in conversation with artist, Mary Jackson, a renowned sweetgrass basket weaver known for combining traditional methods with contemporary designs.  Based in the Low Country of South Carolina, Mary is the descendant of generations of Gullah basket weavers. Born in 1945, in 2008, Mary was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (“Genius Grant”) for "pushing the...

This week on CP, host Abra Lee is joined in conversation by Tracy Qiu, a horticulturist, researcher, and advocate who explores how plants, stories, and culture intersect. Tracy holds a masters in Public Horticulture from the University of Delaware, is a Longwood Fellow, and is finishing her doctoral thesis at Concordia University in Montreal. Her work explores the colonial roots of botanical garde...

Welcome to our next airing of a CP LIVE* conversation, this time in celebration of Artober in conversation with Sofia Laçin and Hennessy Christophel, of LA-based Studio Tutto. On highway underpasses, school walls, public park welcome centers, and city water towers, the epic hand-crafted murals of Studio Tutto tell visual stories of invisible nature to help people connect and become familiar with w...

In a world that needs a great deal from us right now, we can almost never go wrong by igniting our creativity. This week on CP we dive deeper into ArtTober in conversation with one of our favorite creatives, artists, gardeners, writers, teachers, and flower lovers. We’re speaking once again with writer, photographer, and potter Frances Palmer about her new book Life with Flowers, inspiration and l...

This week on CP, we kick off ARTOBER. Host Ben Futa is talking all things Wild By Design, the Art of Planting. He’s in conversation with Ben O’Brien of Wild By Design, who creates "artfully crafted, richly planted, lovingly tended gardens". Based in Ontario, Ben O’Brien believes that the best gardens captivate, delight, and deeply resonate with people; they respond to, reveal, and amplify the magi...

This week on Cultivating Place, in honor of this first week of Autumn, and the idea of passing time, looking back, and the importance of memory and history, host Abra Lee welcomes someone whose work reminds us that gardens are not only grown in the soil but also in the stories we keep and share. Abra is in conversation with Rose Vincent, Resource Sharing Librarian at the New York Botanical Garden’...

This week on Cultivating Place, we lean into the Art of CP, exploring how the act of Cultivating Place is artful, and how Art can be one our most beautiful acts of Cultivating Place. How acts of Cultivating Place and acts of making Art both offer us the agency to create new worlds, or new versions of our current world. These human impulses are simultaneously miraculous and represent the endless va...

In 2008, Cincinnati, Ohio, developed the program that has earned it the nickname: Green City. The Green Cincinnati Plan (GCP) is a now-17-year-running community vision updated regularly to address climate change and build a more sustainable, equitable, and resilient future for its citizens. 2008 was also the year that garden/grower by nature and engineer by profession, Rose Henry Seeger, was intro...

This week on Cultivating Place, we celebrate late summer and fall on the horizon in conversation about one of fall’s stars in the garden… past, present, and future. CP host Ben Futa is in conversation with Jessica Hall of Harmony Harvest Flower Farm, based in Weyers Cave, Virginia, to explore their "Mum Project," which aims to revive chrysanthemum production in the US by preserving, sharing, and e...

This week on Cultivating Place, host Abra Lee dives into the world of pathways to plant professions with Jazmin Albarran, executive Director of Seed Your Future, a non-profit whose vision is a world where Everyone understands the power of plants and is aware of the promising careers in the art, science, technology, and business of horticulture. Horticulture is the art, technology, and science of p...

As autumn and harvest begins to color the edges of our awareness, this week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by two people whose work is all about perennial and abundant harvest as represented by the concept, and the endless generosity, of an Orchard.  The Giving Grove, based in Kansas City, lives a purpose of providing healthy calories, strengthening community, and improving the urban environme...

Looking back, even just this year, Cultivating Place has had multiple conversations with plantspeople from around the country about the inspirational plants from, and places known as, prairies. An iconic and beloved ecosystem strongly identified with the American Midwest. As summer warms and mellows into its Augustness, we’re in conversation this week with two humans who are cultivating their plac...

Hot August nights turn to bright August nights at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, WI.  The Garden's annual GLEAM light show is celebrating its 10th anniversary and opens August 30th, transforming the very bright-by-day gardens into equally bright in a different way by night. The award-winning display runs through October 25th, and this year’s exhibit will center on the concept of reflect...

Ahhh, high summer, my friends – this week we continue with our CP summer-break reprisals, reminding us of the importance of the great outdoors and the care and cultivation of it, revisiting ecological-plantsman Benjamin Vogt’s great work Prairie Up! To inspire your planting and designs for the season ahead, a fierce advocate on behalf of our gardens being critically important links in our world’s...