Cultivating Place

Creativity is one of those anchors-to-windward in unsettled and worrisome times. So is a hands-on, creative project – with bonus points for working with organic materials (natural fibers, clay, or – flowers)! Just in time for Valentine’s Day, and all the spring events cascading from there in the coming months, we’re joined this week by a woman who has artistry, creativity, and hands-on project ins...

This week, Guest host Abra Lee is in conversation with legendary topiary artist and star of the HGTV hit show Clipped, Mike ‘Gibby-Siz’ Gibson. Mike is based out of sunny Columbia, South Carolina, where he owns and operates his own business, “Gibson Works.” Abra and Mike talk about all things Topiary arts in their lively conversation! Diving into Mike’s time on HGTV’s hit show Clipped, how he buil...

This week – in the wind, rain, snow, and fires of early 2025 so far – it is good to be able to focus on SEEDs this week – seeds remind us so tangibly of our ability to get small, to slow down into a fortified dormancy of resilience, rest, and regrowth – and the possibilities inherent in all of those states. And this week, Cultivating Place does just that in conversation with Dan Brisebois, host of...

Maybe your New Year’s resolution was to take up gardening, or to garden more, or in a new way? Well, this week’s Cultivating Place conversation is all about making time for gardening even for very busy people!  Nicole Burke, the energy force behind the online forum known as Gardenary, is with us to share more about the philosophy centered in her new book: The 5-Minute Gardener. It’s the genius of...

To ring in the New Year, this week on Cultivating Place, guest host Ben Futa is in conversation with Bo Dennis, lead farmer and designer of Dandy Ram farm, located in rural Maine. Dandy Ram is an LGBTQ+ flower farm and floral design studio that sustainably grows and designs florals for weddings and ships evergreen and floral products nationally. Dandy Ram is committed to bringing joy to the world,...

Happy Winter Solstice season! In celebration of the planetary moment of the longest night and the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, which took place on December 21st, this week we revisit a conversation about getting STILL. We hold a moment of stillness to notice and honor our places, our selves, and our many companions in time and space. We revisit our conversation with Artist/...

This week, CP Guest Host Abra Lee celebrates the season in conversation with the King of Camellias, Sidney Frazier. Sidney is based out of sunny Charleston, South Carolina, where he sits as Vice President of Horticulture at Middleton Place - a historic home and garden there is believed to be the oldest landscaped garden in America. Camellias were first planted in America near the end of the 18th c...

Many gardeners are also collectors. Collectors of things like pots, books, seeds, and - of course - plants. Some plant collecting gardeners collect flowers, shrubs, herbs or seeds. Others collect trees – and when writer, artist and curious human Amy Stewart, award winning author of Flower Confidential, Wicked Plants, and The Drunken Botanist, ran into more and more humans who collected trees in va...

This week, Cultivating Place’s guest host, Ben Futa, is in conversation with Katie Elzer-Peters, owner and founder of The Garden of Words, a digital marketing agency for the green industry. Katie is a lifelong plant lover, storyteller, communicator, and artist. An early love for museums and public gardens led Katie to discover what has today become her mission: empowering more plant-based business...

This week, when many in the US have time off with family and friends, we note our gratitude for Public Gardens and green spaces around our country and in our lives. Guest-Host Abra Lee is in conversation with one of North America’s public garden leaders, Paul Redman. As President and Chief Executive Officer of Longwood Gardens for the last 16 years, Paul has implemented institutional and strategic...

In honor of the season of gratitude, festivities, long nights, rest, and reflection upon us, this week we revisit a BEST OF conversation with Robin Wall Kimmerer, Indigenous scholar, professor, land and culture tender, MacArthur Genius Grant award winner, mother, and all around wonderful human. She is also a gardener. Her book, Braiding Sweetgrass (Milkweed Editions) is something of a philosophica...

In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, and all that they are growing in this world, this week in particular I am delighted to be in conversation with a longtime and inspiring plants person. Tony Spencer is the plantsman cultivator behind the Canadian-based endeavor, which for the last decade has been known as The New Perennialist. Under this name, Tony is a writer, a...

This week on Cultivating Place, guest host Ben Futa of Botany in South Bend, Indiana, is back, this time in conversation with John Kish in the desert town of Bend, Oregon. John is the founder and owner of Somewhere That’s Green, an indoor plant shop and home of the Greenhouse Cabaret Theatre. Per John’s vision, his work and life are a combination plant shop, performance venue, and community center...

Sometimes our dreams didn’t start out as our dreams. Sometimes, our current dreams were once just seeds germinating in the crucible of time and experience leading up to what is now. For seed farmer Jen Williams, being a seed farmer situated within a small island community was not always the dream. The dream to effect meaningful change in the world around her, started out for Jen in a realm all to...

Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and W. EB Dubois are some of the many recognizable names of an intellectual cultural and artistic period in American history known as the Harlem Renaissance. This week, CP Guest Host Abra Lee is in conversation with Reverend Jerri Mitchell-Lee. They enjoy a deep dive into the history of Effie Lee Newsome, another highly respected writer - and gardener - of the...

The wilds of New Jersey might sound like a humorous oxymoron to many – many who don’t live in New Jersey. Humor is one of our guests' great traits this week, along with his deep love of the plants and places making up New Jersey and its wilds—whether scrappy and unlikely roadside verges or extant majestic old-growth forests.   Jared Rosenbaum and his wife Rachel Mackow own and operate New Jersey’s...

This week, we’re so excited to air the first listen to one of our CP LIVE conversations, which were recorded live in front of an audience on the home ground of the Cultivators of Place with whom we are speaking. I am so thrilled to kick the airing of this series off on my own home ground in Northern California - back in conversation with Sandy Fisher and Durl Van Alstyne of Golden State Linen, pre...

Amanda Thomsen is a horticulturist, garden designer, keynote speaker, freelance writer, backyard consultant, and author living in suburban Chicago. Amanda wants to help the world live more sustainably (but without a load of effort and twice the fun!). Amanda has been a professional horticulturist, landscape designer, and project manager for the past twenty-plus years. Her focus is bringing rule-br...

Dr. Alan Weakley is a career-long botanist and conservation biologist firmly rooted in the southeast region of the U.S. For a little over 23 years, Dr. Weakley has served as the director of the UNC Chapel Hill Herbarium, which since 2000 has been part of the North Carolina Botanical Garden. Throughout his career, from his PhD work to his professorial and director duties and community engagement wo...

Erin Benzakein of Floret Flower Farm needs little introduction to most garden-minded listeners. She has been so instrumental is cultivating a flower-farmer and flower-farming economy in our country. Her innovative and dedicated seed research and breeding work of the past almost decade, however, is whole new lens through which to appreciate her work. Back in 2017, when I first interviewed Erin for...

One day in his mid-adulthood, at a particularly low point after many years of battling debilitating depression, Jarod K. Anderson witnessed the presence of a Great Blue Heron fishing in a creek in the woods near his home. In the opening pages of his new book, Something in the Woods Loves You, he describes the transformative moment of meeting this “poem of ancient slowness” as a “bridge to when nat...

This week, in honor of Labor Day just passed, we venture into the world of garden preservation, history through the lens of spaces of incarceration, and how these can help all of us consider, with clearer eyes, the great diversity of ways in which the word Garden is used. We’re in conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Lara, a cultural geographer and Garden Historian who is looking at the role and uses o...

At this back-to-school, change-of-seasons moment, I thought we would all enjoy a good bedtime-story vibe. Enjoy this Best of CP conversation with Gwendolyn Wallace.  Gwendolyn Wallace is a gardener, a student, a teacher, a historian, and the author of two new works of illustrated children’s literature. Joy Takes Root, and The Light She Feels Inside (both published this year) are works grounded in...

This week, A BEST OF conversation. In this long, hot, fiery summer here in Northern CA and wet and windy summer in other parts of the country – I really needed some flowers – and thought our conversation with the UK’s Shane Connolly might be just the thing. ENJOY! As we tend toward summer’s end, with end of summer and fall events and celebrations perhaps in mind, maybe even winter events in the pl...

It’s back to school time – you can tell by the ads on television and radio (yes, I was watching the Olympics!) and by the displays at the stores with notebooks, pencils, backpacks, and lunch boxes being on prominent display. As you and I know, one of the best classrooms available to us all is the outdoors – from the wildlands of fields, woods, and waysides around us to more formal state and nation...