Cultivating Place

Late July, August, and September (the dog days of summer with the constellation Sirius high in the night sky) are perhaps the stretch of the year in most climates of the Northern Hemisphere that really show you what your garden and plants are made of (for better or worse) after months of them producing and growing under long hours of sun, high heat, and either humidity or drought. Or smoke. It’s a...

Tim Johnson is engaged in the native plant and garden worlds on both personal and professional levels. Having worked with Seed Savers Exchange earlier in his career, Tim last joined us on Cultivating Place a few years back as Executive Director for The Botanic Garden of Smith College. Tim is a spouse, a father, a life long learner and gardener, and since January of this year, he is the CEO of the...

Working under the online name Trackless Wild, Janisse Ray is an American writer, naturalist, and environmental activist. Just about everything she does speaks to me of the largest meaning and importance of what it means to be a capital G gardener in our world. A moving storyteller, speaker, and teacher, her book titles include Ecology of A Cracker Childhood (1999), a memoir; Wild Spectacle, Seekin...

This week we revisit a favorite conversation from the archive, “The Comfort of Crows, A Backyard Year," with author and backyard tender and observer, Margaret Renkl. Reminding us that even on days when we feel overheated and overwhelmed, there is always some comfort, intelligence, and agency to be found among the flora and fauna of this generous planet. Many of you will remember our previous conve...

“Are Humans Parasites sowing our own hunger, or fruit, gifts from Earth to our future? Is the edge of our lives, civilization, and species a cliff to catastrophe or a bridge to transformation?” These are the words, questions, and motivations of poet and gardener, Frederick Livingston author of Trees are Bridges to the Sky a collection of essays and poems exploring the human/climate connection. I f...

It’s the seedy time of summer. This week of the fourth of July we’re working from the premise that foundational to good citizenship is great stewardship of place (plants and people) and we are looking to the desert Southwest in conversation with Alexandra Zamecnik, Executive Director of Native Seed/SEARCH. For more than four decades, Native Seeds/SEARCH (NS/S) has stewarded the seeds of the desert...

It’s full summer - for us and for the fauna of the Northern Hemisphere.  That means many of our most charismatic, sun-loving pollinators are at the peak of their seasonal cycles – and we are celebrating National Pollinator Week with Tora Rocha of the Pollinator Posse based in Oakland, CA – sharing all things love of pollinators. Tora is a gardener and ecosystem steward, leader, and innovator in pu...

Happy (almost) Summer Solstice! In celebration of the planetary moment of the longest day and the shortest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, taking place on June 20th, we get Still. We hold a moment of stillness to notice and honor our places, our selves, and our many companions in time and space. We’re in conversation with Artist/Photographer Mary Jo Hoffman all about her more than a...

In honor of Juneteenth celebrations coming up, we check in on the Anne Spencer House & Garden in Lynchburg, VA. The home and garden of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer and her husband Edward, this garden remains the only known fully restored historic garden of an African American in the U.S. We’re in conversation with Anne and Edward’s granddaughter, Shaun Spencer-Hester – who serves as the Ex...

Cultivating our places with attention, intention, thought and care is certainly an ethos I hold dear and advocate for with some measure of ferocity. When student and gardener Félix de Rosen reached out to me in 2021 seeking advice on a new book project. His thinking and design resonated with me, and we have communicated back and forth ever since.  Now an ecological designer and artist, and graduat...

With the Chelsea Flower Show in the UK just completed, the gardening world as a whole has the concept of Garden Design awards and recognition - along with the garden world’s trends, concerns and priorities - top of mind. Such display and attention – and recognition well beyond the garden world – has the potential to move hearts and minds and, more importantly, to change minds and behaviors. We hop...

This week on Cultivating Place, we’re in conversation with Kristen Bradley, Co-founder and Creative Director of the world-renowned Australian-based Milkwood Permaculture.  Their new Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook is another perfect resource for our summer garden (and life) plotting, planning, and planting, with an emphasis on garden-life-based habits for hope in a changing world. Join us! C...

Just in time for your continued planning, plotting, and planting in order to grow the earliest and the latest and the biggest and the longest producing and the best tasting of the summer vegetable and fruit bounty, this week Cultivating Place returns to our intermittent series on seeds in conversation with Adam Alexander, author of The Seed Detective, Uncovering the Secret Histories of Remarkable...

Bevin Cohen and his wife Heather Marie co-founded Small House Farm, a homestead, garden, family, and bridge to the natural world around them. Bevin writes: “The garden is where we meditate, harvest our seeds and learn about Mother Nature’s many wonders. We are avid seed savers, and amateur plant breeders. We believe that each seed is a connection to every grower that stewarded that variety before...

To kick off May, looking forward to Mother’s Day, Graduations, and the promise of Summer Gardening in general here in the US, this week we go all in for flowers in pots! with one of the world’s bright gardens and floral stars: Sarah Raven. Her newest book: A Year Full of Pots Container Flowers for All Seasons (Bloomsbury Press, 2024) notes that pots in the garden are like "bubbles in a glass of ch...

The third week of April is California Native Plant week, this year being celebrated by the California Native Plant Society via 8 days of action in honor and protection of our native plant diversity. Our celebratory action item here at Cultivating Place is being in conversation this week with Aaron Sims, Director of the Rare Plant Program for CNPS. 2024 year marks the 50th anniversary of the CNPS R...

Following on from native plant week, this week we revisit a BEST OF conversation about some of our favorite native plant visitors: our native bumble bees. Bumble bee conservation has recently had some good news: the Xerces Society recently kicked off their newest Bumble Bee Atlas project, this time in the US Midwest. With that in mind, please enjoy our conversation from 2023 with Leif Richardson,...

Hummingbirds are a beloved and charismatic creature of the America’s, the more than 350 species of hummingbirds have coevolved with the flora of the Americas for millions of years. For this fourth week in our series of 5 episodes on our gardens as important habitat and we gardeners as important stewards of land and biodiversity, we check in on the state of things for the Hummingbird. Cultivating P...

This week, with Spring and seeding season fully underway—indoors and out—we speak with gardener entrepreneur Anne Fletcher of Orta Kitchen Gardens, creators of non-toxic ceramic, self-watering Orta seed pots. These pots' material lives help eliminate plastic right from the start in your plants’ growing lives, seeding more circularity into our garden lives! They have a seed club, too….Listen in! Cu...

To round out Women’s History Month in style, this week, we are back in conversation with Leslie Bennett, an Oakland, CA-based landscape designer who creates gardens that help to nourish and tell the story of who we are, individually and communally. Leslie lives out her horticultural and cultural ethos in her landscape design work with Pine House Edible Gardens and Black Sanctuary Gardens, as well...

The Great Unlawning of America has been underway for some time now, and as we have just crossed the threshold of the spring equinox earlier this week, I want to celebrate how far we have come and give us all a forceful nudge to help us stay the path with the many millions of acres of the progress we have to go in this work to trade lifeless monoculture chemically dependent lawns for a happy health...

The combining of sculpture and gardens dates back centuries if not millennia, and there are few public gardens I know of that do not incorporate sculpture into their aesthetics and identity at some point. This week we are in conversation with an exemplary public garden, whose identity grows out of this pairing: the art of horticulture and the art of sculpture. The Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculp...

Happy Women’s History Month! To kick Women’s History Month off on Cultivating Place, we visit with the woman known as the Queen of Herbs, Jekka McVicar of Jekka’s Herb Farm in the UK this week. Her long and notable career has brought the gardened world the best the herbs of the world have to offer to our gardens, to our environments, to our kitchens, and to our souls. In recognition of her herbal...

Most gardeners know the somewhat gruesome pleasure of working in the garden – with a sharp tool, or a poisonous plant, or ankle deep in a juicy scene of decomposition – and thinking to yourself, “oh, this would be a great scene for a murder mystery.” Writer and gardener Marta McDowell is with us this week for our Leap Day Special - sharing more about her newest title Gardening Can Be Murder: How P...

This week we lean into a particular aspect of our garden lives – but perhaps a favorite winter activity in the northerly climates in winter: tending to our houseplant and indoor garden family. We’re in conversation with Jane Perrone, host of the “On The Ledge” Podcast, and author of “Legends of the Leaf: Unearthing the secrets to help your plants thrive”. In this deep end of the winter season, whe...