Cultivating Place

Chad Manley is a fellow and lecturer in the School of Landscape Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Nora Jacobs and Carlos Velasco were two of the Masters of Landscape Architecture students in Chad’s spring 2023 Landscape Architecture Design Studio entitled Dancing the Dragon’s Jaw – a deeply imagined course of study designed by Chad “inviting students on a smokey dance of spac...

Can you believe it is already back-to-school season? This week, we look at what back to school means for our lifelong learning with plants. This week, we’re in conversation with members of the Miami University of Ohio engaged with Miami’s Institute for Environment and Sustainability Masters of Environment program and Institute for Food Farm to learn more about just a few of the ways plant and hort...

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 planning, we turn this week to floristry and how and where it intersects with sustainability – and as our guest today shares, with thoughtfulness. British floral designer Shane Connolly is well-known for his world-class floristry and floral design – gracing several w...

In the throes of fire season, especially in the western regions of North America, this week, we turn to the idea of not only gardening for beauty, food, and/or habitat but also fire preparedness. We’re speaking this week with Dr. Adrienne Edwards and Rachel Schleiger, biologists, botanists, gardeners, and authors of the new book Firescaping Your Home, a manual for readiness in wildfire country – i...

Sam Hoadley is the Manager of Horticultural Research at the Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware, a remarkable botanic garden and conservation center as well as one of the country’s leading research and trial gardens for native plant species as well as their old and new cultivars. Open to the public since 2013, Mt. Cuba is dedicated to us all growing at a higher level. With the fall planning and planting s...

Erin Presley is the herb, woodland, and pond garden horticulturist at Olbrich Botanical Gardens, a 16-acre, free, public garden founded in 1952 on the shores of Lake Wonona in Madison, Wisconsin. In her position since 2014, Erin has become as much a part of the landscape as the plants and animals of the garden she loves. She has been particularly instrumental in bringing to life, with the help of...

The garden in summer is at its fullest sensory delight and overwhelm – the peak of sunlight, growing hours, heat, and growth, ripening and even rotting. In this week’s conversation, embrace this sublime sensuality from various perspectives in conversation with master naturalist Nancy Lawson. Lawson is perhaps best known as The Humane Gardener, the title of her first book, and her online signature....

The garden in summer is what we all dream of: some downtime, some play time, fresh flavors, fragrances, and of course, flowers and fun. This week we revel in the beautiful chaos of a garden-inspired life with an Oklahoma accent in the company of Linda Vater, author of The Beautiful & Edible Garden, and founder of Potager Blog on Instagram and Garden Inspired Living on Youtube. Linda is exuberantly...

Novelist Jane Delury describes herself as a fledgling (maybe seedling?) gardener after 8 years into gardening being part of her everyday life and loves. This labor and love in life coincide with themes of landscapes, gardens, and gardeners becoming fully-embodied motifs and characters in her fiction writing. They show up in her first novel-in-stories, The Balcony, and in her newly released novel H...

This week before July is upon us, and thoughts of what it means to be a citizen fill our minds, hearts, and collective messaging, I am so pleased to be joined by Taylor Pennewell and Rose Hammock of the Redbud Resource Group, an advocacy organization founded in 2020 by Taylor and her cousin Madison Esposito. The Redbud Resource Group believes fiercely that intergenerational healing can occur only...

In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, and how they are growing our world, I am so pleased to be back in conversation this week with Day Schildkret, the founder, the ongoing creator, and re-creator of the movement and practice known as Morning Altars, bringing together nature, art, and ritual.  Day and his work are devoted to the pursuit of impermanent beauty and how...

National Pollinator Week is an annual celebration since 2010 in support of pollinator health that was initiated and is managed by Pollinator Partnership. This year National Pollinator Week festivities will take place across the country June 19 – 25, 2023 and in celebration, this week on Cultivating Place we look closely at one particular group of our native pollinators the charismatic bumble bees,...

No matter what you might call it – Rewilding, wildscaping, backyard habitats, Acts of Restorative Kindness, Native plant habitat gardening, Homegrown National Park, Perfect Earth, 2/3rds for the Birds, or Garden for Wildlife, the concepts of Conservation + Biodiversity + our Gardens wherever they might be is not a new idea, although it is newly imperative in our world. These three concepts as a pe...

Welcome June! This week, the third and final-for-now conversation in our series on the state of seed for native ecosystem restoration through the lens of California: seed identified, site-sourced, and grown for conservation & biodiversity support. The foundational level of seed – for scales large and small, and how it grows on from there is top of mind at the Theodore Payne Foundation in Southern...

Pat Reynolds is a restoration ecologist with more than 30 years of professional experience in the design, implementation, and monitoring of habitat restoration projects, including the effective use of native seed. He is the Director of River Partners’ Native Seed and Plant program, the former General Manager of Hedgerow Farms, and a past Associate Restoration Ecologist at H.T. Harvey & Associates....

This week we kick off a several-part series looking into the state of seed, specifically wildland seed, for conservation and ecological restoration in our world from various perspectives. We start off in conversation with Andrea Williams, the Director of Biodiversity Initiatives with the California Native Plant Society, and from there, a contributor to both the proposed California Seed Strategy an...

We are now mid-May, halfway through a month of graduations, spring celebrations, and weddings, and Mother’s Day is upon us here in the US this coming weekend. Something that all of these celebratory kinds of human-marked rituals and events have in common? We so often mark them with the best of our most loved flowers of the season. With that as our touchstone, I am so pleased to once again be in co...

As we head into the exuberance of May and towards Mother’s Day celebrations here in the U.S., this week, we speak again with award-winning poet, scholar, and University Distinguished Professor at CSU, Colorado: Camille Dungy.  Her newest book, Soil: The Story of A Black Mother’s Garden, just published on Tuesday, May 2nd, from Simon & Schuster. SOIL is a rich exploration into and celebration of an...

As we close out April, a best of conversation from Mother’s Day 2022. Can we ever get enough nurturing energy in the world? Enjoy! David Rawle is the founder and force (with contribution and support from his wife, Carol Perkins, and a wide variety of community members in Charleston, SC), behind Theodora Park, a public park in Charleston - designed and cared for (with financial and care planning fo...

This last week of April, we enjoy an art of the garden conversation with artist, historian, gardener and environmental advocate Rebecca Allan. Bronx-New York-based, Rebecca is “known for her richly layered and chromatically nuanced abstract paintings. Her work investigates watershed environments and landscapes and is inspired by her deep interest in botany and land conservation. In 2018 Rebecca es...

It is now Mid-April, and this week we are celebrating both California Native Plant Week AND the week of Earth Day. Wildflowers are blooming and being admired across the country! In honor of Earth Day 2023 and all of the fierce and tender hopes we have for it, we are back in conversation with Ireland’s Mary Reynolds, self-described as an ex-garden designer, actively reimagining and rebuilding a rel...

Great gardens need great plants, and great plants people the world over, throughout history, have made it their lives calling to bring gardeners great plants – whether introducing native plants to the horticultural trade, selecting best garden varieties from naturally occurring choices by breeding, and by educating both the trade and gardeners in their gardens on best cultivation of these same pla...

I know the adage goes that April showers bring May flowers, but based on images from across the Northern Hemisphere – from snowdrops in Vermont, Cherry Blossoms in DC, wildflowers in California, and daffodils peeking out in parts of Colorado between snow storms – April has plenty of her own bloom and the growing season is underway. To inspire your planting and designs for the season ahead, this we...

Alice Vincent is a multi-platform storyteller based in London, and examining with gusto and curiosity the intricacies of words and language, of what it is to be human, to be a woman, and to be always in service to the wonders – large and small, grief-laden and joy-spangled - of everyday life. The author of several previous books, including her nature memoir - Rootbound, Rewilding a Life, Alice goe...

For this penultimate episode of Women’s History month, Cultivating Place heads to Tacoma, Washington, to chat with Tyra Shenaurlt, horticulture resource supervisor at Metro Parks Tacoma, overseeing, among other things, a hundred fifteen-year-old glass house known as the W.W. Seymour Botanical Conservatory in Tacoma’s wright park. From March 2021 to May of 2022, the historic structure underwent a m...