Cultivating Place

This week we revisit a best-of Cultivating Place conversation focusing on seeding our imaginations—metaphorically and literally, with Diane Wilson writer, gardener, emeritus executive director of Dream of Wild Health and, more recently, emeritus executive director of The Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. Diane has long interwoven her gardening and her advocacy work with her writing, and h...

In a continuation of Women’s History Month and our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, and what they are growing in this world, especially as it relates to improving the impact of our gardening lives on the larger planet, I am so pleased to be in conversation this week with Kathy Kramer. Kathy is a long-time advocate for native plant and ecological gardening based on the...

In this first week of March, we kick off Women’s History Month in conversation with one of the great critical thinkers and writers of our time, Rebecca Solnit. Writer, historian, feminist, and activist, Rebecca’s long bibliography epitomizes her wide-ranging humanitarian interests—from politics to cultural geography to environmentalism and an abiding love of the earth herself. In her hands, all of...

This last week of February, we return to our love of apples – and the warm comfort of eating and cooking with homegrown ones, a particular joy in late February when spring and summer seem close but also still too far away. We’re in conversation with the UK’s James Rich, orchardist, chef, and author of Apple: Recipes from the Orchard and his latest Orchard: Sweet and Savoury Recipes from the Countr...

Now more than halfway from the winter solstice to the spring equinox, many of us have seeds of spring and summer foods on our minds (and hearts). So, this week we continue our celebration of Black History Month, and love stories, centered on the cooperative, and communal concept of Ujaama, in conversation with Bonnetta Adeeb of Ujaama Seeds, and the Ujaama Cooperative Farming Alliance, and Nathan...

Love is already a theme in the work of Cultivating Place, to be sure, but with last week’s loving work around the restoration of historic apple orchards in southwestern Colorado, and this week’s episode, which I think of as the Love Letters of Abra Lee, love letters, love stories, and loving gardeners is an explicit theme here this month!  In celebration of Black History Month in progress and Vale...

As February is upon us we turn from a love letter to biodiversity writ large to a labor of love in conserving the biodiversity of one iconic fruit in large part born of human labor across the ages and the globe – apples. We’re in conversation with Jude Schuenemeyer, who with his wife Addie, has spent decades discovering, researching, documenting, protecting, restoring, and propagating the rich div...

This week we complete our 4-part conservation series kicking off 2023 by taking a broader look at the Klamath River’s namesake region and the importance of knowing any place better from multiple perspectives for the most effective and durable conservation to be truly possible.  We’re in conversation with Michael Kauffman, research plant ecologist, educator, and founder with his botanist wife Allis...

Seen in the overview, the 30 x 30 conservation efforts at federal and state levels are tremendous, but as the last two weeks’ conversations have made clear, it is at the landscape and local levels that these conservation efforts work or don’t work, get done or don’t, and ideally get done as thoroughly and thoughtfully as possible. This week we focus on one specific and historical project at least...

This week we continue our multi-part series on the many facets of the global 30 x 30 conservation efforts as they continue across the state of California as just one example of local, state, and national efforts aggregated. We're in conversation with Jun Bando, the new executive director of the California Native Plant Society, and back in conversation with Liv O’Keefe, the senior director of Publi...

Welcome, 2023! This week Cultivating Place kicks off a multi-part series devoted to the international, national, state, and local conservation efforts collectively known as 30 x 30 – a multi-faceted commitment by governments, agencies, and localities to securely preserve 30% of our world’s biodiversity by 2030. While President Joe Biden committed to the goals of the 30 x 30 conservation concept wi...

As we look out over a new garden year this week, a conversation to help us meet our garden learning goals. Award-winning designers, writers, educators, and consummate plant-driven gardeners Annie Guillefoyle and Noel Kingsbury join us to share more about their year-round and globally accessible Garden Masterclass forum. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for...

Cris Sarabia is the conservation director of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy. He is also a dedicated and active member of many local land and conservation organizations in his home region of North Long Beach, in Southern California, including GreyWater Action Network, the California Native Plant Society, Pelecanus, and Puente Latino, a grassroots non-profit art, culture, and ecology or...

This week, a pre-Solstice offering for Cultivating Place listeners! Maria Popova is the creator and writer behind The Marginalian (formerly known as Brain Pickings), which, for the past 16 years, has been a daily—perhaps even hourly—exploration of wonder in our world as seen through the lenses of how we as humans express ourselves in our own creativity, our intellectual curiosity, our sadnesses an...

This week – we visit and learn from gardeners' past as we look to the future in conversation with Judith Tankard, a landscape historian, author, and preservation consultant. Tankard is the author or co-author of twelve illustrated books on landscape history, including her most recent publications, Beatrix Farrand: Garden Artist, Landscape Architect (Monacelli Press, 2022); Gardens of the Arts and...

Kier Holmes is a garden designer and writer regularly contributing to the likes of Martha Stewart, Better Homes and Gardens, Gardenista, Sonoma Magazine, Marin Magazine, and Sunset Magazine. She is also a children’s garden and science educator. In her writing and designing, she focuses on low-cost and low-impact, chemical-free, richly textured, visually dynamic spaces full of life – all of which i...

Dear All, Rebecca Schiller is a gardener, a smallholding steward, an activist, and author of: A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention, A Memoir of Coming Home to My Neurodivergent Mind – about grounding back to land, place, and garden - even after a surprising diagnosis of severe ADHD. Schiller’s writing and her gardening-life vividly reminds us all that being different doesn’t have to mean broken – in o...

In this week after Veterans Day here in the U.S, and in this season clarifying that gratitude is one of the greatest gifts of the garden and the growing world, we’re in conversation with someone who knows this gift of the garden perhaps especially well. Zepherine - Zee – Hanson is an Air Force Veteran who, after 8 years serving as a military photojournalist, took a medical retirement in 2004. As p...

In one of our more flamboyant arboreal seasons of the year—when our charismatic woody megaflora of the Northern Hemisphere—the trees—are chorophylling down, coloring up, and turning over their foliage biomass to the soil in preparation for the winter ahead, this week we are in a conversational exploration about the scale and meaning of trees, with William (Ned) Friedman, 8th director of the Arnold...

Settling into November now, this week on Cultivating Place we’re in conversation with three members of the horticultural team at Filoli, a historic house and 16 acres cultivated garden in Woodside, California, where they are striving toward environmental and cultural practices to generously pay their long history of privilege forward. Just in time for the generous season in front of us. At Filoli,...

Approaching All Hallow’s Eve/Halloween, Samhain, and Day of the Dead, we are entering into the season of gratitude - running from now through the Winter Solstice & the calendar’s new year. It is a season of gathering, collection, and reflection, and Cultivating Place is in conversation this week with an artist and a green spirit in our garden care world, Louesa Roebuck, about her newest book Punk...

This week on Cultivating Place, we continue with fall/winter planning and planting, this time with a focus on design, in conversation with Nick and Allison McCullough – of McCullough landscape & Nursery, a design, build, and maintenance firm based in New Albany, Ohio. Their new book American Roots, Lesson and Inspiration from the Designers Reimagining our Home Gardens, is a transcontinental tour o...

As another offering to all of you in this Autumnal planting and planning period, a revisit and reminder of the poetics involved as well as the pragmatics, in conversation with award-winning poet and long-time home gardener Camille Dungy. Camille is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collectio...

As we look to our fall and winter planting and planning windows, this week, Cultivating Place is back in conversation with Uli Lorimer, native plantsman and Director of Horticulture at the Native Plant Trust. His new book, "The Northeast Native Plant Primer: 235 Plants for an Earth Friendly Garden," is a great resource no matter where you garden. Join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button!...

This first full week of Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere – looking toward the month of October and its many harvest celebrations, we look to our seeds – the beginning and end of the lives of the seed-bearing plants who make our lives possible.  Stacey Denton, of Flora Farm & Design Studio in Williams, Oregon, is an organic flower farmer, bioregional seed grower, and homesteader based in the Klama...