Cultivating Place

This week on Cultivating Place, we look at culture and ecology with Farmer Rishi. Rishi is a farmer/gardener, teacher, thinker, and lover of life-based in Southern California. The executive director of the Sarvodaya Institute there, Rishi leads by example and by invitation. His intention for working in the fields of regeneration and urban farming is to joyfully increase understanding around the ba...

Anna Andreyeva is a Russian-born UK- based garden designer, plantswoman, and mother. She is currently pursuing a horticultural and ecological research Ph. D. focused on perennial steppe plants around the world for green roofs and general urban planting in a changing world under British plantsman Nigel Dunnett in Sheffield, England. Anna designed the plantings for many public spaces, including the...

If you ask me, the independent nurseries and growers of our world – especially those focused on helping us as gardeners create not only beautiful gardens but also gardens that contribute to the ecologies of our places, are some of our great national treasures. This week following Labor Day, we celebrate these treasures wherever they may be in conversation with one: Barton Springs Nursery in Austin...

Pam Penick is the gardener behind the well-known long-time garden blog known as Diggi ng. Based in Austin, Texas, Pam is an avid and audacious gardener and garden writer. She is also a determined garden community builder in all that she does from digging, to writing, to organizing gatherings like the Garden Bloggers Fling, a convening of garden communicators in a different city or gardening region...

Still in the Dog Days of Summer - the heat it hot, the days are long, and garden maintenance in the form of watering, weeding, and perhaps mowing and blowing (especially in the dry and droughty parts of the country right now) might be wearing thin….especially with the relentless watering/mowing/blowing of a thirsty lawn. Maybe you’re rethinking your lawn? Wanting to water/mow less and see butterfl...

In our ongoing exploration of where gardeners are and what they are doing in our world right now, we head pretty far north on Cultivating Place this week in conversation with Canadian gardener Janet Melrose.  Janet is known in Calgary, Alberta as the Cottage Gardener, she is also an urban farming spokesperson and leader, a horticultural therapist, and co-author with fellow gardener Sheryl Normande...

This week on Cultivating Place, we’re in conversation with Jenny Jones and Jen Toy. They are gardeners, landscape architects, and caring humans who are taking the idea of a test plot to the community level. A test plot is a traditional term used in botany and land reclamation work. It describes a smaller piece of land on which outcomes are observed and tested in order to apply an appropriate treat...

David Godshall is a landscape architect, gardener, and meta-garden philosopher making his way with his young family and his Terremoto Landscape Architecture design studio team in Los Angeles. The Terremoto team was featured as one of Elle Décor’s A List of designers in 2021. David’s LA home garden and his perspective on adventurous gardening and design are featured in Under Western Skies, on which...

It’s the height of warm season crops in our gardens here in the Northern Hemisphere, and this week Cultivating Place is joined by Jeff Quattrone – graphic artist, gardener, and heirloom vegetable and seed advocate based in Salem County, New Jersey. Jeff is particularly dedicated to the preservation and sharing forward of the histories and genetics of historic, culturally, and economically importan...

It’s the height of summer farmers' markets as community hubs, and this week we're in conversation with Cheetah Tchudi co-founder with his wife Sami and his parents, Susan and Steve Tchudi, of Turkeytail Farm, a small diversified organic family farm serving the community of Butte County California.  Cheetah is also the founder and Program Director of Butte Remediation, providing support to home and...

In a month where there is a lot of talk about what it means to be a citizen of this country – this world even – this week we follow last week’s urban garden conversation with another, this time with Karen Kahle Executive Director of the Civic Garden Center of Greater Cincinnati, where for 80 years the Center has empowered gardeners, grown food, habitat, educational programs, and community in abund...

San Francisco Bay Area’s Greenhouse Project is a cultural and economic restoration garden project making use of what we have and growing on it. This week Cultivating Place is joined by Caitlyn Galloway who shares more about the firm belief of this project that Urban Agriculture is essential to building a sustainable future wherever you might live. The Greenhouse Project is an urban agriculture ini...

K joins Cultivating Place this week to delve into the long view and deep relationships born of the generosity of seed – and seed people - in our garden lives. 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 first public library-based seed lending library in the US; in 2008 he went on to co-found with his partner Doug M...

It is really and truly summer now Happy Summer Solstice Season in the Northern Hemisphere. Are your gardens and parks full of the sound and movements of winged life – the fluttering of moths at your white flowers, at the porch or street light each evening? Dragonflies, mosquitos, bumblebees, and flower flies dancing across your flowers and grasses by day? National Pollinator Week is June 20 – 26,...

Teresa J Speight is a Washington DC-based gardener, garden historian, and podcaster under the name of Cottage in the Court. Teri’s new book out from Bloom! Imprint is BLACK FLORA – a gorgeous look into transformative humans of color and creativity at work with flowers. Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cul...

This week we consider the idea of mental health and our gardens from an even more poignant perspective. In the wake of the recent Uvalde and then Oklahoma gun violence deaths and tragedies, I wish this was not such a timely episode, but it is. I am joined this week in conversation by Gabrielle Chanel El, Chanae Pickett, and Ezekiel McCarter - founders of the Long Live Love Foundation. Following th...

I think it’s nearly impossible to try and stay abreast of current events, and not simultaneously need to remind ourselves to care for our individual mental health - for ourselves, but hopefully to contribute to the sanity of our collective as well. I was so pleased to read last week that at one of the garden world’s biggest show events, London’s RHS Chelsea Flower Show, held the last week of May,...

As summer arrives, more than 1 million US households are now engaged in gardening – a number that is double what it was before the pandemic. This week we focus on the communal power and importance of local garden information – provided in-person, on-air, in writing, or online, to help grow gardeners. We’re in conversation with Lyons Filmer and Susan Hayes, creators and hosts of "In The Coastal Gar...

IN the spirit of May, this week we’re headed out in the garden, or down the block, or up the trail for some planty wonder and magic in the company of Bridget Beth Collins – the creative force, glittering vision, and imagination behind the botanical art of Flora Forager. Bridget is a gardener, a mother, and an artist who often brings all three of her life roles together in her work. She founded the...

Any gardener and their muscles, bones, joints, and ligaments know that gardening is a full-contact sport (or religion), this week we’re joined by Madeline de Vries Hooper and Jeff Hughes, the founders of GardenFit, a new PBS series focusing on a holistic approach to fitness and taking care of your body while you take care of your garden, because as Madeline and Jeff believe: your body is your best...

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 for the long haul) in a way that is reminiscent of the very best of private gardens: it is open, it is both lively and tranquil, it i...

In preparation for May and Mother’s Day here in the US, we’re in conversation with Lorene Edwards Forkner, a gardener, a writer, a cook, a mother, a daughter, the garden columnist for the Seattle Times, and known as gardener cook on-line. Lorene joins CP this week to share more about her artistic garden-based daily practice for the last four years, which has resulted in the new book: Color in and...

In honor of Earth Day on April 22nd, this week, Cultivating Place is in conversation about a person who committed their career to the idea, design, and championing of Parks for the Nature of Everyone. April 26th is the 200th birthday of Frederick Law Olmsted – in celebration and recognition, the National Association for Olmsted Parks is joining with celebration partner locations around the US to h...

Nitasha Manchanda is a genetic scientist, a mother, a wife, a gardener and the creator and host of a podcast series entitled The Indian Edit – exploring the inspiring lives of women of the Indian diaspora – living everywhere from Boston, where Nitasha now makes her home, to Germany, Canada, and even returned to India. Subtitled conversations with innovators in design, culture, and entrepreneurship...

Rose Ramirez is a California native plant gardener, basketweaver, photographer, and educator of Chumash descent; Deborah Small is an artist, photographer, and professor at the School of the Arts at California State University, San Marcos.  In preparation for California Native Plant Week 2022 (April 16 - 23), celebrating the botanical biodiversity of the California Floristic Region, Rose and Debora...