Cultivating Place

Many of the systems that run our world, let alone garden our world, are built-sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently-to discourage and disincentivize regenerative growing and regenerative thinking. Mark Lewis is a human who learned from gardening, and ultimately from running a 354-acre regenerative organic farm, how to live into his regenerative values. Gardening and regenerative farm...

Kai Wright is a gardener, but chances are good you know him as a Peabody Award-winning host, editor, and longtime journalist whose work explores the intersection of history, power, and the evolving American identity. He is co-host of The Guardian’s new video podcast: Stateside with Kai and Carter, a current events program "striving to make sense of it all". Kai’s garden history and practice help g...

For the next conversation in our intermittent series on what regenerative cultivation looks like in our world-at many levels, Cultivating Place is speaking this week with Dr. Garrett Liles, cofounder and faculty affiliate of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture and Resilient Systems at California State University, Chico. The Center is all about caring cultivation of place, understanding and sup...

To welcome October, this week on Cultivating Place, host Ben Futa welcomes Colleen Raney of Washington State’s Songbird Seed Company and Diadem Flower Company.  Colleen founded Songbird Seed Co., a seed company devoted to cultivating and preserving exceptional sweet peas. What started as a personal fascination with the sweet pea became a deeper study of their history, varieties, cultivation, and e...

Happy Autumn! Cultivating Place is proud to launch an occasional series from Host Abra Lee, delving into our Garden past to better understand and illuminate our Garden present and future. Sometimes we have to look back to grow forward! This week, Abra shares her research into an intrepid and unflagging cultivator of place from our past in Virginia’s Tidewater Region: Asa Sims. A businessman, educa...

To “leave the land better than we found it” should be the ethic of all Gardeners. It is the North Star ethic of regenerative and organic farming leaders: Lundberg Family Rice. Third- and fourth-generation stewards of rice, land, and planet, Bryce and Brita Lundberg join Cultivating Place this week to share why, and all that grows from that single dedication. Cultivating Place now has a donate butt...

Erin Benzakein of Floret Flower Farm needs little introduction to most garden-minded listeners. She has been so instrumental in cultivating a flower-farming economy in our country. Her innovative and dedicated seed research and breeding work of the past decade, however, is a whole new lens through which to appreciate her work. As we look toward the Autumnal Equinox later this month, please enjoy t...

As the season begins to show signs of turning its next page, Cultivating Place host Ben Futa heads to Vermont! This week he's in conversation with David Jacques, also known by the internet persona "Davey Wavey". David is the owner of Frog Meadow Bed & Breakfast, a retreat for men in southern Vermont. For nearly 20 years, David has been pursuing his passion for gardening while serving an audience (...

Whitney Jaye is a florist, flower farmer, and the creative force behind Sunbird Flowers, based in Decatur, Georgia, and providing sustainably grown, beautifully curated flowers for the Atlanta area.  Seeing her work through the lens of Black Southern folkways that (re)center agrarianism, and through the ancestral memories and practices of coastal Carolinian culture, Whitney Jaye’s work sits at the...

Alcatraz is a name rich with story, myth, and drama. It is also a dramatic sight where history, gardens, and how gardens grow us better all come together. This week we continue our theme of gardens and cultural landscapes as a form of social care–tending to place and people. We’re joined by Shelagh Fritz, the Senior Program Manager of Alcatraz Historic Gardens, part of the Golden Gate Parks Conser...

Erika Rumbley and Renee Portanova are Co-Founders and Directors of The New Garden Society. Now, you may hear that phrase and think of a garden club or a plant society. But this organization’s very name invites you to consider a new angle on the words Garden + Society. The New Garden Society is a Boston-based organization run by horticulturists, landscapers, and farmers who seek to expand green ind...

All history reminds us that we are all history in the making! Garden history reminds us that we as gardeners, our gardens, our gardening, and how our culture tends to and stewards land are all that, too!  What is the historical context of gardens in this moment-especially given some of the changes and impacts on national or public shared landscapes? What does garden history specifically teach us a...

At the height of summer, we head to the mile-high city to think more about cultivating place at elevation: human-made and natural elevations, in the service of people and their places. We’re in conversation with Professor Jennifer Bousselot, who leads the Green Roof and Urban Agriculture Program, Growing Food for People and Pollinators, at Colorado State University. Dr. Bousselot is motivated by b...

Allen Bush is an esteemed plantsman and lifelong advocate for the joy of gardening. He joins Cultivating Place Host Abra Lee in conversation this week to share more. From his work with Jelitto Perennial Seeds to his decades sharing rich garden stories as a Garden Rant writer, Allen’s life and work invite us to look more closely at the remarkable diversity of plants and the endless opportunities th...

What does accessibility mean in the garden? In a public garden? Reeves-Reed Arboretum in Summit NJ, an historic estate and garden, has been considering these questions intensely. How to increase accessibility for visitors and yet maintain the equally important sense of being in and with nature. One result of their thoughtful deliberations is their Path For All, which opened in May of 2026. Three m...

Planting design is an essential skill in garden design writ large, for the health and beauty of a site– functionally, environmentally, and psychologically. Andrew Fisher Tomlin is widely acknowledged as leading the development of a distinct professional career path in planting design through his own work and as a Director of Environmental Design at the London College of Garden Design in London and...

Cultivating Place well so often comes down to sharing the abundance of growing from a place of love and a strong sense of community and home. Susan Greutman is the founder and owner of Sunchoke Farms, an urban homestead-turned-family farm in South Bend, Indiana, growing chemical-free produce on formerly vacant city lots. Susan has been farming since 2018 and also happens to be growing right in Ben...

Amanda Hannah is the Director of Botanical Garden Horticulture at Holden Forests & Gardens in Cleveland, Ohio. Amanda’s path into horticulture has taken her from the agricultural landscapes of Idaho and Utah to studying in Argentina, living in Seattle, and moving through the Longwood Fellows Program. This week, Amanda and Cultivating Place Host, Abra Lee, dive into plants, the role of public garde...

We are finally at peak daylight and the Summer Solstice–which officially takes place June 21st this year. Summer speaks of garden parties and holidays at the beach, or lake, by rivers, or in the mountains. Summer speaks directly to our connection to the wild places we love and perhaps long for– and which, through our gardens, can be right here at home. SummerHome Garden in Denver, CO, is a playful...

The conservation of biodiversity writ large is directly tied to the conservation of native bees, crucial pollinators in our cultivated and wildland ecosystems across most regions of the world. This week, we look forward to International Pollinator Week, which always falls in the third week of June, tied to the summer solstice. We’re in conversation with Krystle Hickman, award-winning conservation...

What makes a place a place, versus just any space? Tyler Kanchazeski is a sustainability advocate and the founder and owner of ReGen South Bend, an incremental development and community catalyst company based in the Near Northwest Neighborhood of South Bend, Indiana. Tyler brings business leadership, logistics, resiliency, and community experience to his work alongside neighbors to transform space...

This week on Cultivating Place, public gardens as living classrooms, the quiet power of trees in city life, and how tending landscapes can cultivate resilience, curiosity, and belonging. Host Abra Lee is in conversation with Brent “Fig” Figlestahler, horticulturist, landscape architect, educator, and devoted steward of public green spaces from the cultivated collections and urban woodlands of Cylb...

This week, we continue plumbing the potential of gardens and gardeners for growing a future we want to cultivate- for the benefit of all. In order to look forward, we look back to the radical plan of a 50-year-old intentionally-designed community and sustainability-oriented housing development, Village Homes, in Davis, California. Central to the intelligent design? You got it, Gardens and Green sp...

Kate Brown is an MIT Distinguished Professor in the History of Science. Across her career, her research has sometimes inadvertently documented the impact of urban, often small and under-resourced gardens and gardeners in our world. Her new book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, compiles this research and her own lived experience of its truth and...

This week on Cultivating Place, we continue with our flower theme as we celebrate May, looking toward the most floral of celebrations, Mother’s Day in the US. We discuss not us as gardeners growing flowers, but rather, how flowers shape our world, our cultures, our economies, our thinking and outlooks. We're in conversation with Christin Geall, author of Cultivated: Elements of Floral Style. Her n...