Cultivating Place

Sometimes when you use the word garden – people immediately conjure up images of the ornamental perennial border. Other people, however, conjure up colorful visions of the summer vegetable garden – beginning to groan this time of year under the abundance and literal weight of the summer harvest of tomatoes, peppers, corn, zucchini and so on. Throughout history, these two distinct kinds of gardens – let’s call them the ornamental garden on one hand and the edible garden on the other – have had lots of overlap sometimes inadvertently and sometimes very intentionally. Who among us has not noted the beauty of the blossoms on any fruit tree, the freshness of the first peas of spring, or comforting shape and color of the apples of autumn? And who does not fully appreciate the double duty of some of our flowers and flowering plants – roses and salvias and nasturtiums, for example, in being both edible and beautiful? Today we are joined by Stefani Bittner, co-owner with fellow plantperson, floral and garden designer Alethea Harampolis of Homestead Design Collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area. They design gardens that are both beautiful and incorporate edible plants throughout. Stefani is co-author with fellow edible garden designer, Leslie Bennett, of “The Beautiful Edible Garden” (2013, Ten Speed Press). In February of 2017 Ten Speed Press will publish a book co-authored by both Stefani and Alethea entitled “Harvest.”

Kristin Currin is owner and founder with her husband Drew Merritt of Humble Roots Native Plant Nursery in Mosier, Oregon. Situated at the interface between temperate rain forest, the Great Basin and the Columbia River Gorge, Humble Roots has a mission to inspire gardeners, nature lovers and conservationists to deepen their relationship with native plants.

Cultivating Place this week welcomes Debra Prinzing, the producer of slowflowers.com, the online directory to American flower farms, and florists, shops and studios who source domestic and local flowers. I would be surprised if most people I spoke to today — pretty much no matter where I might be in the US — were not familiar with the term slow food. Are you familiar with the term and movement known as Slow Flowers?

In this election year, and with the Independence Day holiday just past, we have something of a patriotic garden theme going. This week, we’re joined by Marta McDowell, a gardener, historian and writer who lives in Chatham, New Jersey. Her self-described greatest interest lies in the relationship between writers and their gardens — the connection, as she says, “between pen and trowel.” This interest is well-illustrated and developed in her titles to date including “Emily Dickinson’s Gardens,” “Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life,” and most recently the patriotic history of the White House Gardens entitled: “All the Presidents’ Gardens” out now from Timber Press, and the focus of our conversation.

Are you a person who takes refuge in the natural world or your home garden? If so, then you appreciate the many benefits of these for regrouping from life’s stresses, large and small. As we look to the Fourth of July, we’re joined this week by Ann Mead Daniel, co-founder with her husband Scott Robertson of Gardens for Heroes. It’s a young non-profit in the Washington DC area, whose work seeks to help wounded veterans and their families find space and resources for regrouping and healing in the context of their own home gardens.

This week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by Genny Arnold, Seed Program Manager at the Theodore Payne Foundation who speaks with us about the care and long-term keeping of our native geophytes — those coolest of plants which have an underground storage organ, like a bulb or tuber or corm, which helps them to withstand some of the planet’s harshest conditions: cold, heat, drought and dark. Or a hot dry California summer. California is home to close to 300 species of native geophytes, many of which are now rare or endangered. This spring, after a winter of closer-to-normal rainfalls, many of our bulbs are treating us to a particularly spectacular year of bloom.

The impulse to garden is prismatic, right? It's about connection, about beauty, about plants, about productivity and self-sufficiency, about health and community. It can be political. It can be spiritual. Is the impulse that draws people to cultivate their home gardens the same one that draws them to and grounds them in farming? When we say farm, what are the lines between small farms, family farms, and large tracts of mono-culture farming that we might place under an umbrella we’d call perhaps Big Agriculture — where the human it seems is more removed from any discernible connection to land and is more focused on commodity? This week we’ll explore some of these questions with Lundberg Family Farms.

Flower gardens grow flowers, vegetable gardens grow vegetables, and, yes, butterfly gardens grow butterflies. This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by Matthew Shepherd of the Xerces Society, a national nonprofit organization based in Portland, Ore., which protects wildlife through the conservation of invertebrates and their habitat. For more than 40 years, the society has been at the forefront of invertebrate protection worldwide, harnessing the knowledge of scientists and the enthusiasm of citizens to implement conservation programs.

Ever wonder how a plant got its name? Or for whom it was named and why? Those are the sorts of questions that started historian and author Andrea Wulf down the path of her research. This week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by Ms. Wulf, the author of multiple books exploring the ways nature, botany and horticulture influence art, science, politics, human culture and even the development of nations.

Salvias are among my favorite of flowers. Do I say that about a different plant group just about every other week? It could be. Let’s say then that this week, this time of year, salvias are among my very favorite of flowering plant groups. And it’s a big and diverse group, so you’re not bound to get bored with them any time soon. In my current suburban garden – small no matter how you slice it – I have nine salvias and counting. In some of our recent Cultivating Place conversations we have heard of the value of salvias for pollinators and habitat and the many native salvias in California. Today we’re going to dig a little deeper into this well-loved cornerstone herbaceous perennial with Salvia expert Ernie Wasson.

We all know that human development impacts nature, and that the most developed of human spaces — cities — without any nature in them, negatively impacts humans. Since the very beginnings of the fields of landscape architecture and public planning, there have been designers, builders, thinkers and dreamers who have worked to interweave nature — its sense of green, of refuge, or peace — into these otherwise very inorganic areas, for the benefit of both the ecological world and the benefit of humans. Think of Frederick Law Olmstead’s work in New York’s Central Park and many, many other urban parks across the country at the turn of the 19th century. To varying degrees of success, generations of landscape architects since Olmstead have carried the torch.

Nothing says place like the cultivation and caring for the plants native to your place. As gardeners we hear a lot about native plants. This is perhaps especially true in the past 20 years or so. And it is perhaps especially true in California, one of the 33 biodiversity hotspots in the world and home to an astounding number of native and endemic natives – meaning those natives that only occur in their specific locations here. Today we’re joined by two people who have been on a leading edge of the ever-increasing interest in California Native Plants for the home gardener for the past 35 years. In 1981 Sherrie Althouse and Phil Van Soelen were two young twenty-somethings who began the unconventional California Flora Nursery — one of the oldest native plant nurseries in the state, located in Sonoma County.

Do you have particular plant groups you like more than most? Because of family history or where you live, perhaps? The Geranium family of flowering plants rank right up there for me. And I’m not alone. This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by Robin Parer — founder and owner of the specialty Geraniaceae Nursery, champion of all members of the Geraniaceae family. She is also the author of “The Plant Lovers Guide to Hardy Geraniums,” out now from Timber Press.

Sometimes flowers, gardens and nature speaks to us. Sometimes we employ them to speak on our behalf. What do our gardens and flowers say to the world? This week on Cultivating Place, we're joined by two people who cultivate hope and opportunity through flowers indirectly and directly in their lives. We speak with Vanessa Diffenbaugh, author of the New York Times Best Selling novel “The Language of Flowers,” and Shelly Watson, founder and director of Bloomin’ Hope, a vocational floral skills program for women at the Jesus Center in Chico. Diffenbaugh is the featured speaker at an upcoming fundraiser for the Jesus Center in Chico on May 14.

This week, we’re joined by Dr. Bill Thomas: gardener, farmer, parent with his wife Jude, and Harvard-trained geriatrician and international authority on eldercare. In the 1990s he co-founded with his wife Jude a transformative philosophical approach to how we care for our elders — or ourselves — as we age, known as "The Eden Alternative.” The Eden Alternative challenges us as individuals and as a culture to reframe how we imagine life in elderhood — that we imagine it to be more like a garden and less like a prison.