Cultivating Place

Have you ever noticed how every garden has a story? No matter how many gardeners might have worked that spot: just 2 - for instance mother nature AND you, or multitudes: you and the many who known or unknown may have worked that ground before you – the land you cultivate, hike, or gaze at, has a story. Likewise, every gardener has a story – no matter how many gardens they’ve cultivated or at what point in their lives they came to their engagement in gardening or love of natural history - there are stories there. Figuratively, these stories might take the form of haikus, a well-crafted short story, a rambling run-on sentence, or an epic novel. But as Alfred Austin famously said: Show me your garden and I’ll show you who you are. In the first year of Cultivating Place, I heard a good lot of feedback from listeners and friends. One piece of feedback from a friend was this: “I want to hear from real home gardeners, too, what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, how they cope.” I liked the idea of this kind of sharing – a kind of Dispatches from the Home Garden. While every garden and every gardener have this act of cultivation in common, they are all necessarily different in their living details. We all have fingerprints, and they are all unique. I think something meaningful is learned in sharing both our commonalities and our differences. This week we’ll hear from the very friend that sent this feedback/request. She sent it more than once, so it only seemed fair that she would help to craft and kick off our Dispatches from the Home Garden story time. In the interest of full disclosure, she is one of my oldest friends in the world: Christl Findling - satellite builder and home gardener from Lookout Mountain, Colorado. Join us!

“Anyone who’s gazed at the moon or stood still in a magnificent stand of trees knows what it’s like to experience the Power of Awe – it seems to slow time, proffer reverence for life and connect us to one another. Recent research shows that when we spend time outside in nature, engaging all our senses, our heart rates slow, our stress hormones dip, our thoughts grow both more expansive and less self-focused.” This week on Cultivating Place, award winning author Florence Williams discusses her newest book “The Nature Fix – How Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative," which is out on shelves from Norton the first week of February. Having grown up in New York City, Florence went on to spend a large part of her professional writing career, which focuses on science, the environment and health, till now living in or close to the wide open wild spaces of the West - notably Colorado. When her husband’s career took their young family to Washington DC, she found herself experiencing a depression and irritability that ultimately led her to a curiosity about the physical, emotional and intellectual effects of access to nature on not just her but the human body and soul as a whole. The Nature Fix is the story of her researching and reporting on the scientific research going on around the globe into this question. Join us!

Digging deep: this is a phrase that has a wide variety of meanings and uses – both literal and figurative — in the garden, and in the body, mind and heart. In a new year, many of us have a tendency to generate a to-do list of tasks and projects to start, to get in order or to finally this year complete in our lives – and if we are gardeners, our gardens are not left out of this energetic attention and intention. To help integrate some of this energy — shore up your resolve and energize your physical, spiritual and artistic muscles — this week I am joined by Fran Sorin, “best-selling author, unshakeable optimist, coach and CBS radio news contributor.” In 2004, with a well-established career in garden design, garden journalism and garden coaching, Fran published, “Digging Deep – Unearthing Your Creative Roots Through Gardening.” In 2016, a new revised edition of the book was published.

It is mid-January. It is deep mid-winter, even in my relatively mild USDA zone 9, Sunset zone 8. While I am fortunate enough to have a year-round Saturday farmer’s market available to me, my own home garden is looking spare. Which is at it should be this time of year, but it could be looking a little less spare while still remaining seasonally appropriate. One of MY New Year’s resolutions is to strive to do a little better on this front. After the calendar year 2016, I would like to feel a little more self-reliant. Call me crazy - I’m starting with adding a few raised vegetable beds to my little home garden. For a little refresher course, I pulled out my trusty-old “The Four-Season Harvest” by Eliot Coleman (Chelsea Green, 1992), which was formative to my first on-my-own adult garden in the 1990s. Today, I am joined by Eliot Coleman, esteemed plantsman, gardener and author based in Harborside, Maine, where he lives and gardens year round at Four Season Farm. Eliot and his wife, Barbara Damrosch (a noted gardener and garden writer herself — perhaps you follow her regular contributions to The Washington Post?) were early proponents and continue to be enthusiastic advocates for growing your own seasonally appropriate, sustainably tended, food year-round — no matter where you live. Eliot is also the author of "The New Organic Grower" and “The Winter Harvest Handbook."

As a celebration of the many ways that one’s cultivation of place can benefit not only the individual cultivator – gardener or naturalist – this week on Cultivating Place I’m joined by John Carlon, president of River Partners, a nonprofit organization working to create wildlife habitat for the benefit of people (economically and environmentally), water (quality and conservation), wildlife and the wider environment (including benefitting agricultural productivity and quality) by restoring successional riparian corridors throughout watersheds of the Western United States.

Happy New Year! For over 100 years Sunset magazine has been inspiring gardens and gardeners in the American West. This year marks the first full year for Sunset’s gorgeous, innovative new demonstration and display gardens at Cornerstone Sonoma. Join me this week when Cultivating Place converses with Sunset’s Garden Editor Johanna Silver - inspiring New Year’s resolutions for garden living. Join us.

There is something inherently satisfying about a full circle – a completion – a beginning brought to its fullness and coming to its natural end, which leads right into the next beginning. This full circle satisfaction is true for cycles of the moon, cycles of the seasons and cycles of the field and garden. For me this is especially apparent at the Winter Solstice and, of course, the full circle of a calendar year. It’s long been customary to celebrate the year’s end by toasting to the old and welcoming the new with a glass of something bubbly – and I decided Cultivating Place should too – but not just any bubbly, rather one that is deeply grounded in this cultivation of place and all its systems and intricacies we find so vital and fascinating. A glass of bubbly that embodies and is as interdependent with the soil, water, wildlife and plant life of place as we are. So what better bubbly than the most ancient of fermented spirits, nectar of the gods — honey-based mead. To that end, and to new beginnings, today, I am joined by Gordon Hull, mead maker and owner of Heidrun Meadery – makers of dry, sparkling mead based in Point Reyes, California.

In this season of the winter solstice — marked by the beauty and appreciative contemplation that mark the celebrations of winter holidays the world around, I very much wanted this week's Cultivating Place to acknowledge the diversity, value and fragility of our native plants and their communities. No matter where you garden or cultivate place now, or where you might have done so throughout your life, the native plants of any place are what signify, identify and root that place as its own. Native plants — ornamental, edible or useful, common, rare or endangered — all cultivation and gardening is based upon the native plants of somewhere. This week, I honor the native plants of my place — the native plants of California, one of the world's biodiveristy hotspots, with more native and endemic plants than certainly anywhere I've lived or gardened before now. To help me in this celebration of the plants of our own places, my guest today is Michael Kauffmann, editor-in-chief of Backcountry Press and author of several books exploring the natural history of some signature plants of the western forest, including — so seasonally appropriate — "Conifer Country, Conifers of the Pacific Slope" and "A Field Guide to Manzanitas,” one of our native broadleaved evergreens. As of January 2017, Michael is also the editor of Fremontia, the journal of the California Native Plant Society.

The famous British gardener and writer Vita Sackville-West stated that no room is ever complete without flowers. This week on Cultivating Place we explore this idea with Vietnamese-born New York Based photographer and writer Ngoc Minh Ngo. Her most recent book “In Bloom – Creating and Living with Flowers” beautifully portrays the imaginative and surprising ways in which 11 different artists and thinkers around the world weave their love of flowers into their everyday lives.

Emily Dickinson references plants, flowers, nature or her garden in more than one-third of her known poems, with many more references in her extensive correspondences with family and friends. Flowers and nature provided her with both “inspiration and companionship.” In celebration of the poet’s upcoming birthday, this week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by Jane Wald, executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, who’s overseeing current research and restoration of the Dickinson’s historic home garden and conservatory. Join us!

The term “herbal” refers to far more than a soothing tea or tasty spice. An herbal is a book or otherwise codified collection of knowledge about the use of plants for food or medicine. Dating back as far as ancient Egypt, Sumer and China, there are more herbals published every year. On Cultivating Place this week, I’m joined by Stephen Orr, editor-in-chief of Better Homes & Gardens and author of "The New American Herbal," published by Clarkson Potter/Random House in 2014.

Every year about this time, the light wanes, the temperatures drop and we as people draw in a bit, hunker down and begin whatever we can of a winter dormancy. For gardeners and non-gardeners alike, I think, there is a human urge to sometimes craft our garden plants, branches, flowers, seeds, cones and fruit into other, artful and unique creations — for doorways, for gates, for windows, for tabletops. For me this urge is particularly strong in fall and winter. Perhaps it’s an effort to preserve the beauty; perhaps it’s an urge to celebrate and give thanks for the abundance. Or both. For Thanksgiving Day on Cultivating Place, we pay homage to this urge and this age-old tradition when we’re joined by two artists who have an eye, hand and heart for just this kind of craft. Join us as we “gather” and “season to taste” a variety of seasonal plant crafts with gardener, stylist and photographer Caitlin Atkinson, author of "Plant Craft” (2016, Timber Press), and Alethea Harampolis, floral designer at Studio Choo and coauthor of "The Wreath Recipe” (2014, Artisan Books) about the traditional and not so traditional practice of crafting wreaths (and swags and branches). Join us!

As we enter a traditional two-month period marked by celebrations of giving thanks, this week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by Qayyum Johnson, farm manager of Green Gulch Farm Zen Center in Marin, CA. Practicing in the Zen Buddhist tradition and farming 7 acres of cool season crops, Qayyum explores with us the connection between the back breaking physical labor of farming and the cultivation of awareness, generosity and thanksgiving in our minds and spirits. Join us!

This week on Cultivating Place, we speak with Steve Van Hoven Chief Arborist and Horticulture Supervisor of Arlington National Cemetery, Memorial Gardens and Arboretum. This historic landscaped national military cemetery sits on the location of what was once the home estate and gardens of General Robert E Lee and his wife Mary Custis Lee in Arlington, Virginia. More than 400,000 veterans are laid to rest there, among many gardens and more than 8.600 trees. In 2015 Arlington was accredited with LEVEL II arboretum status.

Gardens can be important repositories for cultural and environmental history. From the plants included to materials used — you can read a great deal about time and place in any garden. This might be particularly true of gardens created and cared for at the turn of the 19th century in England and the United States — a time marked by the unprecedented expanding financial, journalistic and horticultural wealth of the industrial age. This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by Gail Read, garden manager of Blithewold, to explore the history embedded in any garden. Blithewold, which is Welsh for “ Happy Wood,” is a nationally significant Country Place Era house, garden and arboretum on Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay.