Cultivating Place

We are now mid-May, halfway through a month of graduations, spring celebrations, and weddings, and Mother’s Day is upon us here in the US this coming weekend. Something that all of these celebratory kinds of human-marked rituals and events have in common? We so often mark them with the best of our most loved flowers of the season. With that as our touchstone, I am so pleased to once again be in conversation this week with Deb Prinzing, founder of the Slow Flowers movement here in the U.S. and Canada, and of The Slow Flowers Society, representing the needs, successes, stories, and voices of the floral world in the Slow Flowers Journal, in the weekly Slow Flowers Podcast, and in the annual gathering known as the Slow Flowers Summit, this year happening in Seattle, WA June 26th and 27th. As yet another facet of her floral-focused advocacy, Deb is co-founder and Editorial Director of Bloom Imprint Books, which identifies, develops, and publishes projects that shine a light on the floral lifestyle, showcasing the stories of floral personalities, creatives, entrepreneurs, farmers, artisans, and makers. Their newest title, “Furrow and Flour,” by sisters Sarah Kuenzi and Beth Syphers, fits right in with this week’s themes. I don’t know how she does it all, but I am so pleased she’s back to share with us about it. Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

As we head into the exuberance of May and towards Mother’s Day celebrations here in the U.S., this week, we speak again with award-winning poet, scholar, and University Distinguished Professor at CSU, Colorado: Camille Dungy.  Her newest book, Soil: The Story of A Black Mother’s Garden, just published on Tuesday, May 2nd, from Simon & Schuster. SOIL is a rich exploration into and celebration of ancestry and being an ancestor; about what it means to be human, about motherhood, writing, gardening, biodiversity, grief, beauty, joy, and above all, SOIL is about the tenacious hope for growth. Join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

As we close out April, a best of conversation from Mother’s Day 2022. Can we ever get enough nurturing energy in the world? Enjoy! 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 is filled with beautiful seasonal (native and non-native) plants, it offers places to sit, to play, to splash as well as to gather; it offers artful views representative of and inviting for the entire community - residents and visitors alike - human and more-than-human alike. Theodora Park was opened in 2015 and is dedicated to the memory ofDavid’s mother - Theodora. Happy Mother’s Day to all mothering souls and spaces - may all of our gardens, public and private, be welcoming, nurturing – shall we say mothering - places for all. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This last week of April, we enjoy an art of the garden conversation with artist, historian, gardener and environmental advocate Rebecca Allan. Bronx-New York-based, Rebecca is “known for her richly layered and chromatically nuanced abstract paintings. Her work investigates watershed environments and landscapes and is inspired by her deep interest in botany and land conservation. In 2018 Rebecca established Painterly Gardens, a firm specializing in sustainable garden design. From January through June of 2023, Rebecca’s solo show, Cultivating Eden is featured at Wave Hill House & Garden. The exhibit presents Rebecca’s recent paintings focused on the labor of gardeners and their spaces. By artistically highlighting working process—both visible and unnoticed—her series praises the devoted care that the gardeners provide on a daily basis. She sees Wave Hill as “a special place where art and horticulture are intertwined. Both practices require tenacity, refined skill and historical curiosity.” As an artist and gardener Rebecca notes that one motivation behind her work is “a desire to nurture the world by envisioning and then enacting spaces where beauty is revealed.”

It is now Mid-April, and this week we are celebrating both California Native Plant Week AND the week of Earth Day. Wildflowers are blooming and being admired across the country! In honor of Earth Day 2023 and all of the fierce and tender hopes we have for it, we are back in conversation with Ireland’s Mary Reynolds, self-described as an ex-garden designer, actively reimagining and rebuilding a relationship with nature through her most recent founding of a movement known as We Are the Ark in which we transform our gardens and gardening into Acts of restorative Kindness welcoming and supporting all manner of life. Some of you may remember that my previous conversation with Mary in 2019 after her last book, The Garden Awakening, was published, and just as she was founding We Are the Ark. Mary’s dedication and persistence around the importance of each of us in stewarding the land we can is a bright spot in our world. Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Great gardens need great plants, and great plants people the world over, throughout history, have made it their lives calling to bring gardeners great plants – whether introducing native plants to the horticultural trade, selecting best garden varieties from naturally occurring choices by breeding, and by educating both the trade and gardeners in their gardens on best cultivation of these same plants. This week's guest on Cultivating Place is one such well-known and long-respected plantsperson who has helped to shift our horticultural world for the better these past many decades – Roy Diblik. Roy who began selecting and propagating native plants for ecologically and beautiful gardens beginning in the 1970s, and as a gardener, nurseryman, writer, and thinker, he went on to co-found Northwind Perennials Farm, a nursery and garden design business based in Burlington, Wisconsin, serving public and private gardens and gardeners. Roy is an expert at creating compelling and ecologically-contributing combinations of native and nonnative plants using methods he variously describes as the watercolor style of planting, and “know maintenance” designs. It is a pleasure to welcome this national treasure of a plantsman to the program. Roy’s knowledge and passion has something to offer every garden and every gardener. Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

I know the adage goes that April showers bring May flowers, but based on images from across the Northern Hemisphere – from snowdrops in Vermont, Cherry Blossoms in DC, wildflowers in California, and daffodils peeking out in parts of Colorado between snow storms – April has plenty of her own bloom and the growing season is underway. To inspire your planting and designs for the season ahead, this week we’re back in conversation with Benjamin Vogt of Monarch Gardens, a fierce advocate on behalf of our gardens being critically important links in our world’s broken and fragmented ecological chains. You may remember my 2018 conversation with Benjamin about his first book – A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future?  Well that ethical manifesto now has an instruction manual in Benjamin’s second book - Prairie Up: An Introduction to Natural Garden Design – it might be just the reference you need to get your growing season off to a great start. Join us this week for more with Benjamin Vogt! All images courtesy of Benjamin Vogt, Monarch Gardens, LLC., all rights reserved. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Alice Vincent is a multi-platform storyteller based in London, and examining with gusto and curiosity the intricacies of words and language, of what it is to be human, to be a woman, and to be always in service to the wonders – large and small, grief-laden and joy-spangled - of everyday life. The author of several previous books, including her nature memoir - Rootbound, Rewilding a Life, Alice goes by the name Noughticulture online. For our final episode in this year's five-part series of Cultivating Place in honor of Women’s History Month, I caught up with Alice just a few short weeks ago to talk in-depth about her newest work: Why Women Grow, Stories of Soil, Sisterhood, and Survival. It is a moving, indeed verdant, tapestry of Alice’s own story as a woman "going to ground" to grow herself, intertwined with that stories of other women gardening across Great Britain and beyond and what that has meant to their own lives and to our collective understanding of both gardens and women. Since we spoke, Alice has added one more title to her life list: mother. Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

For this penultimate episode of Women’s History month, Cultivating Place heads to Tacoma, Washington, to chat with Tyra Shenaurlt, horticulture resource supervisor at Metro Parks Tacoma, overseeing, among other things, a hundred fifteen-year-old glass house known as the W.W. Seymour Botanical Conservatory in Tacoma’s wright park. From March 2021 to May of 2022, the historic structure underwent a massive restoration. Now almost one year out from re-opening, Tyra is with us to share more about her own story as a black woman in horticulture and the story of the historic conservatory where she has made the most of her career and leadership. Join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

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 her first novel, The Seed Keeper, was published by Milkweed press in 2021. Join us for more about Diane’s journey of discovering, sharing, and celebrating seeds and Indigenous cultural recovery through the knowledge and history that seeds hold and the future they make possible. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

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 natives of your area, and she has been determined for many, many years to demonstrate just how beautiful that concept of gardening can be. She is the founder of The Bringing back the Natives Garden Tour, based in the Bay Area of Northern California, but which after 19 years in operation, has country-wide acclaim. The tour and the gardening-ethos it cultivates and celebrates can be replicated anywhere we as humans garden. As Spring draws closer - Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

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 these topics are revelations on our culture’s many fault lines and the human actions and responses—from walking, to reading, to traveling or gardening with open minds, eyes, and hearts—that might bridge these fault lines. Rebecca’s many books include Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Far Away Nearby, Men Explain Things to Me, and Orwell’s Roses, “a lush exploration of politics, roses, and pleasure, and a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded [and sometimes refueled] by his passion for the natural world.” While many of Rebecca’s titles fall firmly under the purview of the concerns of Cultivating Place, it was her 2021 title, Orwell’s Roses, the was the catalyst for my inviting her to be a guest on the program – that and a generous nudge from Maria Popova. Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

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 Countryside, out now from Hardie Grant Books. I caught up with James in late November, and I knew this would be a warming conversation for this end-of-February time of year. Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

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 Kleinman of the Experimental Farm network, a member and collaborator in the Ujaam alliance and all that it is growing – which is both uplifting and delicious. Join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

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 Valentine’s Day coming up – this week we’re rejoined in conversation by Abra Lee, gardener, garden scholar under the name of Conquer the Soil, horticulturist, and graduate of the Longwood Gardens Fellows program, a 13-month leadership in public horticulture fellowship. In addition to co-creating a public garden exhibition called Music x Flowers, Abra has recently accepted a position as Director of Horticulture at the Oakland Cemetery, a historic Victorian garden cemetery in downtown Atlanta. This week’s conversation is a valentine to gardeners and garden lovers everywhere. Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.