Cultivating Place

As a farewell to the calendar year that has been, and a welcome/seeding for the new year that will be, I am joined by seed person and agent of growing transformational change - Kellee Matsushita-Tseng. Known as Brave New Seed online, Kellee is a Yonsei (fourth generation) queer, Japanese-Chinese American, as well as the farm-garden assistant manager at the UC Santa Cruz Center for AgroEcology, and a member of the seed research and growing collective Second Generation Seeds, which specializes in seeds of the Asian Diaspora. Kellee’s work focuses on sharing, education, and building a movement towards seed sovereignty as a means of cultivating community health and working for collective liberation. Kellee serves on the board of directors at the National Young Farmers Coalition and also organizes with the Asian American Farmers Alliance. Her leadership voice is one of clarity, integrity, and communal intention for a new year - and growing the world we want to live 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.

Gary Paul Nabhan is a gardener, an agricultural ecologist, an ethnobotanist, and an ecumenical Franciscan Brother based in Patagonia, Arizona. He is the author of a host of books covering a diversity of plant-relationship topics – from pollinators to food policy, to love letters to his favorite landscapes. The heart of his work is fed by his own lifelong enchantment with the world – and his nearly lifelong commitment to healing wounded landscapes from a primary objective of consciously conserving healthy relationships on all levels and planes. In all he does, Gary examines our human relationships to plants and places not just as a matter of important pragmatics but as a matter of generosity, spirit, and poetics - I cannot think of a better time of year to share forward that exact kind of enchantment and hopeful work. Gary Paul Nabhan joins Cultivating Place this week - 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 cultivatingplace.com.

Winter in the Northern Hemisphere is a time of dormancy for the plant and animal kingdoms alike. While it may look relatively still and quiet, it is in fact a period of unseen activity worth looking at and learning from – for perspective and possibilities. This is our final offering for your garden-based preparations for the Winter Solstice officially occurring on December 21st at a little before 8 am Pacific/11 am Eastern time. The Solstice is not just a date and time, but a turning and inflection point in our annual cycle of growth. In honor of that cycle, and its periods of rest – daily, weekly, annually, and throughout cycles of years - we’re joined today in conversation with farmer, gardener and community advocate, Devorah Brous – with whom we explore the importance of rest, dormancy and sabbatical as a way to refuel, to rethink, and to rejuvenate in all health and creativity for our work and cycles ahead. 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 another offering to all of you in your gardens tending toward the Solstice in just a few weeks on December 21st, this week we are in conversation with award-winning poet and life-long home gardener Camille Dungy. Camille is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood, and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Camille is also a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. In our conversation, we explore the intertwining of poetry, gardening, life, and trophic cascades in each of them. 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.

Mike Sullivan is the author of "The trees in San Francisco", Jason Dewees is a horticulturist and author of "Designing with Palms", and Richard Turner is a designer, consultant, the Emeritus Editor of Pacific Horticulture, and co-editor of "Trees of Golden Gate Park". The three men got together in the early days of the Pandemic and put their imaginations and frustrations to work creating self-guided, pop-up, sidewalk-chalked, walking tours of the trees of the various neighborhoods of San Francisco. In the process, and at a time of high rates of emotional isolation for many, the three tree geeks got a city of people outside into the fresh air to meet and know better their tree neighbors all around them. With a whole new winter of pandemic complications and complexities in front of us, and in introducing urban-dwelling humans to their trees, and these trees to their people, the "three tree geeks of San Francisco” - and all our other knowledgeable tree folk doing likeminded work in the world – provide us a journey lesson on looking, listening and living. 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 week I’m thankful for my own garden, of course, but also for the good fresh food grown for all of us by so many hard-working souls wherever you are, from San Francisco to Cincinnati to Syracuse, and here where I am. Pyramid Farms is a small organic, integrated family farm of humans led by Matthew Martin and Lisa Carle. Famous for the carrots, and also growing more than 30 varieties of fresh produce and flowers year-round, living with the soil, with flora and fauna and the seasons of their place, and with the 365 days a year of hard work that farming is. They wouldn’t do life any other way, and as Matthew and Lisa say – you can taste the love. It’s a good week for this kind of gratitude. Listen in! Photos courtesy of Pyramid Farms, 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.

As a gardener and a human in this exact time on our planet, and in this specific season of the year - a season of communal gathering and thankfulness at the tail end of the growing season in the Northern Hemisphere, this week we celebrate Family, Kin, & Kinship. We are joined in this conversational celebration by Gavin Van Horn and Rowen White sharing with us about a new multi-volume collection of written voices entitled "Kinship Belonging in a World of Relations" out now from the Center for Humans and Nature, based in Chicago. Gavin is the creative and executive director for the Center for Humans and Nature and served as co-editor on the Kinship series with Robin Wall Kimmerer and John Hausdoerffer. Rowen is a seed keeper, a mother, and a farmer from the Mohawk community as well as being a passionate activist for Indigenous seed and food sovereignty. She is the educational director and lead mentor of Sierra Seeds an innovative Indigenous seed bank and land-based educational organization located in Nevada city, California. Rowen is the founder of the Indigenous Seedkeepers Network and her essay "Sky Woman’s Garden" appears in Partners the third volume of the five-volume Kinship series. Just like all kinds of gardens, these voices raised together in this uplifting series is all about growing together in this world. 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.

Fall and early winter are the perfect time in much of the Northern Hemisphere to plant bulbs, woody shrubs and trees, herbaceous perennials, and perennial vines in the landscape. It is also a good time to seed many spring-blooming native(and non-native) annuals. So, I thought it was just the right time of year as well to chat a little with Heather McCargo of the Wild Seed Project in Portland, Maine. Focused on the relationship between seed grown native plants in cultivated landscapes and reweaving healthy ecosystems across our world, Heather founded The Wild Seed Project and served as its executive Director from 2014 – 2021. She is currently the seed program manager for the project. The Wild Seed Project envisions a landscape where people help re-populate the landscape to be abundant with native plants (primarily grown from seed) so that we can support wildlife, biodiversity, and buffer the effects of climate change. They invite gardeners around the country - the world in fact – to take their rewild pledge committing to working towards including a minimum of 70% seed-grown native plants in your garden. 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.

Last week on Cultivating Place, we looked at Gardens and history through the lens of a historic Garden Cemetery – this week we look at Garden History through the interpretive lens of how we preserve, interpret, codify and share gardens past and present. We are in conversation with Christopher Woodward, Director of the Garden Museum in London. Garden history & Garden hindsight come together in the museum and in this week's conversation, helping us to interpret and plan for our shared Garden futures. 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.

Just in time for Samhain, All Hallow’s Eve, and Day of the Dead observances, this week we explore the sacred, green and communal space of a cemetery – specifically Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Boston, Massachusetts. Opened in the 1830s, Mt. Auburn was the first of a genre of so-called Garden Cemeteries in the U.S. Horticulturist Dave Barnett is the Emeritus President and CEO of Mt. Auburn. After nearly 30 years of growing the ecological, horticultural, and cultural legacy of Mt. Auburn, Dave retired this past September. I caught up with him earlier this year to explore the lessons of Mt. Auburn at this time. 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 on Cultivating Place we’re in delicious conversation with Chef Dave Smoke McCluskey, founder of Corn Mafia, and a grower/producer of such traditional corn products as Longhouse Selections’ hominy, masa, and grits. Based in South Carolina, Dave is an Indigenous foods educator and member of the Mohawk Nation, who invites us all to think about the history of the ingredients in our food, especially those originating from the Native American lands we in the US live on. Dave’s belief in the power of flavorful, real food stems from a very basic and lifelong curiosity about his peoples’ culinary past and trying to determine not only “What has been lost?”, but also how to re-envision, and imaginatively recreate a more accurate, flavorful, and probable culinary narrative for the past, present, and future. 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.

As we enter the season of seed saving, of easing into dormancy, beginning to consider next season through the lens of the last season, of forward planning, this week Cultivating Place explores some big thinking for our shared future in conversation with Severine Von Tscharner Fleming, one of the women featured in The Earth in Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants. 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 our second episode focusing on the inspiring beauty of dry gardens and the plants and people who love them, Cultivating Place is joined this week by photo journalist Saxon Holt. The sole photographer on more than 30 garden books, Saxon is also owner of the PhotoBotanic Garden library and director of the Summer-Dry Project. Saxon’s most recent book, a collaboration with writer Nora Harlow, is Gardening in Summer-Dry Climates, plants for a lush, water-conscious landscape, published by Timber Press in 2020. The vision of the Summer-Dry Project is that "in the midst of tumultuous climate change, it’s all the more important that gardeners be stewards of the land, attuned to the local environment on behalf of all creatures. The Summer-Dry Project provides gardeners in summer-dry climates authoritative plant information and inspiring photos that encourage sustainable garden practices." 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 near the close of a dry, dry season in the generally dry climates of much of the US west, this week Cultivating Place has the first of a two-episode focus on the inspiring beauty of dry gardens and the plants and people who love them. We start off with some high style in dry gardens with garden designer Daniel Nolan, owner of Daniel Nolan Design and author of Dry Gardens, High Style for Low Water Gardens, published in 2018 by Rizzoli Press, and photographed by Caitlin Atkinson. In the opening to his book, Daniel notes that “some of the most successful gardens are not about human’s control over nature, but about how human’s respond respectfully to their surroundings.” Daniel’s work, which is consistently focused on strong design using as little water as possible, covers regions as wide ranging as Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana, Texas, Arizona, California and the West Coast generally. 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.

Ernesto Alvarado is a Mexican-born, Southern California-based native plant and seed teacher and student. He is currently the Native Plant Nursery Assistant at the Riverside Corona Resource Conservation District where he specializes in seed and native plants for gardening and greater connection to the world around him – and us. While I told you that last week was the second in a two-part series in the sacred and much-needed ritual and ceremony that the seasonal cycles of our plants and gardens – I would say this is a bonus third episode in this vein. I think you will agree. As a native plant and seed teacher and student, Ernesto’s greatest hope is to have his work serve as a green and living bridge for people to develop a deeper connection to the life all around them. 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.