Cultivating Place

September, October, and November are traditional harvest celebration months in the Northern Hemisphere from variations on Octoberfests to those around the idea of Thanksgiving. The ancient Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot is celebrated from the full moon on September 20th to September 27th this year, with the Autumnal Equinox occurring on the 22nd. This week on Cultivating Place we enjoy the second of two conversations on the sacred every day and the sacred in the seasonal. We are joined from Philadelphia by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, co-founder of The Shalom Center, which equips activists and spiritual leaders with awareness and skills needed to lead in shaping a transformed and transformative Judaism that can help create a world of peace, justice, healing for the earth, and respect for the interconnectedness of all life. A long-time activist for social and environmental justice, Rabbi Waskow is also the author of Seasons of our Joy, which brings reverent renewal to the ancient agricultural and seasons-based celebrations of the Abrahamic religions. 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 tend toward the Autumnal Equinox on September 22nd here in the Northern Hemisphere, we are deep in a period of time full of sacred seasonal celebrations and observances based on the cycles of the moon, of the sun, and of the growing season ending with harvest and simultaneously beginning again with the dormancy of seed and soil. Late summer to early fall holds the Islamic and Jewish New Year celebrations, early harvest celebrations and a shift in the light and color, in the garden foods and flavors, fragrances and flowers of our days. This week Cultivating Place offers out the first in a two-part series on the sacred of the everyday in our seasonal garden lives, the first in conversation with London-based photographer, artist, and Vicar's wife Kristin Perers, whose works and days are intentionally grounded in bits of nature and color all around her. Kristin shares her abiding passions and what the everyday sacred means in action in ways both small and large, in ways that are seasonally grounded by year and seasonally oriented across her life. 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.

On Cultivating Place this week we celebrate (and say farewell) to the fullness of summer at its calendar-end with Labor Day weekend in full view here in the US. We do this with some moving and wonderful sounds of a summer concert series not only held in but inspired by a remarkable urban garden: the Capital Public Radio Garden at Sacramento State University, a garden of food, habitat, gathering, season, and meaning in California’s capital city of Sacramento, California. We’re in conversation with Jennifer Reason, musician, CapRadio’s Mid-Day Classical Music Host and Summer Garden Concert Director, and with CapRadio’s Garden Coordinator Nicole McDavid. They - the women, the concert series musicians and music, the garden itself - all remind us of just how much one garden can hold, no less than the breadth and depth of our planet’s seasonal faces and our incredibly diverse expressions of humanity – in grief, in community, and in joy. 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.

In our final episode focusing specifically on ecologically rich and contributing gardens, we learn some innovative lessons in built ecology. Literally. Rebecca McMackin is an ecologically focused horticulturist and garden designer. For the past decade, she has been the Director of Horticulture for Brooklyn Bridge Park, an ecologically minded landscape constructed from the soil up on repurposed post-industrial shipping piers jutting out over New York’s East River beneath the iconic namesake bridge. Rebecca and her horticultural team care for the diversity of life within this 85-acre parkland organically and with an emphasis on habitat creation for birds, butterflies, and soil microorganisms – as well as visiting humans. Rebecca introduced me earlier this year at the Metro Hort Group’s annual Plant-O-Rama event, and I have had the pleasure of hearing her speak several times since then. Rebecca joins us this week to share more about rebuilding ecology where you can – and, she notes, if they can do it on concrete shipping piers over the East River in New York City – we can all do it on our own terms and in our unique conditions too. 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.

At a time when our gardens large and small often feel more important than ever, I think our focus on exactly what our gardens contain and consist of is also more important than ever. In this second in a three-part celebration of gardens that offer back more than they consume, I’m pleased to be speaking this week with Owen Wormser. Based in Western Massachusetts, Owen is the founder of Abound Design, providing design & consulting for regenerative, sustainability-focused landscapes. He is also the co-founder with traditional and clinical herbalist Chris Marano, of the non-profit Local Harmony, focused on encouraging and creating community-driven regeneration. Finally, Owen is the author of a new book entitled Lawns into Meadows, Growing a Regenerative Landscape, out now from Stone Pier Press. Owen joins us to share more on his deep belief in the planet’s tendency towards abundance. 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.

In the heat of the dog days of summer, Cultivating Place celebrates the farms and gardens striving to not draw down resources but to contribute resources back into the world's flow of energy: fro providing shade, food, and retreat, these kinds of gardens are also replenishing rather than drawing down or polluting groundwater, they are sequestering carbon rather than spewing it, they are growing soil and mending the torn fabric of habitat corridors one urban, suburban, and rural home garden at a time. Many gardeners will remember with delight reading Gaia’s Garden by author and activist Toby Hemenway, originally published in 2001. Toby passed in Sebastapol, CA in 2016, but not before he lit a spark and passed a metaphoric mantle to today’s guest, Matthew Trumm. Matthew went on to learn under Dr. Elaine Ingham, among other mentors and has for years been learning from the wisdom of the land itself – first near rural Berry Creek, California before the #CampFire in 2018, and for the last handful or years also on an urban lot in Oroville, CA. I was introduced to Matthew by CP producer Matt Fidler, who mentioned over Zoom one day in lockdown: "you have to see this guy’s backyard – it’s amazing!" And so today, Matt Fidler and I take you on an actual field trip to the energetic, permaculture-regenerative-urban agriculture-food forestry-and indigenous-land-stewardship informed back yard paradise Matthew Trumm tends and grows with. He is a teacher, designer, activist, and a Gardener with a capital G. Over the course of our conversation and tour, we begin in Matthew’s house, head out to the garden itself and end up with our heads and hearts in the stars of all that is possible through our garden relationships. 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 week on Cultivating Place we continue our high-elevation garden view, now in Vail, Colorado at The Betty Ford Alpine Gardens, leaders in the research and conservation of North American alpine plant communities. The Alpine Zone has long been one of interest to plant enthusiasts worldwide across time and space for the sheer admiration for and interest in these rugged and resourceful plants and wildlife who’ve evolved to endure and thrive in the Alpine’s extreme conditions – extreme cold, wind, sun, heat, drought and/or snow and ice. As the conditions of our generous planet change with the climate crisis, the Alpine Zones around the globe become a last refuge for plants and wildlife migrating in search of cooler conditions. As a result, the Alpine Zone is of great interest to researchers looking not only preserve the beauty, diversity, and integrity of these highly sensitive environments, but also looking to them for lessons on adaptation for us all. Nicola Ripley is the Executive Director and Nick Courtens is the Curator of Plant Collections at The Betty Ford Alpine Gardens. Nicola and Nick join me this week in a conversation about their high-elevation enthusiasm and efforts. For more information and many more resources and images, please see the full post at www.cultivatingplace.com under the Podcast tab. 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 gain a little perspective with a lot of altitude as we begin a two-part series on 'Gardening at Elevation’. Isa Catto is a mother and partner, a fine and textile artist, a gardener, and a writer. Isa’s multi-faceted gardens at 8,000 ft in Woody Creek, Colorado are rooted in generations of family. in connection to community, and in love of place. Her gardens feed her family, her creativity, her soul, and her desire to contribute. Isa’s gardens, called Mojo Gardens are featured in Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press, 2021) on which I collaborated with photographer Caitlin Atkinson. I will be joining Isa in Aspen, Colorado this summer as the Jessica Catto Dialogues speaker for the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies on the 11th of August. Isa joins us this week to share more about her artistic garden life story. 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.

Hannah Gardner is a gardener, writer, and mother. She is a garden designer and plantswoman with a passion for traveling the world to learn about and meet plants and their communities in their places, from Estonia to the Canaries, Northern Israel to the wildflower meadows of the United Kingdom, where she makes her home. Her longtime column in Gardens Illustrated entitled "The Outsider”, which ran from 2017 to 2020 is a trove of adventurous armchair plant and garden travel. The botanical lessons she's learned globally inform her organic horticultural and floriculture work right at home and give inspiration to all of us for better botanical holiday making ourselves. She is a firm believer in the 'Imaginative Possibilities' born of broadening our horizons through travel. 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.

David Godshall is a landscape architect, gardener, and meta-garden philosopher making his way with his young family and his Terremoto Landscape Architecture design studio team in Los Angeles. The Terremoto team was featured as one of Elle Décor’s A List of designers in 2021. David’s LA home garden and his perspective on adventurous gardening and design are featured in Under Western Skies, on which I collaborated with photographer Caitlin Atkinson. David joins Cultivating Place this week, and as he shares in our conversation: "Garden building is civilization-building,” it should be done with creativity and integrity at all levels. 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.

Bonnie J Clark is a professor of anthropology at the University of Denver. Her new book "Finding Solace in the Soil, Archaeology of Gardens and Gardeners at Amache" (University Press of Colorado, 2020) traces six field seasons of her research and immersion into the lives of Japanese Americans held at the Amache prison camp, which was active on the high plains of Colorado from 1942 to 1945. With Amache already designated a National Historic Landmark, and with bills before both the US House of Representatives and the Senate to make Amache a part of the National Park Service, Bonnie joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about what it means to be a gardener and a human. 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.

Ali Meders-Knight is a Mechoopda tribal member whose traditional and present homelands are based in interior Northern California, a mother of five, and a traditional basketweaver in Chico, CA she is also a tribal liaison working to form partnerships for federal forest stewardship contracting and tribal forestry programs authorized in the 2018 Farm Bill. She has been a Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) practitioner for over 20 years, creating, collaborating on, and leading decolonized environmental education and land restoration projects with Chico State University and the City of Chico. In 2009 she envisioned and helped to manifest a unique 17-acre interactive food forest and interpretive park in North Chico known as Verbena Fields. This restoration of a small slice of the degraded watershed and its native plants works to heal land while educating the larger human community about the rich ecological heritage of the Mechoopda people. As Ali expresses in all aspects of her cultivating practice, especially as the founder of the Chico Traditional Ecological Knowledge Program: "Wassa Honi Mep! (Keep your heart's intentions good!)” In her specific place, she is a model for cultivators everywhere in traditional ecological knowledge providing a saving grace for returning health and prosperity to lands, economies, and communities. As we enter in July, 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.

At a time in the gardening world when we're hearing the phrase "ecologically functional gardens" and "ecological landscape design" with great regularity, Cultivating Place is pleased to be joined this week by Kelly Norris. Kelly is an avid gardener, a former nursery owner and plant breeder, and an award-winning author. Based in Des Moines Iowa, he is recently retired from his role as Director of Horticulture and Education at the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden and his newest book, "New Naturalism, Designing and Planting a Resilient, Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden” (Cool Springs Press, 2021) helps all of us to demystify what an ecologically functional and still incredibly beautiful and gratifying home garden means. It’s a perfect listen for the long hot gardening days of the Summer Solstice season. 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 ww.cultivatingplace.com.

Jessica Walliser is an avid gardener and professional horticulturist – working in the business of plants and gardening since the tender age of 15. As she has matured as a gardener, so too have her understandings and passions, and she now considers herself a devoted bug lover as well as a devoted plant lover because, you know, these two groups of lives we love are wholly interdependent. Jessica is a former garden podcaster, a co-founder of the online gardening resource Savvy Gardening, and the author of many books reflective of her journey and knowledge, including "Good Bug, Bad Bug"; "Attracting Beneficial Insects to your Garden", and most recently, "Plant Partners: Science-Based Companion Planting Strategies” (Artisan Press, 2020). Listen in this week as we discuss how far we’ve come in our mainstream gardening practices this past 50 years, from companion planting to cover cropping, interplanting to the joys of watching predatory robber flies help control Japanese beetles. We also cover the even greater joy of knowing that more life in your garden equals more health in your garden life. 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.

Through the many twists and turns of life, hers including a life-threatening battle with an auto-immune disorder and lung cancer, Claire’s organizing ethos has become: “Go Gently." An environmental advocate before turning to flowers as her life path, Claire is also the author/co-creator of a new book entitled “The Healing Power of Flowers”, which looks around the year at the meaning, magic, and medicine of 80 flowers. The book, photographed by Eva Nemeth, is an update and expansion on the Victorian Language of flowers, with seasonality and sustainability at its heart. As we in the Northern Hemisphere approach the Summer Solstice, Claire shares more about her gentle garden and floral life journey. 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.