Cultivating Place

In honor of Juneteenth celebrations coming up, we check in on the Anne Spencer House & Garden in Lynchburg, VA. The home and garden of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer and her husband Edward, this garden remains the only known fully restored historic garden of an African American in the U.S. We’re in conversation with Anne and Edward’s granddaughter, Shaun Spencer-Hester – who serves as the Executive Director and Curator of the House & Garden Museum. Shaun shares so much more information on the history, including new discoveries, the present, and the vibrant future of this important historic treasure of a garden and its gardeners. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Cultivating our places with attention, intention, thought and care is certainly an ethos I hold dear and advocate for with some measure of ferocity. When student and gardener Félix de Rosen reached out to me in 2021 seeking advice on a new book project. His thinking and design resonated with me, and we have communicated back and forth ever since. Now an ecological designer and artist, and graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard University, Félix’s design practice, Polycultura Studio, is based in Oakland, California, on traditional Ohlone territory. His now published book is: A Garden’s Purpose, which invites us to understand gardens as places where we build mutually beneficial relationships with the living world around us. Amen to that. Félix joins me this week on Cultivating Place to share much more about his garden life journey, his philosophy, and the experience of considering the idea of "a Garden’s purpose” from a multitude of perspectives. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

With the Chelsea Flower Show in the UK just completed, the gardening world as a whole has the concept of Garden Design awards and recognition - along with the garden world’s trends, concerns and priorities - top of mind. Such display and attention – and recognition well beyond the garden world – has the potential to move hearts and minds and, more importantly, to change minds and behaviors. We hope for the better. In 2023, Pacific Horticulture, a non-profit leader in horticultural thinking and gardening up and down the Pacific Region of the US since 1976 (and rooted back even earlier), jumped into the arena of how we encourage, celebrate, recognize, and even incentivize garden design when they launched their inaugural Design Futurist awards. These awards demonstrate the power of garden design to achieve climate resilience, steward biodiversity, and connect people with nature. In 2023, the first year of the awards, “visionary designers and regional plantspeople submitted designs illustrating that our gardens can conserve plants and wildlife, treat our water and soil as precious, and hold the wellbeing of people at their center.” The Design Futurist Awards celebrate “garden design that is easily replicable, modest in scale, or designed for intimate neighborhood community use” and I hope serve as a model for how to not just award but reward good garden design anywhere and everywhere. This week, Sarah Beck Pacific Horticulture’s Executive Director joins Cultivating Place to share more about the process and purpose of these awards – entries for which are being accepted now through July 26th, 2024. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place, we’re in conversation with Kristen Bradley, Co-founder and Creative Director of the world-renowned Australian-based Milkwood Permaculture. Their new Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook is another perfect resource for our summer garden (and life) plotting, planning, and planting, with an emphasis on garden-life-based habits for hope in a changing world. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Just in time for your continued planning, plotting, and planting in order to grow the earliest and the latest and the biggest and the longest producing and the best tasting of the summer vegetable and fruit bounty, this week Cultivating Place returns to our intermittent series on seeds in conversation with Adam Alexander, author of The Seed Detective, Uncovering the Secret Histories of Remarkable Vegetables. This conversation and gardening human go to show—once again—that all of life (and the histories of humans with their plants in their places) can be found in the garden if we’re looking. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Bevin Cohen and his wife Heather Marie co-founded Small House Farm, a homestead, garden, family, and bridge to the natural world around them. Bevin writes: “The garden is where we meditate, harvest our seeds and learn about Mother Nature’s many wonders. We are avid seed savers, and amateur plant breeders. We believe that each seed is a connection to every grower that stewarded that variety before us – and every rower that comes after us.” Through his books, his educational workshops and lectures, and now through his podcast, Seeds and Weeds, Bevin shares his small-farm big-life heartfelt world view. In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are and what they are growing in this world, I am so pleased to be in conversation with Bevin 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com. All photos courtesy of Bevin Cohen, Small House Farm. All rights reserved.

To kick off May, looking forward to Mother’s Day, Graduations, and the promise of Summer Gardening in general here in the US, this week we go all in for flowers in pots! with one of the world’s bright gardens and floral stars: Sarah Raven. Her newest book: A Year Full of Pots Container Flowers for All Seasons (Bloomsbury Press, 2024) notes that pots in the garden are like "bubbles in a glass of champagne. In the past 25 years, Sarah has been a leadership voice in beautiful and productive gardening through her trial and research garden at Perch Hill, her many books and in-person educational offerings, and now through her podcast: Grow, Cook, Eat, Arrange. What could be a better way to welcome May? 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

The third week of April is California Native Plant week, this year being celebrated by the California Native Plant Society via 8 days of action in honor and protection of our native plant diversity. Our celebratory action item here at Cultivating Place is being in conversation this week with Aaron Sims, Director of the Rare Plant Program for CNPS. 2024 year marks the 50th anniversary of the CNPS Rare Plant Inventory, tracking and analyzing rare plants and their status across the floristic province to help fight extinction (and subsequent biodiversity loss), to engage citizen scientists, including gardeners, across the state, and to inform land use decisions statewide. Along with the beauty, joy, and life sustaining qualities of our native plant flora whereever we might live and garden, that is all worth celebrating. Happy Native Plant (rare and common) Gardening to you - 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Following on from native plant week, this week we revisit a BEST OF conversation about some of our favorite native plant visitors: our native bumble bees. Bumble bee conservation has recently had some good news: the Xerces Society recently kicked off their newest Bumble Bee Atlas project, this time in the US Midwest. With that in mind, please enjoy our conversation from 2023 with Leif Richardson, Conservation Biologist with the Xerces Society, sharing so much about conservation, about bumble bees, about the nation-wide Bumble Bee Atlas projects generally, and his spearheading of the California Bumble Bee Atlas.

Hummingbirds are a beloved and charismatic creature of the America’s, the more than 350 species of hummingbirds have coevolved with the flora of the Americas for millions of years. For this fourth week in our series of 5 episodes on our gardens as important habitat and we gardeners as important stewards of land and biodiversity, we check in on the state of things for the Hummingbird. Cultivating Place is joined in this by Dr. Susan Wethington, research scientist, Program Developer and Executive Director of the Hummingbird Monitoring Network, based in Arizona. "Hummingbirds are unique in that every culture that lives with hummingbirds has a positive interaction with hummingbirds and it seems to me that if we can maintain hummingbird diversity in this world - because we all love them - then we have a chance to maintain biodiversity in other species that are so critical in our functioning natural world. That if we can let one animal into our hearts - the others can follow." Dr. Susan Wethington, Executive Director, The Hummingbird Network The hummingbirds are among our smallest of birds, but our largest – and of course avian – pollinators. These little birds, many of which migrate vast distances, need to drink more than their body weight in nectar every day, and are voracious and effective insectivore. Having co-evolved with the native flora of the Americans – including with the vast diversity of salvias, penstemons, lobelia, agastache, manzanitas, honeysuckles and more – they love nothing more than beautiful flowering native or other nectar/pollen rich plants in our gardens to help them on their way. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week, with Spring and seeding season fully underway—indoors and out—we speak with gardener entrepreneur Anne Fletcher of Orta Kitchen Gardens, creators of non-toxic ceramic, self-watering Orta seed pots. These pots' material lives help eliminate plastic right from the start in your plants’ growing lives, seeding more circularity into our garden lives! They have a seed club, 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

To round out Women’s History Month in style, this week, we are back in conversation with Leslie Bennett, an Oakland, CA-based landscape designer who creates gardens that help to nourish and tell the story of who we are, individually and communally. Leslie lives out her horticultural and cultural ethos in her landscape design work with Pine House Edible Gardens and Black Sanctuary Gardens, as well as in her writing and advocacy. Her newest book, Garden Wonderland, written in collaboration with Julie Chai and photographed by Rachel Weill, will be published on April 2nd from Ten Speed Press. Garden Wonderland brings together all of Leslie’s wisdom, spirit, experience, and paradigm-shifting passions while also bringing together the power of women and gardens. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

The Great Unlawning of America has been underway for some time now, and as we have just crossed the threshold of the spring equinox earlier this week, I want to celebrate how far we have come and give us all a forceful nudge to help us stay the path with the many millions of acres of the progress we have to go in this work to trade lifeless monoculture chemically dependent lawns for a happy healthy habitat. This work was given a beautiful boost in 2020 with the publication of Owen Wormser’s book Lawns into Meadows, Growing a Regenerative Landscape (updated second edition out now in paperback!) Owen is a gardener, designer, author and ecological gardening advocate working under the name of Abound Design, based in Western Massachusetts. In honor of the vernal equinox pulling us into the light, enjoy this conversation with Owen Wormser. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

The combining of sculpture and gardens dates back centuries if not millennia, and there are few public gardens I know of that do not incorporate sculpture into their aesthetics and identity at some point. This week we are in conversation with an exemplary public garden, whose identity grows out of this pairing: the art of horticulture and the art of sculpture. The Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan is “proudly ranked as one of the top 45 most visited museums in the world” and their award winning gardens “showcase over 200 captivating sculptures,” inviting visitor to experience what they see as the “perfect blend of art and nature.” We’re joined this week by Steve LaWarre, the Vice President of Horticulture at Frederick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park to share more. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Happy Women’s History Month! To kick Women’s History Month off on Cultivating Place, we visit with the woman known as the Queen of Herbs, Jekka McVicar of Jekka’s Herb Farm in the UK this week. Her long and notable career has brought the gardened world the best the herbs of the world have to offer to our gardens, to our environments, to our kitchens, and to our souls. In recognition of her herbal research, plant breeding, garden designing, and advocacy around the many merits of all manner of herbs to the garden world these past 40 years, Jekka has been awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour in Horticulture by the Royal Horticultural Society and the Gardeners Media Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as 62 RHS Gold Medals. At Jekka’s Herb Farm and Herbetum in South Gloucestershire, she displays her life’s collection of more than 600 culinary, medicinal, pollinator-supporting, and beautiful herbs. I was honored to profile Jekka in my 2020 book, The Earth In Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants, as one of the women leaders in our horticultural world who have expanded and elevated the way we think and talk about gardening. Jekka’s newest book, 100 Herbs to Grow A Comprehensive Guide to the Best Culinary and Medicinal Herbs publishes from Quadrille Press in march of 2024. Savor! 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Most gardeners know the somewhat gruesome pleasure of working in the garden – with a sharp tool, or a poisonous plant, or ankle deep in a juicy scene of decomposition – and thinking to yourself, “oh, this would be a great scene for a murder mystery.” Writer and gardener Marta McDowell is with us this week for our Leap Day Special - sharing more about her newest title Gardening Can Be Murder: How Poisonous Poppies, Sinister Shovels, and Grim Gardens Have Inspired Mystery Writers, in which she delves into the literary history of mysteries and crime fiction being long inspired by life and death in the garden. It’s an oddly fun romp into the overlapping worlds of mystery and crime fiction with gardens and gardeners. Join us! All images courtesy of Marta McDowell, illustrations by Yolanda Fundora, all rights reserved.

This week we lean into a particular aspect of our garden lives – but perhaps a favorite winter activity in the northerly climates in winter: tending to our houseplant and indoor garden family. We’re in conversation with Jane Perrone, host of the “On The Ledge” Podcast, and author of “Legends of the Leaf: Unearthing the secrets to help your plants thrive”. In this deep end of the winter season, when our indoor gardening might be holding us through till we can get back outside, Jane shares more about her many plant love motivations. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, what they are growing in this world, and why that matters to all of us, I am so excited to be joined this week by Brent Leggs, Senior Vice President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Executive Director of the Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, whose mission focuses on telling the full American story. The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund holds a vision of preservation serving as a potential path for equity. The fund is actively working to preserve the landscapes and buildings of Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Historic Black Churches, the Washington Rosenwald Schools, as well as the homes and gardens of cultural icons such as Madame C.J. Walker, musicians John and Alice Coltrane, singer/songwriter Nina Simone, and Harlem Renaissance poet and gardener Anne Spencer. The Action Fund is also partnering with community members in Akron, Ohio, on re-creating a public plaza space to preserve the historic activism of once-enslaved abolitionist and author Sojourner Truth, who delivered her “Ain’t I a Woman” speech in Akron in 1851. This is a very personal conversation but also a universal love story of the heritage and history held in our places and the importance of that fullness to all of us. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, what they are growing in this world, and why that matters to all of us, we use this midwinter moment for a mid-winter retreat. We head south to the Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center and their remarkable Cherokee Garden Library – named for the historic Cherokee rose, prevalent across the south. Staci Catron has been the Library’s Director since 2000, and Jennie Oldfield is the collection’s Senior Technical Librarian/Supervisory Archivist. The two join Cultivating Place this week to share so much more about the fertile ground of their work – enriching all of our garden lives. The three of us discuss the importance of horticultural and garden library collections for preserving the past and enlivening our present and future. As a result of their work in archiving, research, and exhibitions, this conversation continues our celebrations of Black History Month, and it will pair nicely with a warm cup of something on a cold afternoon. 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 see many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Camille Dungy is perhaps best known for her remarkable and award-winning, often environmentally focused poetry and editing of collections of environmentally focused poetry and writing by people of color exploring the intersections of gender, race, art, environment, and culture. In honor of Black History Month, we revisit this best-of conversation with Camille from May of 2023. Just as her newest title, Soil, The Story of A Black Mother’s Garden was published by 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 better 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, what they are growing in this world, and why that matters to all of us, I am pleased to be joined this week by three members of the team at The Institute for Applied Ecology – literally ecology in action. Their mission is to conserve native species and their habitats through restoration, research, and education. They envision a world where all people and wildlands are healthy and interact positively, biological diversity flourishes, and environmental challenges are met with a social commitment to solving problems with scientific principles. And in many ways, this all comes back to an abundant and healthy seed supply. This brings us to the Institute’s Native Seed Network and their coordination of their upcoming National Native Seed Conference, being held virtually Feb 7th and 8th. The conference connects research, industry, land management, and restoration professionals, providing the premier opportunity to develop relationships and share information about the collection, research and development, production, and use of native plant materials. Given that gardeners are land managers in their own right, this is the kind of information that informs good garden decision-making for all of us. And I am excited to serve as the keynote speaker for the event. Alexis Larsen, Program Director for the Institute's Plant Materials Program, Morgan Franke, the Program Coordinator for the Plant Materials Program, and Tom Kaye, the Institute’s co-founder, Executive Director, and Senior Ecologist, join Cultivating Place this week to share so much more about the past, present, and future of this important work. 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.

Did you know that grasslands account for between 20 and 40 percent of the world's land area? Generally open, fairly flat, and accessible, they exist on every continent except Antarctica. Ecologically as important as but different from other large ecoregion types such as forests or deserts, grasslands are even more vulnerable to pressure from human populations – for settling, planting, livestock, and development. Threats to natural grasslands, as well as the wildlife that live on them, include farming, overgrazing, invasive species, illegal hunting, and climate change. At the same time, one study found California's grasslands and rangelands could store more carbon than forests because they are less susceptible to wildfires and drought. Still, less than 10 percent—of the world's grassland is currently protected in large part due to a lack of understanding of their ecological role. Which is where Dr. Justin Luong comes in. Grassland ecosystems fill an ecological role as important as and different than our charismatic forests, our extreme deserts, and our coastal or chaparral scrub. And in fact, much of the general home garden lanscapes with their mix of perennial flowers, annual vegetables, and grasses, in many ways mimic grassland meadows. Ecologist and educator Dr. Justin Luong of Cal Poly Humboldt joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about his journey (including being a worm wrangler) in science, practice, and education focused on biodiversity and climate resiliency, most recently through grassland restoration ecology. 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 on Cultivating Place, we hear the magical story of how two gardeners, separated by time, came together to grow all of our imaginations. May Sarton was a 20th—century writer known for her poetry, novels, and personal journals illuminating the landscape of the human heart and mind. She was also a lifelong and avid gardener. She spent the last 22 years of her life on the coast of Maine in a house and garden called Wild Knoll, now a part of the Surf Point Artist In Residence Program. Carly Glovinski is an artist working in a wide array of mediums that balance between craft, utility, and art. She joins us today to tell the story of how she helped reimagine May Sarton’s former house site as a garden and to re-establish Sartons’s extant gardens using Sarton’s well-known journal “The House by the Sea” as her guide. It's an inspiring story of how we all existentially garden with one another in so many ways, entwined across time and space, and how we garden the past, present, and future simultaneously. 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.

Esme Cabrera is an artist, a naturalist, and a born educator. Under the Instagram name “la-mamigami", Esme experiments, shares, and nurtures a plant-based art practice honoring the "miracles-of-being" that are the native plants around her. Exploring their spirit, medicine, history and culture, mathematical, scientific, and sacred patterns with curiosity and deep observation is integral to Esme's California native plant origami designs. Following her efforts to know these plants intimately enough to fold them provides us ALL with a portal to creatively reimagine our collective and growing ways forward. Ingenious, colorful, biodiverse, full of play, discovery, a community of sharing, and plant-and-place-centric, I cannot imagine a more powerful blessing to usher in the new year than this conversation. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

We opened up 2023 here on Cultivating Place, focusing on biodiversity, and we close the year similarly, with diverse plant community thinking getting the final say. We’re in conversation with Cornwall-based ecological landscape designer Sid Hill, a land and ecological artisan who creates beautiful, abundant, and thoughtful places. Sid challenges himself, his clients, and the broader horticultural world to keep going and to go even further in rethinking and reimagining how horticulture is practiced and thought of in our world. A believer in the ability of intentional and well-thought-out design to help our gardens help the world in moderating so many of the challenges ahead, Sid asks us to think like the plant and animal communities, as well as the indigenous human communities that are, and have been, foundational to the uniqueness of our places. He asks us to think like healthy habitats and their dynamic patterns as we look to the future – as we grow the future. I think this plant-and-ecology-of-place-centric thinking is a perfect way to close out 2023 and herald in 2024. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Collin Pine is an avid gardener, as well as an educator and writer. His first book is a work of garden-based children’s literature, The Garden Next Door. Thought-provokingly illustrated by Tiffany Everett, the detailed and specific artistry of the book adds a rich visual storyline to the already rich language-based narrative. Just in time for the Winter Solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere, The Garden Next Door, at its most philosophical, reminds us of the power of our gardens to support plant and animal life, human community, and pure delight - a delight that transcends age and the many distractions and misdirections of our time. This lovely addition to our children’s bookshelves also reminds us that ALL of our gardens are next door to someone, and in this way, is an addition to our own existential understanding of the power of gardens and gardeners. Happy Happy Solstice from Cultivating Place! 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Caribbean-born British-based writer and Gardener Marchelle Farrell is the author of Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside, Finding Home in an English Country Garden. A medical doctor by training, Marchelle’s work unflinchingly surveys her own journey to life in an English country garden and along the way unearths the hard edges but also the richness of the contributions of the African diaspora to our modern gardening world—contributions made willingly and unwillingly, seen, and unseen, acknowledged and unacknowledged. Known as Afroliage online, Marchelle’s writing, a gardening story shared, and home deeply rooted are healing and re-integrating, in that way in which our gardens can be all of our very best health care. Uprooting is both powerfully personal and simultaneously universal. Listen in this week! 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, and what they are growing in this world, I am thrilled to be joined this week by Maria Rodale, of the Rodale Organic Gardening family. Maria is a self-described "explorer in search of the mysteries of the universe." Author, artist, activist, and recovering CEO, she serves on the board of the Rodale Institute and is also a former board co-chair. Throughout her career, she has advocated for the potential of organic regenerative farming to heal the damage wrought by pesticides and industrial agricultural practices. She is the author of Organic Manifesto and Scratch and is a children’s book author under the pseudonym: Mrs. Peanuckle. Maria is a mother, grandmother, and crazy gardener who lives in Pennsylvania, right near where she was born. This week we take a deep dive into the heart of the lessons of all of our gardens through the lens of Maria’s garden journey, documented in her newest book Love Nature Magic: Shamanic Journey’s Into the Heart of My Garden, out now from Chelsea Green Books. 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Jac Semmler is a plant practitioner, a multi-disciplinary, creative, highly skilled horticulturist, and the human behind an epic new book and the Australian-based plant practice known as Super Bloom. As our Northern Hemisphere gardens and landscapes settle into whatever their annual dormancy and winter rest might be, we head to the Southern Hemisphere in conversation with Jac Semmler. Her philosophy (of more flowering plants, everywhere, all the time) behind her work Super Bloom gives us so much to dream about in our coming deep winter sleeps. In this tiny lull between the mostly happy hubbub of the winter holidays, sweet flowery dreams! 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In our world at this time, I give thanks for the leadership voices that ground us in innovative ways of thinking and seeing our own power for growing the world better. I thought that this week we could all use a dose of such direction and grounding. With that in mind, please enjoy this BEST OF conversation with Indigenous seed keeper and teacher, Rowen White, and writer and activist Gavin Van Horn. They are voices of reason, relationship, and responsibility in our times. 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. 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. A passionate advocate for Indigenous seed and food sovereignty, 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week we’re in conversation with award-winning plantsman Riz Reyes of Washington State-based RH Horticulture and Landwave Gardens. Riz is the current Assistant Director of Heronswood Garden and started his new role in May 2022. His duties include overseeing garden staff, volunteers, organizing garden events/plant sales, teaching lectures/workshops, and assists in maintaining and redesigning prominent sections of the gardens. From his early inspirations as a child in the Philippines to his international horticultural studies, to his rich garden career in iconic horticultural landscapes across the Pacific Northwest, to his family-oriented picture book “GROW a Family Guide to Plants and How to Grow Them” (2022) – Riz’s stories and his inherent joy in living with plants will inspire you to grow more, 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Gwendolyn Wallace is a gardener, a student, a teacher, a historian, and the author of two new works of illustrated children’s literature. Joy Takes Root, and The Light She Feels Inside (both published this year) are works grounded in the human impulse to garden. In words, stories, and images these additions to the world of children’s literature help to grow us all. Using her own history and experience with gardens and gardening, Gwendolyn’s stories remind us (no matter our age) that our gardens raise and tend to us as much as we raise and tend to them! As we lean into the grateful season of November and December - Enjoy. All images courtesy of Gwendolyn Wallace, all rights reserved. It might be just the inspiration we need to get us all planting! 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

As we turn the calendar to November and the season to decidedly late-fall and even wintery in many places across the U.S., we look toward our fall & winter planting windows – especially good for native plants in most of our areas as long as the ground is workable. With that in mind, this week we’re joined by two native plant enthusiasts and nursery people – Kristin Currin and Andrew Merritt of Humble Roots Nursery in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge. Humble Roots is a native plant nursery acclaimed for its efforts in sustainability and promoting native plant passion, knowledge, and ethics across the wider ecoregions of the Pacific Northwest. After years at this work, Kristin and Drew, as he is known, have recently shared a great deal of their knowledge even more widely with the recently published The Pacific Northwest Native Plant Primer, 225 plants for an Earth Friendly Garden, out now from Timber Press. It might be just the inspiration we need to get us all planting! 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week we continue our artistic autumnal theme in conversation with Nina Veteto, a conservationist, an artist, and an expert storyteller. Known as Blue Ridge Botanic online and creator of the brand new Flora and Forage Podcast (and offshoot of her beloved Secrets of the Wildflowers Video series on social media). Nina is based in North Carolina, and she joins us this week to share more about her history, her artistry, and her passion and voice for plants – from their artistic renderings to their secret stories and other wonders of our natural 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week in this season of endings and beginnings again, we welcome back writer, backyard tender, and heartfelt observer Margaret Renkl joining us to share more about her newest, likewise heartfelt book: “The Comfort of Crows, A Backyard Year.” Many of you will remember our previous conversation with writer and gardener Margaret Renkl about one of her previous titles, “Late Migrations.” Her opinion pieces in The New York Times document the nature of our humanity weekly. I am so pleased to welcome her back this week to share more about her newest title – what is aptly described as “a literary and nature-based devotional” from one of our favorite backyard nature devotees. Join us, this week. 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place, we return to the artistry and also the activism of our plant-loving and garden-growing lives in conversation with Olly Costello. Through their remarkable colors and forms and interconnections made visible - from the life of the soil to the lives and forms of plants and humans right on up to the myriad stars in our galaxy-night skies - Olly draws us all together. Olly is a white non-binary queer illustrator, food grower, honey bee tender, and a seeker of mysticism. Through their creative work – which includes both visual arts and community building and reimagining - Olly explores themes of interconnectedness, cosmology, reciprocity, queer ecology, biomimicry, and emergence. They are perennially interested in cultivating our radical imaginations to help us all shape our emergent new world – in and out of the garden. 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week, we enjoy a conversation with a gardener and garden guru well- known and loved: Joe Lamp’l of the famed and award-winning Growing a Greener World on PBS and The ‘joe gardener’ Show podcast. Growing a Greener World is not just a show name but a nearly life-long mission for Joe. While he is known for his organic vegetable gardening knowledge and advocacy, Joe likewise loves the wilder side of his place in the world and ecological function is a top priority along with his human garden community. And at the end of the day, Joe is a lot like all of us: he just loves playing in the dirt with his plant friends. In our ongoing exploration into who gardeners are, where gardeners are, and what they are growing in this world, Joe Lamp’l joins Cultivating Place to share more about his garden life – and how he enhances ours—the rest of us “joe gardeners.” 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

As we move toward October, the first a few intermittent episodes reminding us of the artistry behind our plant and garden love, the artistry underpinning mother nature herself. This week we’re in conversation with artist Libby Ellis – photographer who sees the fullness of creation in the many faces of the flowers who delight us. Libby Ellis is a fine art photographer based on the island now known as Martha’s Vineyard homeland of the Wampanoag people and nation who named the beautiful island Noepe. Monochromoatic and often single focused Ellis’ work lands in my heart in a similar way as a Georgia O’Keeffe painting or a Dorothea Lange portrait – all of them capturing the essence of one subject while contributing insight into the workings of life itself – nature, plus the workings of humanity and its perceptions. In the case of Libby Ellis – the focal point include everyday flowers from Cosmos to musk roses, hibiscus to magnolia. And her work has been featured from various locations on Martha’s Vineyard including the Featherstone Center for the Arts and the Carnegie Museum to London’s Saatchi Gallery for the Royal Horticultural Society’s 2022 Botanical Art and Photography exhibit, from the Harvard Divinity School to large scale projection against a high rise building in Denver, CO. Libby joins us from her studio in Edgartown MA (on the to share more about her photographic eye and gardener’s heart.

This week, a Best OF episode revisiting our conversation with Maria Popova, the creator and writer behind The Marginalian (formerly known as Brain Pickings). For the past 16 years, The Marginalia has been a daily—perhaps even hourly—exploration of wonder in our world as seen through the lenses of how we as humans express ourselves in our own creativity, our intellectual curiosity, our sadnesses and griefs, and in our greatest loves and joys. Gardening and gardeners are recurrently among the human endeavors Maria has explored these many years. This is a light of a conversation in the best spirit of quantum gardening as we tend toward the fullness of Autumn’s splendor. 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

On this special edition of the show, our guest will be Cultivating Place’s wonderful host, Jennifer Jewell. Jennifer has a new book out and it’s very special. A very intimate and, at the same time, global take on the natural and social science aspects of one of the most fundamental things to life on Earth – seeds. Jennifer’s book is titled What We Sow: On The Personal, Ecological and Cultural Significance of Seeds. It’s an exploration of the lives of plants and people through the cycle of a botanical year viewed through the fundamental lens of seeds. With our guest host, Dave Schlom of NSPR’s Blue Dot program and podcast, we’ll hear about the good and the bad when it comes to the modern world of seeds - from those produced by natural plants battling to adapt to climate change to those produced by human hands. 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, our second episode on gardens and green spaces of New York City, getting us primed for The Garden Conservancy’s inaugural Garden Futures Summit being held at the New York Botanical Garden on Sept. 29th and at gardens across the city on Saturday, Sept. 30th. This week, we head to The High Line – a 1.45 elevated linear garden - one of New York City’s green space highlights. We’re in conversation with Richard Hayden, Director of Horticulture at The High Line since 2022. A horticulture and public garden enthusiast, Richard is all about connecting people with the power of plants. Join us! All photos courtesy of Richard Hayden and The Friends of The High Line, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. The self-seeded wild high line prior to revitalization and curation demonstrates the biodiversity of flora and fauna possible on this elevated railway line. Top image by Joel Sternfeld. 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.

To kick off September, we head to the Big Apple, where at the end of the month, the Garden Conservancy is holding its inaugural Garden Futures Summit on September 29th and 30th. In preparation, we thought we’d dedicate two episodes to checking in on some garden lives in the city. This week we’re in conversation with photographer, artist, author, and gardener Ngoc Minh Ngo, sharing more about her newest work, “New York Green,” profiling in word and uplifting photography more than 40 exceptional parks and gardens of the five boroughs that comprise New York City. “From tiny corner lots to acres of old-growth forests, New York is filled with a wealth of beautiful green spaces–if you know where to look,” and Ngoc Minh Ngo’s book shows us just where to look. Ngoc was a previous guest on Cultivating Place in 2018, and I am so pleased to welcome her back. 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.

Chad Manley is a fellow and lecturer in the School of Landscape Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Nora Jacobs and Carlos Velasco were two of the Masters of Landscape Architecture students in Chad’s spring 2023 Landscape Architecture Design Studio entitled Dancing the Dragon’s Jaw – a deeply imagined course of study designed by Chad “inviting students on a smokey dance of space-making along a continuum of Northern and Central California landscapes," and that resulted in an "accretive semester’s long individual-collective physical and digital collage." As a culmination of the students' learning and creative term, they traveled as a group to California to “dance through its communities, meadows, and mountains, meet with fire keepers; land managers; scientists; artists; and designers, situating the journey within both the urgencies and poetic potentials of a land-on-fire.” The studio-developed ‘pyro-loci,’ worked to consider and “re-imagine an empathetic landscape architecture born of regenerative fire" – and regenerative, inclusive, and expansive learning mindsets. They learned from books, from other designers and design history, from the drawing board, but they also learned on and from the land and people for whom their design might be of greatest benefit. In our second week of back-to-school-themed episodes devoted to plant education in school and in life, the three join Cultivating Place this week to share more. 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.

Can you believe it is already back-to-school season? This week, we look at what back to school means for our lifelong learning with plants. This week, we’re in conversation with members of the Miami University of Ohio engaged with Miami’s Institute for Environment and Sustainability Masters of Environment program and Institute for Food Farm to learn more about just a few of the ways plant and horticultural information in integrated into the daily life of Miami’s curriculum. In September of last year, I had the pleasure and privilege of visiting with students, faculty, and horticultural facilities at Miami of Ohio, and it impressed upon me even more urgently the importance of supporting and demanding strong horticultural and ecological curricula in our educational systems at all levels - from pre-school to Pre-med and PhDs of all kinds. This week, Ross Olson, the Coordinator of Miami’s Institute for Food Farm, Colin Valantino, an IES graduate student doing a Summer Client Project “practicum" with the farm, and Aisley Carpenter, a student worker at the farm, are all with Cultivating Place to share more. 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 summer’s end, with end-of-summer and fall events and celebrations perhaps in mind, maybe even winter events in the planning, we turn this week to floristry and how and where it intersects with sustainability – and as our guest today shares, with thoughtfulness. British floral designer Shane Connolly is well-known for his world-class floristry and floral design – gracing several weddings within the British Royal Family as well as the recent coronation of King Charles. While his floral design is known for this high-profile event, Shane is also known as one of the preeminent ambassadors for a more sustainable, organic, local, seasonal, and low-waste floral design and floral supply industry. In advance of the Slow Flowers Society welcoming Shane for three days of workshops and events in Seattle, WA Sept 29th – October 1st, Shane joins Cultivating Place this week to share more. 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 the throes of fire season, especially in the western regions of North America, this week, we turn to the idea of not only gardening for beauty, food, and/or habitat but also fire preparedness. We’re speaking this week with Dr. Adrienne Edwards and Rachel Schleiger, biologists, botanists, gardeners, and authors of the new book Firescaping Your Home, a manual for readiness in wildfire country – including 640 resilient native plant recommendations with a focus on native plants of California, Oregon and Washington but widely applicable across wildfire-prone region. 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.

Sam Hoadley is the Manager of Horticultural Research at the Mt. Cuba Center in Delaware, a remarkable botanic garden and conservation center as well as one of the country’s leading research and trial gardens for native plant species as well as their old and new cultivars. Open to the public since 2013, Mt. Cuba is dedicated to us all growing at a higher level. With the fall planning and planting season now firmly in sight, Sam joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about the data (including ecological benefits, optimal growing conditions, performance results, and overall beauty) he and the team at Mt. Cuba are aggregating for us as home gardeners about how native plant species and their selections available on the market really DO In our gardens. It’s valuable data for us 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.

Erin Presley is the herb, woodland, and pond garden horticulturist at Olbrich Botanical Gardens, a 16-acre, free, public garden founded in 1952 on the shores of Lake Wonona in Madison, Wisconsin. In her position since 2014, Erin has become as much a part of the landscape as the plants and animals of the garden she loves. She has been particularly instrumental in bringing to life, with the help of other plants people, gardens of culture representing the natural history and plant relationships of a diversity of Madisonians from the Indigenous cultures, including Ho-chunk, to Ayurvedic, Hmong, and more. It’s the perfect summer field trip to a wonderful public resource. 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.

The garden in summer is at its fullest sensory delight and overwhelm – the peak of sunlight, growing hours, heat, and growth, ripening and even rotting. In this week’s conversation, embrace this sublime sensuality from various perspectives in conversation with master naturalist Nancy Lawson. Lawson is perhaps best known as The Humane Gardener, the title of her first book, and her online signature. And a humane gardener she is. She is a habitat consultant, and founder of The Humane Gardener, LLC. She observes, researches, and pioneers creative wildlife-friendly landscaping methods in her own home habitat and for others. In other words – and in all senses of the phrase – Nancy puts her gardening where her words are and words and action come together beautifully in her newest book, Wildscape, Trilling Chipmunks, Beckoning Blooms, Salty Butterflies, and Other Sensory Wonders of Nature. Together this week, we delve into her newest research and reporting on the complexity and richness of the sensory life of other than human lives, from the botanical to the birds, bugs, mammals, amphibians, and other wildlife all around us. Wildscape is the eye, ear, nose and heart opening! 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.

The garden in summer is what we all dream of: some downtime, some play time, fresh flavors, fragrances, and of course, flowers and fun. This week we revel in the beautiful chaos of a garden-inspired life with an Oklahoma accent in the company of Linda Vater, author of The Beautiful & Edible Garden, and founder of Potager Blog on Instagram and Garden Inspired Living on Youtube. Linda is exuberantly-spirited and as well-known for her former storybook Oklahoma Garden – its expansive front garden and deliciously designed back garden potager - as she is for her extensive and supremely elegant collection of homegrown topiary. Now in residence in her new-old Cottage on the Hill garden, Linda is fashion-minded, fabulous, and fun in the second of our gardener’s summer vacation-themed conversations. 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.