Cultivating Place

Novelist Jane Delury describes herself as a fledgling (maybe seedling?) gardener after 8 years into gardening being part of her everyday life and loves. This labor and love in life coincide with themes of landscapes, gardens, and gardeners becoming fully-embodied motifs and characters in her fiction writing. They show up in her first novel-in-stories, The Balcony, and in her newly released novel Hedge, gardens, gardeners, and gardening past and present from all kinds of perspectives take center stage. Deep into the heat of the season now, it’s always gratifying to lean into the pleasures of a good summer book. In our case, a good garden-based summer book. Hedge is steamy, dreamy, and through the setting of gardens and garden history, the story plumbs the depths of human longing, loss, and ultimately the long view. Jane joins Cultivating Place this first week of July to share more about her new and richly gardened novel, the research that went into it, and the garden passion and history that enlivens it. 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 before July is upon us, and thoughts of what it means to be a citizen fill our minds, hearts, and collective messaging, I am so pleased to be joined by Taylor Pennewell and Rose Hammock of the Redbud Resource Group, an advocacy organization founded in 2020 by Taylor and her cousin Madison Esposito. The Redbud Resource Group believes fiercely that intergenerational healing can occur only when Native voices are valued in every area of public life. Taylor and Madison's “firsthand experience as modern Native people inspired" them to "create resources that support all communities" in making an often erased population visible again. “Native people are often left out of conversations on issues that impact their communities,” the Group notes, and in their work, they see the impact of this erasure regularly. As an intervention and disruption of this pattern, the Redbud Resource Group is improving public health outcomes for Native American communities through education, research, and community partnership. It is generative, growing, and much-needed work in our world going meaningfully beyond land acknowledgments and building bridges between Native and non-native communities. As Taylor and Rose make clear early in our conversation, you cannot separate the fate of any damage done to Native peoples from that done to native lands and plant communities; their healing and success go hand in hand as well. 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 ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, and how they are growing our world, I am so pleased to be back in conversation this week with Day Schildkret, the founder, the ongoing creator, and re-creator of the movement and practice known as Morning Altars, bringing together nature, art, and ritual. Day and his work are devoted to the pursuit of impermanent beauty and how that can become nourishment for life to continue. That sounds like being a gardener to me, and the week of the Summer Solstice is the perfect time to reflect on this. 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.

National Pollinator Week is an annual celebration since 2010 in support of pollinator health that was initiated and is managed by Pollinator Partnership. This year National Pollinator Week festivities will take place across the country June 19 – 25, 2023 and in celebration, this week on Cultivating Place we look closely at one particular group of our native pollinators the charismatic bumble bees, the more than 250 species in the genus Bombus. Our guest this week, Leif Richardson, is an Endangered Species Conservation Biologist with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, coordinating the community science efforts behind the newest of the society’s North American Bumble Bee Atlases - this time in California. If you’re in the Northern California listening region, mark your calendars for the mid-July opening of an in-depth and beautiful exhibit entitled Bombus: The Natural History of Bumble Bees. At Gateway Science Museum on the campus of California State University, Chico, this new exhibition interweaves current scientific research on the North American population of bumble bees, as well as over a decade of study, observations and spectacular photography by plantsman and California Bumble Bee Atlas participant John Whittlesey. Through his deeply studied lens, you will never see a bumble bee again without a deepened love and appreciation. Listen in this week and join us in person this summer! 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.

No matter what you might call it – Rewilding, wildscaping, backyard habitats, Acts of Restorative Kindness, Native plant habitat gardening, Homegrown National Park, Perfect Earth, 2/3rds for the Birds, or Garden for Wildlife, the concepts of Conservation + Biodiversity + our Gardens wherever they might be is not a new idea, although it is newly imperative in our world. These three concepts as a perfect trinity go back to at very least 1973 when the National Wildlife Federation kicked off its Garden for Wildlife Program. Celebrating the 50th anniversary of these programs, Cultivating Place is joined this week by Mary Phillips, since 2014 she has been the head of the NFW’s garden for wildlife and certified wildlife habitat programs. In this big anniversary year, the programs are very close to realizing 300,000 cultivated wildlife habitats 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, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Welcome June! This week, the third and final-for-now conversation in our series on the state of seed for native ecosystem restoration through the lens of California: seed identified, site-sourced, and grown for conservation & biodiversity support. The foundational level of seed – for scales large and small, and how it grows on from there is top of mind at the Theodore Payne Foundation in Southern California, an historic conservation icon in their region through their seed banking and native plant conservation, education, and community-based work. This week I am joined by Executive Director Evan Meyer, Seed & Bulb Program Manager Genevieve Arnold, and Horticulturist and California Native Plant Landscaper Certification instructor Alejandro Lemus to explore and celebrate more about the radical range of the Theodore Payne Foundation as it grows us into the future and normalizes the great fun of native plant landscapes. 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.

Pat Reynolds is a restoration ecologist with more than 30 years of professional experience in the design, implementation, and monitoring of habitat restoration projects, including the effective use of native seed. He is the Director of River Partners’ Native Seed and Plant program, the former General Manager of Hedgerow Farms, and a past Associate Restoration Ecologist at H.T. Harvey & Associates. This week we continue our series exploring conservation and biodiversity support at the foundational level of seed—for scales large and small—in conversation with Pat. Heritage Grower’s high-quality habitat seed sourcing, grow out, and distribution to restoration projects, often in collaboration with their sibling endeavor, River Partners, is a model in getting high-quality source-identified seed for the right places in the face of increasing urgency for restoration, but also increasing hope as to the impact of restoration. 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 we kick off a several-part series looking into the state of seed, specifically wildland seed, for conservation and ecological restoration in our world from various perspectives. We start off in conversation with Andrea Williams, the Director of Biodiversity Initiatives with the California Native Plant Society, and from there, a contributor to both the proposed California Seed Strategy and the National Seed Strategy. 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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This week we revisit a best-of Cultivating Place conversation focusing on seeding our imaginations—metaphorically and literally, with Diane Wilson writer, gardener, emeritus executive director of Dream of Wild Health and, more recently, emeritus executive director of The Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. Diane has long interwoven her gardening and her advocacy work with her writing, and her first novel, The Seed Keeper, was published by Milkweed press in 2021. Join us for more about Diane’s journey of discovering, sharing, and celebrating seeds and Indigenous cultural recovery through the knowledge and history that seeds hold and the future they make possible. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In a continuation of Women’s History Month and our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, and what they are growing in this world, especially as it relates to improving the impact of our gardening lives on the larger planet, I am so pleased to be in conversation this week with Kathy Kramer. Kathy is a long-time advocate for native plant and ecological gardening based on the natives of your area, and she has been determined for many, many years to demonstrate just how beautiful that concept of gardening can be. She is the founder of The Bringing back the Natives Garden Tour, based in the Bay Area of Northern California, but which after 19 years in operation, has country-wide acclaim. The tour and the gardening-ethos it cultivates and celebrates can be replicated anywhere we as humans garden. As Spring draws closer - Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

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

This last week of February, we return to our love of apples – and the warm comfort of eating and cooking with homegrown ones, a particular joy in late February when spring and summer seem close but also still too far away. We’re in conversation with the UK’s James Rich, orchardist, chef, and author of Apple: Recipes from the Orchard and his latest Orchard: Sweet and Savoury Recipes from the Countryside, out now from Hardie Grant Books. I caught up with James in late November, and I knew this would be a warming conversation for this end-of-February time of year. Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Now more than halfway from the winter solstice to the spring equinox, many of us have seeds of spring and summer foods on our minds (and hearts). So, this week we continue our celebration of Black History Month, and love stories, centered on the cooperative, and communal concept of Ujaama, in conversation with Bonnetta Adeeb of Ujaama Seeds, and the Ujaama Cooperative Farming Alliance, and Nathan Kleinman of the Experimental Farm network, a member and collaborator in the Ujaam alliance and all that it is growing – which is both uplifting and delicious. Join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Love is already a theme in the work of Cultivating Place, to be sure, but with last week’s loving work around the restoration of historic apple orchards in southwestern Colorado, and this week’s episode, which I think of as the Love Letters of Abra Lee, love letters, love stories, and loving gardeners is an explicit theme here this month! In celebration of Black History Month in progress and Valentine’s Day coming up – this week we’re rejoined in conversation by Abra Lee, gardener, garden scholar under the name of Conquer the Soil, horticulturist, and graduate of the Longwood Gardens Fellows program, a 13-month leadership in public horticulture fellowship. In addition to co-creating a public garden exhibition called Music x Flowers, Abra has recently accepted a position as Director of Horticulture at the Oakland Cemetery, a historic Victorian garden cemetery in downtown Atlanta. This week’s conversation is a valentine to gardeners and garden lovers everywhere. Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

As February is upon us we turn from a love letter to biodiversity writ large to a labor of love in conserving the biodiversity of one iconic fruit in large part born of human labor across the ages and the globe – apples. We’re in conversation with Jude Schuenemeyer, who with his wife Addie, has spent decades discovering, researching, documenting, protecting, restoring, and propagating the rich diversity of heritage apple varieties in Colorado’s southwestern-most Montezuma county. The diversity of apple genetics in this region traces back 150 years or more, and in this traditional winter season of apple tree pruning, and apple scion wood selection, and the first of grafting season, Jude shares with us more about how The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project ( affectionately referred to as MORP) is preserving historic trees and orchards and simultaneously cultivating food, economic, and environmental vigor in their region, which makes a wonderful model for all of our regions. 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 we complete our 4-part conservation series kicking off 2023 by taking a broader look at the Klamath River’s namesake region and the importance of knowing any place better from multiple perspectives for the most effective and durable conservation to be truly possible. We’re in conversation with Michael Kauffman, research plant ecologist, educator, and founder with his botanist wife Allison of the ecologically focused Backcountry Press, and Justin Garwood, Environmental Scientist for the California Dept. of Fish and wildlife with a focus on fisheries. Michael and Justin have spent the better part of the last decade curating and editing a cohort of 34 expert contributors to a new and really the first comprehensive Natural History of the Klamath Mountains, one of the most biodiverse temperate mountain ranges on earth. 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.

Seen in the overview, the 30 x 30 conservation efforts at federal and state levels are tremendous, but as the last two weeks’ conversations have made clear, it is at the landscape and local levels that these conservation efforts work or don’t work, get done or don’t, and ideally get done as thoroughly and thoughtfully as possible. This week we focus on one specific and historical project at least 50 years in the making – the undamming of the majestic Klamath River. The final approval for the removal of a series of hydroelectric-production dams (whose installations date from the early to the mid1900s) was won in November of 2022. Dam removal is set to begin in 2023. We’re in conversation with two people, Brook Thompson and Joshua Chenoweth, engaged in preparing for the revegetation of the more than 2000 acres that will be re-exposed following the draining of the dam basins. Brook is a Yurok tribal member, a Native scholar, a civil engineer, water rights and cultural sovereignty activist, and Joshua is a restoration ecologist working for the Yurok tribe and leading the many-year planning and implementation of this complex revegetation process. It’s all about re-connections. 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 we continue our multi-part series on the many facets of the global 30 x 30 conservation efforts as they continue across the state of California as just one example of local, state, and national efforts aggregated. We're in conversation with Jun Bando, the new executive director of the California Native Plant Society, and back in conversation with Liv O’Keefe, the senior director of Public Affairs for the Society. CNPS is an important agency in a larger coalition of agencies and groups contributing to California’s planning, assessment, and projects meeting the goals of 30 x 30 in this one large biodiverse state. A good portion of this broader coalition took part in CNPS’s 2022 conservation conference, entitled Rooting together: restoring connections to plants, place, and people, at which one whole learning track was dedicated to conservation via the 30 x 30 framework and funding as we look 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.

Welcome, 2023! This week Cultivating Place kicks off a multi-part series devoted to the international, national, state, and local conservation efforts collectively known as 30 x 30 – a multi-faceted commitment by governments, agencies, and localities to securely preserve 30% of our world’s biodiversity by 2030. While President Joe Biden committed to the goals of the 30 x 30 conservation concept within a week of taking office in January 2021, the state of California had already committed to the vision in late 2020 with Governor Gavin Newsom’s signing of the Executive Order N-82-20 outlining and financially supporting the State of California to preserving 30% of its land and water biodiversity, as overseen by California’s Secretary of Natural Resources since 2019, Wade Crowfoot. The first in our series of conversations with people engaged in envisioning and engineering the 30 x 30 conservation projects coming from federal, state, and local levels - and we hope into our very backyards - is with Jennifer Norris, the Deputy Secretary for Biodiversity and Habitat at the California Natural Resources Agency. Norris leads the state's 30x30 initiative being carried out by many agencies and organizations and she oversees "Cutting Green Tape" in support of landscape-scale habitat restoration. Hope you’ll join us for this informative and inspiring series! 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 look out over a new garden year this week, a conversation to help us meet our garden learning goals. Award-winning designers, writers, educators, and consummate plant-driven gardeners Annie Guillefoyle and Noel Kingsbury join us to share more about their year-round and globally accessible Garden Masterclass forum. 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.

Cris Sarabia is the conservation director of the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy. He is also a dedicated and active member of many local land and conservation organizations in his home region of North Long Beach, in Southern California, including GreyWater Action Network, the California Native Plant Society, Pelecanus, and Puente Latino, a grassroots non-profit art, culture, and ecology organization serving the North Long beach community since 2019. At this time of year, post-Solstice, in the midst of Hanukkah, pre-Christmas, Kwanzaa, and the New Year – I think many of us try to center ideals of clarity, connection, caring, and community. This week we have a conversation with a human whose work caring for lives out these very ideals within his many land, water, plant, and human communities. This to me, is what truly good gardening is all about in so many ways. Many listeners will remember an earlier conversation I had with Cris on Cultivating Place in April of 2021 when Cris was the Board Chair of the California Native Plant Society and their decolonizing work. I am so pleased to be chatting more fully with Cris this week about all that he cultivates in his community-based life. Listen in - and Happy Holidays! 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, a pre-Solstice offering for Cultivating Place listeners! Maria Popova is the creator and writer behind The Marginalian (formerly known as Brain Pickings), which, for the past 16 years, 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 near our longest night and just before we begin tending back toward the light once again. Join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week – we visit and learn from gardeners' past as we look to the future in conversation with Judith Tankard, a landscape historian, author, and preservation consultant. Tankard is the author or co-author of twelve illustrated books on landscape history, including her most recent publications, Beatrix Farrand: Garden Artist, Landscape Architect (Monacelli Press, 2022); Gardens of the Arts and Crafts Movement; and Ellen Shipman and the American Garden, winner of the 2019 J. B. Jackson Book Prize. Across her long career, Tankard has traced and made visible the lives, struggles, and achievements of some of the most notable female garden designers and landscape architects of the early 20th century. 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.

Kier Holmes is a garden designer and writer regularly contributing to the likes of Martha Stewart, Better Homes and Gardens, Gardenista, Sonoma Magazine, Marin Magazine, and Sunset Magazine. She is also a children’s garden and science educator. In her writing and designing, she focuses on low-cost and low-impact, chemical-free, richly textured, visually dynamic spaces full of life – all of which is well documented in her newest book: The Garden Refresh How to Give your Yard Big Impact on a Small Budget. Kier joins cultivating place this week to kick off December! Listen in. 114_Kier_EM.jpg All images courtesy of Kier Holmes, 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.

Dear All, Rebecca Schiller is a gardener, a smallholding steward, an activist, and author of: A Thousand Ways to Pay Attention, A Memoir of Coming Home to My Neurodivergent Mind – about grounding back to land, place, and garden - even after a surprising diagnosis of severe ADHD. Schiller’s writing and her gardening-life vividly reminds us all that being different doesn’t have to mean broken – in our minds, our hearts, or our gardens. This narrative and this discussion remind us that it is the many ways in which we pay attention in this world that shows what and whom we value and everyone and everything for which we are thankful. And it is so very often our gardens that remind us not only of where we are but who we are. 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, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In this week after Veterans Day here in the U.S, and in this season clarifying that gratitude is one of the greatest gifts of the garden and the growing world, we’re in conversation with someone who knows this gift of the garden perhaps especially well. Zepherine - Zee – Hanson is an Air Force Veteran who, after 8 years serving as a military photojournalist, took a medical retirement in 2004. As part of her own healing journey, Zephrine joined the Veterans to Farmers program in Denver, CO. Working in partnership with the Denver Botanic Gardens, the therapeutic Veterans to Farmers program was life-changing for Zephrine, bringing together all of the things she cared most about and motivating her to found her business Hamden Farms, which connects farming, storytelling, small business incubation, underserved communities, and growing outside the box. For her innovative work researching how to connect unused farm produce to small makers looking to craft value add products- helping to stabilize the incomes of both farmers and makers, Zephrine has won awards and recognition from the Bob Evan Heroes to CEOs program, from LinkedIn Creator Accelerator Program, from REI, and 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.

In one of our more flamboyant arboreal seasons of the year—when our charismatic woody megaflora of the Northern Hemisphere—the trees—are chorophylling down, coloring up, and turning over their foliage biomass to the soil in preparation for the winter ahead, this week we are in a conversational exploration about the scale and meaning of trees, with William (Ned) Friedman, 8th director of the Arnold Arboretum of Harvard University. Located in Jamaica Plain and Roslindale Masschuesetts, this free and open-to-the public majestic convening of trees is celebrating its 150th anniversary of growing together. The trees have so much to teach us, and we have so much to learn. 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.

Settling into November now, this week on Cultivating Place we’re in conversation with three members of the horticultural team at Filoli, a historic house and 16 acres cultivated garden in Woodside, California, where they are striving toward environmental and cultural practices to generously pay their long history of privilege forward. Just in time for the generous season in front of us. At Filoli, gardeners are striving to meet the social and environmental moment in the best ways possible—ever adapting and evolving to experiment, include, reinterpret, and contribute more and more positively. They think not only about what to plant when but about why these spaces matter and what they have to teach us. Jim Salyards is the Director of the garden at Filoli, Kate Nowell is the production gardens manager, and Haley O’Connor is Filoli’s formal gardens manager. They are all with us this week to speak and share more on just these topics. 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.

Approaching All Hallow’s Eve/Halloween, Samhain, and Day of the Dead, we are entering into the season of gratitude - running from now through the Winter Solstice & the calendar’s new year. It is a season of gathering, collection, and reflection, and Cultivating Place is in conversation this week with an artist and a green spirit in our garden care world, Louesa Roebuck, about her newest book Punk Ikebana: Reimagining the Art of Floral Design (gathering, gleaning & composing in situ), being published by Cameron + Company Books on November 8. Louesa is a multimedia and multigenre creative, floral artist, printmaker, painter, textile designer, curator, and author. You may recall our conversation several years ago around her first book: Foraged Flora. In Punk Ikebana, Louesa starts from a place of reverence for tradtion, in particular those of Japan, but also from a place of "peace-punk, Do-No-Harm." Ikebana, “the way of the flowers,” has been studied formally in Japan and beyond for centuries. In Punk Ikebana, Louesa explains and riffs on the art form’s classic rules—and then demonstrates how to seasonally, sensually, and meaningfully bend them. The book highlights stunning arrangements and installations that unite the cultural meanings and wise elegance of a traditional perspective with an inviting freedom from convention for anyone to feel welcome into.

This week on Cultivating Place, we continue with fall/winter planning and planting, this time with a focus on design, in conversation with Nick and Allison McCullough – of McCullough landscape & Nursery, a design, build, and maintenance firm based in New Albany, Ohio. Their new book American Roots, Lesson and Inspiration from the Designers Reimagining our Home Gardens, is a transcontinental tour of diverse modern home garden design offering lessons and inspiration- seasoned with playfulness, passion, and purpose. 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.

As another offering to all of you in this Autumnal planting and planning period, a revisit and reminder of the poetics involved as well as the pragmatics, in conversation with award-winning poet and long-time 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.

As we look to our fall and winter planting and planning windows, this week, Cultivating Place is back in conversation with Uli Lorimer, native plantsman and Director of Horticulture at the Native Plant Trust. His new book, "The Northeast Native Plant Primer: 235 Plants for an Earth Friendly Garden," is a great resource no matter where you garden. 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 first full week of Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere – looking toward the month of October and its many harvest celebrations, we look to our seeds – the beginning and end of the lives of the seed-bearing plants who make our lives possible. Stacey Denton, of Flora Farm & Design Studio in Williams, Oregon, is an organic flower farmer, bioregional seed grower, and homesteader based in the Klamath Siskiyou region of Southern Oregon. Trained in ecology, permaculture, organic farming, and seed growing and saving, Stacey makes her community-and-land-based life with her daughter Hannah and with her parents nearby. Stacey and I connected over the importance of bioregional seed growing, sourcing, knowing, and supporting at the Slow Flowers Summit held at Filoli in the summer of 202, and she joins cultivating Place this week to share more about the literacy - and joy - of specifically bioregional seeds. 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 look at culture and ecology with Farmer Rishi. Rishi is a farmer/gardener, teacher, thinker, and lover of life-based in Southern California. The executive director of the Sarvodaya Institute there, Rishi leads by example and by invitation. His intention for working in the fields of regeneration and urban farming is to joyfully increase understanding around the basic principles behind the healing of our bodies: both our physical bodies and our shared Earthen body. From his experiences farming in suburban Southern California as well as at Vandana Shiva’s Navdanya Farm in India, Rishi believes that our individual footprints can and should leave the world with rich soil, running rivers, and smiling faces. 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.

Anna Andreyeva is a Russian-born UK- based garden designer, plantswoman, and mother. She is currently pursuing a horticultural and ecological research Ph.D. focused on perennial steppe plants around the world for green roofs and general urban planting in a changing world under British plantsman Nigel Dunnett in Sheffield, England. Anna designed the plantings for many public spaces, including the so-called Highline of Moscow prior to moving to the UK four years ago. In 2022, she collaborated on the planting plans for the “What Does Not Burn” garden, symbolizing the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and reflecting the country’s culture and tradition at the Hampton Court flower show. Sponsored by the GLAU (Guild of Landscape Architects of Ukraine) and Studio Toop, the garden won an award for Global Impact. Anna joins us this week to share more about gardens and plants as common grounds and art forms to help meet the challenges ahead. 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.

If you ask me, the independent nurseries and growers of our world – especially those focused on helping us as gardeners create not only beautiful gardens but also gardens that contribute to the ecologies of our places, are some of our great national treasures. This week following Labor Day, we celebrate these treasures wherever they may be in conversation with one: Barton Springs Nursery in Austin, TX, where since 1986 the owners and staff having been raising both plants and gardeners right. In 2021, Barton Springs Nursery succeeded from the founders Conrad and Bernadine Bering into the skillful and passionate hands of garden designer Amy Hovis, and horticulturist William Glenn and photographer and systems designer Greg Thomas. The three, plus their dedicated and knowledgeable staff continue the long and beautiful Barton Springs Nursery legacy of offering in-house, seed-grown, native and climate adapted plants (without the use of toxic chemicals), inspiring display gardens, and garden education ensuring low-impact, high contribution - and even higher joy - gardening for Austin – and the planet. 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.

Pam Penick is the gardener behind the well-known long-time garden blog known as Diggi ng. Based in Austin, Texas, Pam is an avid and audacious gardener and garden writer. She is also a determined garden community builder in all that she does from digging, to writing, to organizing gatherings like the Garden Bloggers Fling, a convening of garden communicators in a different city or gardening region of the US each year. In 2017, she dug in deeper and began organizing and hosting a garden design speaker series called Garden Spark, to facilitate bringing some of the best voices in gardening for the benefit and expansion of her garden region. Pam joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about life in a hot & dry climate as a thinking gardener. 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.

Still in the Dog Days of Summer - the heat it hot, the days are long, and garden maintenance in the form of watering, weeding, and perhaps mowing and blowing (especially in the dry and droughty parts of the country right now) might be wearing thin….especially with the relentless watering/mowing/blowing of a thirsty lawn. Maybe you’re rethinking your lawn? Wanting to water/mow less and see butterflies, hummingbirds, and fireflies more? With just this in mind, this week on CP, we revisit a Best of Conversation with Owen Wormser inspiring us to transform our lawns (or some portion of them) into meadows! Enjoy - 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. I’m pleased to be speaking about just this 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 our ongoing exploration of where gardeners are and what they are doing in our world right now, we head pretty far north on Cultivating Place this week in conversation with Canadian gardener Janet Melrose. Janet is known in Calgary, Alberta as the Cottage Gardener, she is also an urban farming spokesperson and leader, a horticultural therapist, and co-author with fellow gardener Sheryl Normandeau of a series known as the Prairie Gardener’s Go-To guides - the first of those guides was published in March 2020 by Touchwood Editions and two additional guides have been released every year since. The series is up-to-date Q & As for gardening in Janet’s specific northern prairie place on everything from vegetables to soil, seeds to garden pest management, trees, and shrubs to perennials, but Janet is deeply embedded in her garden community in a wide variety of ways. 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’re in conversation with Jenny Jones and Jen Toy. They are gardeners, landscape architects, and caring humans who are taking the idea of a test plot to the community level. A test plot is a traditional term used in botany and land reclamation work. It describes a smaller piece of land on which outcomes are observed and tested in order to apply an appropriate treatment or formulate a realistic expectation for larger piece of land – whether for reclamation needs, the land’s seed bank, for soil health, or the like. But Jenny and Jen’s idea, that they call Test Plot is to create an ongoing, hands-on experiment in ecological restoration that engages the community. Initially a more casual project of the Terremoto LA design firm, Jenny and Jen’s purpose for Test Plot is to celebrate the labor involved in land care and to build a stronger land and community-based land stewardship ethic, starting from their own community of Los Angeles. Soon enough, they hope to be growing somewhere close 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, 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. This week we revisit David’s conversation with Cultivating Place last year, 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.