Cultivating Place

In the heat of the dog days of summer, Cultivating Place celebrates the farms and gardens striving to not draw down resources but to contribute resources back into the world's flow of energy: fro providing shade, food, and retreat, these kinds of gardens are also replenishing rather than drawing down or polluting groundwater, they are sequestering carbon rather than spewing it, they are growing soil and mending the torn fabric of habitat corridors one urban, suburban, and rural home garden at a time. Many gardeners will remember with delight reading Gaia’s Garden by author and activist Toby Hemenway, originally published in 2001. Toby passed in Sebastapol, CA in 2016, but not before he lit a spark and passed a metaphoric mantle to today’s guest, Matthew Trumm. Matthew went on to learn under Dr. Elaine Ingham, among other mentors and has for years been learning from the wisdom of the land itself – first near rural Berry Creek, California before the #CampFire in 2018, and for the last handful or years also on an urban lot in Oroville, CA. I was introduced to Matthew by CP producer Matt Fidler, who mentioned over Zoom one day in lockdown: "you have to see this guy’s backyard – it’s amazing!" And so today, Matt Fidler and I take you on an actual field trip to the energetic, permaculture-regenerative-urban agriculture-food forestry-and indigenous-land-stewardship informed back yard paradise Matthew Trumm tends and grows with. He is a teacher, designer, activist, and a Gardener with a capital G. Over the course of our conversation and tour, we begin in Matthew’s house, head out to the garden itself and end up with our heads and hearts in the stars of all that is possible through our garden relationships. Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place we continue our high-elevation garden view, now in Vail, Colorado at The Betty Ford Alpine Gardens, leaders in the research and conservation of North American alpine plant communities. The Alpine Zone has long been one of interest to plant enthusiasts worldwide across time and space for the sheer admiration for and interest in these rugged and resourceful plants and wildlife who’ve evolved to endure and thrive in the Alpine’s extreme conditions – extreme cold, wind, sun, heat, drought and/or snow and ice. As the conditions of our generous planet change with the climate crisis, the Alpine Zones around the globe become a last refuge for plants and wildlife migrating in search of cooler conditions. As a result, the Alpine Zone is of great interest to researchers looking not only preserve the beauty, diversity, and integrity of these highly sensitive environments, but also looking to them for lessons on adaptation for us all. Nicola Ripley is the Executive Director and Nick Courtens is the Curator of Plant Collections at The Betty Ford Alpine Gardens. Nicola and Nick join me this week in a conversation about their high-elevation enthusiasm and efforts. For more information and many more resources and images, please see the full post at www.cultivatingplace.com under the Podcast tab. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place we gain a little perspective with a lot of altitude as we begin a two-part series on 'Gardening at Elevation’. Isa Catto is a mother and partner, a fine and textile artist, a gardener, and a writer. Isa’s multi-faceted gardens at 8,000 ft in Woody Creek, Colorado are rooted in generations of family. in connection to community, and in love of place. Her gardens feed her family, her creativity, her soul, and her desire to contribute. Isa’s gardens, called Mojo Gardens are featured in Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press, 2021) on which I collaborated with photographer Caitlin Atkinson. I will be joining Isa in Aspen, Colorado this summer as the Jessica Catto Dialogues speaker for the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies on the 11th of August. Isa joins us this week to share more about her artistic garden life story. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Hannah Gardner is a gardener, writer, and mother. She is a garden designer and plantswoman with a passion for traveling the world to learn about and meet plants and their communities in their places, from Estonia to the Canaries, Northern Israel to the wildflower meadows of the United Kingdom, where she makes her home. Her longtime column in Gardens Illustrated entitled "The Outsider”, which ran from 2017 to 2020 is a trove of adventurous armchair plant and garden travel. The botanical lessons she's learned globally inform her organic horticultural and floriculture work right at home and give inspiration to all of us for better botanical holiday making ourselves. She is a firm believer in the 'Imaginative Possibilities' born of broadening our horizons through travel. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

David Godshall is a landscape architect, gardener, and meta-garden philosopher making his way with his young family and his Terremoto Landscape Architecture design studio team in Los Angeles. The Terremoto team was featured as one of Elle Décor’s A List of designers in 2021. David’s LA home garden and his perspective on adventurous gardening and design are featured in Under Western Skies, on which I collaborated with photographer Caitlin Atkinson. David joins Cultivating Place this week, and as he shares in our conversation: "Garden building is civilization-building,” it should be done with creativity and integrity at all levels. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Bonnie J Clark is a professor of anthropology at the University of Denver. Her new book "Finding Solace in the Soil, Archaeology of Gardens and Gardeners at Amache" (University Press of Colorado, 2020) traces six field seasons of her research and immersion into the lives of Japanese Americans held at the Amache prison camp, which was active on the high plains of Colorado from 1942 to 1945. With Amache already designated a National Historic Landmark, and with bills before both the US House of Representatives and the Senate to make Amache a part of the National Park Service, Bonnie joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about what it means to be a gardener and a human. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit cultivatingplace.com.

Ali Meders-Knight is a Mechoopda tribal member whose traditional and present homelands are based in interior Northern California, a mother of five, and a traditional basketweaver in Chico, CA she is also a tribal liaison working to form partnerships for federal forest stewardship contracting and tribal forestry programs authorized in the 2018 Farm Bill. She has been a Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) practitioner for over 20 years, creating, collaborating on, and leading decolonized environmental education and land restoration projects with Chico State University and the City of Chico. In 2009 she envisioned and helped to manifest a unique 17-acre interactive food forest and interpretive park in North Chico known as Verbena Fields. This restoration of a small slice of the degraded watershed and its native plants works to heal land while educating the larger human community about the rich ecological heritage of the Mechoopda people. As Ali expresses in all aspects of her cultivating practice, especially as the founder of the Chico Traditional Ecological Knowledge Program: "Wassa Honi Mep! (Keep your heart's intentions good!)” In her specific place, she is a model for cultivators everywhere in traditional ecological knowledge providing a saving grace for returning health and prosperity to lands, economies, and communities. As we enter in July, join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

At a time in the gardening world when we're hearing the phrase "ecologically functional gardens" and "ecological landscape design" with great regularity, Cultivating Place is pleased to be joined this week by Kelly Norris. Kelly is an avid gardener, a former nursery owner and plant breeder, and an award-winning author. Based in Des Moines Iowa, he is recently retired from his role as Director of Horticulture and Education at the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden and his newest book, "New Naturalism, Designing and Planting a Resilient, Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden” (Cool Springs Press, 2021) helps all of us to demystify what an ecologically functional and still incredibly beautiful and gratifying home garden means. It’s a perfect listen for the long hot gardening days of the Summer Solstice season. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit ww.cultivatingplace.com.

Jessica Walliser is an avid gardener and professional horticulturist – working in the business of plants and gardening since the tender age of 15. As she has matured as a gardener, so too have her understandings and passions, and she now considers herself a devoted bug lover as well as a devoted plant lover because, you know, these two groups of lives we love are wholly interdependent. Jessica is a former garden podcaster, a co-founder of the online gardening resource Savvy Gardening, and the author of many books reflective of her journey and knowledge, including "Good Bug, Bad Bug"; "Attracting Beneficial Insects to your Garden", and most recently, "Plant Partners: Science-Based Companion Planting Strategies” (Artisan Press, 2020). Listen in this week as we discuss how far we’ve come in our mainstream gardening practices this past 50 years, from companion planting to cover cropping, interplanting to the joys of watching predatory robber flies help control Japanese beetles. We also cover the even greater joy of knowing that more life in your garden equals more health in your garden life. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Through the many twists and turns of life, hers including a life-threatening battle with an auto-immune disorder and lung cancer, Claire’s organizing ethos has become: “Go Gently." An environmental advocate before turning to flowers as her life path, Claire is also the author/co-creator of a new book entitled “The Healing Power of Flowers”, which looks around the year at the meaning, magic, and medicine of 80 flowers. The book, photographed by Eva Nemeth, is an update and expansion on the Victorian Language of flowers, with seasonality and sustainability at its heart. As we in the Northern Hemisphere approach the Summer Solstice, Claire shares more about her gentle garden and floral life journey. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Debra Prinzing is the founder and leader of The Slow Flowers Society – She joins Cultivating Place in this first week of summer (after Memorial Day in the US and before the Summer Solstice in a few weeks) to share more about the many facets of her passion for being a voice for the floral world. Debra Prinzing is the founder and leader of The Slow Flowers Society. As a Seattle-based writer, speaker and leading advocate for American Grown Flowers, Debra’s many Slow Flowers-branded projects have convened a national conversation that stimulates consumers and professionals alike to make conscious choices about the flowers in their lives. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a team of plant folks known as Refugia is growing connection among places and people from their beautifully designed native plant gardens and radiating out from those. This week, Cultivating Place is joined by Refugia founder Jeff Lorenz, by stewardship manager Esther Scanlon, by Lead Project Manager Ronnie Ludwig, and Melissa Nase Refugia’s lead Landscape Designer and Greenhouse Manager. The team shares the process and ethos of Refugia as they design, create and help to steward functional landscapes that are ecologically beneficial, beautiful, and resilient - and perhaps most importantly, connective. 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.

Loree Bohl is the Portland Oregon-based founder and visionary gardener behind the well-known and well-loved Danger Garden Blog. In true Danger Garden fashion, Loree’s new book Fearless Gardening empowers us all to be bold, break the rules and grow what you love. Loree joins Cultivating Place this week to empower all of us with a sense of boldness in the garden. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place, we have the second of a two-part series celebrating the publication of Under Western Skies in conversation with landscape architect Christie Green, of Radicle landscape architecture based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Radicle as in the first intrepid and primary growing root of a seedling and the idea of advocating for fundamental or revolutionary changes in current practices, conditions, or institutions. 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.

CAITLIN ATKINSON is a photographer of places, spaces, and all things botanical. She has been my partner this past 2 + years in creating our new book Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast, publishing on May 11 of 2021. Conceived by Caitlin, the book is really an expression of our shared love for the places and plants and plantspeople of the West crafting garden spaces of soul, and this week on Cultivating Place, Caitlin joins me in conversation to discuss more deeply this passion project of ours. Listen in - the views are stunning (and soulful). 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.

Claire Ratinon is a gardener, a writer, and a passionate advocate for the growing a food no matter where you live or how small a space you might live it. She herself first fell in love with growing her own food while living in a one-room flat. Born in Mauritius and raised in England, her horticultural work is deeply interested in how the hunger and heartache of our times, and of re-finding or rooting our own senses of identity starting in the vegetable 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, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

It’s spring in the northern hemisphere (even though snow is still making visitations to parts of North American right now), and gardeners across the hemisphere are itching to get started with their summer vegetable gardens. That age-old and annual question of “when warm summer crops can safely be planted outside" is already high on peoples' lists of garden excitements and anxieties. Cultivating Place is joined this week by the leader of an event and author of a book both known as TOMATOMANIA. Scott Daigre is the owner of PowerPlant Garden Design in Ojai California, and he is a dedicated home gardener and self-proclaimed tomatomaniac. It's earth week and among the garden’s earthiest pleasures are these succulent summer fruits. Scott joins us from his home and trial garden in Ojaiwhere he is deep into the planning for the warm season vegetable garden and all her delights. 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.

April 17 through 24th 2021 is California Native Week, designated by the California State Legislature in 2010 as an annual celebration of the fantastic diversity of plants on whom this large expanse of unique and uniquely beautiful land and history rests in so many ways. The California Floristic Province is one of the Biodiversity Hot Spots on Earth and as the most populous state in the US, California also has an incredible diversity of humans making their lives here as well. In honor of these plants and their communities, Cultivating Place speaks this week with members of the California Native Plant Society community to chat about what CNPS is, and what it is striving to grow into more fully. It is a small, candid look into how the environmental conservation world generally is meeting this moment in time through the lens of one organization. In looking back over the course of this last year, and many years and decades prior, there is renewed clarity and urgency around the environmental world generally having quite a bit of acknowledging and resetting to do for itself and for the greater benefit of the human and greater than the human world around us. It is in that spirit that I am joined today by CNPS staff member Liv O’Keefe, Senior Director of Public Affairs; by Cris Sarabia, Conservation Director of the Palos Verdes Peninsula land Conservancy and the chair of the board of CNPS, a volunteer position; and finally, by John L. Sanders, Founder, and Director of the Delphinus School of Natural History, who is a CNPS community member and volunteer consultant for the society. 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.

Amyrose Foll is a mother, a farmer, and a big thinker. As the executive director and founder of the multifaceted Virginia Free Farm at Spotted Pig Holler in Kents Store Virginia – she is looking to reimagine the foodshed of her world – and ours. As Spring takes hold and the warm growing season greens our northern Hemisphere gardens and farms, Amyrose sees a greater foodshed model within reach. Join Cultivating Place in conversation with Amyrose 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.

Just in time for spring and that itch we gardeners - new and long time - have to get the summer vegetables into the ground, Cultivating Place revisit a favorite conversation with grow-your-own revolutionary, Brie Arthur – author of the "Foodscape Revolution" and "Gardening with Grains". Her enthusiasm will get your season growing – 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.

Having just moved across the seasonal threshold of the Vernal Equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere, this week we continue our focus on land and land and ecology-based garden projects – this time in conversation with horticulturist and plantswoman Laura Ekasetya. I spoke with Laura late last season checking in with her on her work as Director and Head Horticulturist at the famed Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park -landscape architecture by Gustafson, Guthrie & Nichol and planting plans by Piet Oudolf. Laura’s decade at the Lurie Garden ended in January of 2021. 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.

Here we are – mid-way into Women’s History Month, one year after the publication of The Earth in Her Hands. In honor of these two thresholds, this week on CP we offer out a conversation with one of the extraordinary women working in the world of plants featured in the book: Edwina Von Gal - a landscape designer based on New York’s Long Island. Having designed landscapes for the rich and famous in the New York area it was midway through her career that Edwina had an epiphany about the potential impact for the better or worse of how gardens are cared for in our world. In order to help tilt the balance back toward gardens large and small being positive contributors to the life, health, habitat and biodiversity of our world – she founded The Perfect Earth Project – promoting toxin free lawns and landscapes for the people, pets, and the planet. In the last few years, Edwina has expanded her mission with advocacy known as 2/3rd for the birds – in collaboration with the research of Dr. Doug Tallamy – urging all residential and campus landscapes to dedicate 2/3rd of their plantings to be native plants for habitat value and to commit to going toxin free. 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 the vernal equinox is imminent for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, a conversation on balance and our importance as humans in the balance of natural systems. Lorena Gorbet is a Mountain Maidu elder in Northeastern California, a mother, a basket weaver, a land restoration activist, and an educator. She joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about the balanced systems thinking of the traditional ecological knowledge of her culture. Listen in! The Maidu Summit Consortium’s mission is "to preserve, protect, and promote the Mountain Maidu Homeland with a united voice. The Maidu Summit Consortium envisions re-acquired ancestral lands as a vast and unique park system dedicated to the purposes of education, healing, protection, and ecosystem management based upon the Maidu cultural and philosophic perspectives, as expressed through traditional ecology.” 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.

It’s the first week of March and true spring let alone summer is still a ways off for many of us. This week on Cultivating Place, we lean into the last aspects of the winter season and head North - to learn more about the enthusiastic and intrepid deep winter and season extending gardening of the inimitable Niki Jabbour. Her abundant year-round gardening on the 45th parallel will inspire anyone. 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 on Cultivating Place, we’re back stateside to visit with a longtime gardener and garden writer also engaged in a new level of relationship with her new plot of land. Page Dickey joins us to talk about the leaving and grieving of one garden, and the getting to know and love a new garden and its nature – all of which grows her. Her new book “Uprooted" is out now. 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 Lunar New Year celebrations continue, we travel to Hokkaido, a northern Island of Japan to celebrate an amazing intertwining of the wild and cultivated, the sustainable and the regenerative (for land and people) at The Tokachi Millenium Forest in Hokkaido, Japan. Dan Pearson is a landscape and garden designer for whom an understanding of plant ecology along with an appreciation for natural landscapes inspires his acclaimed designs around the world – including that at the Tokachi Millenium Forest. Midori Shintani is the head gardener at the Tokachi Millennium Forest. Having trained as a gardener and horticulturist in Japan and Europe, she joined the Tokachi Millennium Forest team in 2008. Under her care, the Millennium Forest and its gardens merge a “new Japanese horticulture“ with the surrounding wild nature. Midori was featured in my first book The Earth in Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants (Timber Press, 2020). Dan and Midori's inspiring and collaborative work at the Tokachi Millennium Forest really speaks to gardeners around the globe who want to reconnect with the ecological life of the land, plants and animals on that land. The Tokachi Millennium Forest and its many gardens exemplifies a new naturalistic gardening which integrates culture, aesthetics, and horticultural traditions of both east and west. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

On February 12th, the Lunar New Year begins. Celebrated by Asian cultures across the globe, this week Cultivating Place speaks with Eric Hsu, a plantsman of Taiwanese descent particularly interested in following the threads of history back to the many Asian and Asian immigrant contributions to western horticulture in the 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, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week to welcome February we revisit a favorite conversation from our last season - a good reminder to mind the way you spend your days - added together they are what will grow your life. ENJOY! Melanie Falick is a maker of many things by hand, and in her work from knitting to gardening, welding to baking, she explores the connection between what we do with our hands in our own lives and our quality of life and sense of wellbeing. In 2015, Melanie left her 15-year corporate career in the publishing world without a completely clear sense of what she would - or wanted to do- next. Her intuition told her that whatever it was, it would involve engagement with the handwork – knitting, sewing, time in the garden – that she loved, but that she had moved away from personal direct contact with in her career. In the course of making many things following her “retirement" of sorts, it while crafting a simple folded paper box, a box of incredibly basic utility, that she had an epiphany: “in a circuitous way” in all her creative making, she was trying to connect to her own survival – and that impulse was tied inextricably to her own sense of self, capability, and connection to others – ancestors, descendants, community. In these past few months of shelter in place, I think many of us, male, female, old and young across the globe, have had a renaissance in our own psyches of this same impulse. Melanie and I actually chatted in February, before the shut-down, which seems prescient somehow in hindsight, and I think speaks to the fact that this growing global dissatisfaction with what we have been told “success” is, has been in the making for a very long time. Enjoy this conversation about her newest book, “Making a Life, Working by Hand and Discovering the Life You Are Meant to Live” (Artisan Press, 2019), in which she explores how others have been manifesting this impulse and leading lives of great connection and meaning long before Covid-19, and how they might be role models for any one of us in making our own lives.

This week on Cultivating Place we lean into the spirit of the season and the traditional Jewish festival Tu B’Shevat, or New Year of the Trees in conversation with Karen Flotte, with the Mitzvah Garden at the Central Reform Congregation in St. Louis, Missouri. The New Year of the Trees seems like a perfect celebration in this time of dormancy just before the sap begins rising in most living things looking towards spring in the Northern Hemisphere. 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.

MaryLynn Mack is a renaissance woman and leading voice in the world of public gardens today. After beginning her career in the Navy, her experiences have taken her in many directions, including 16 years in Phoenix at the Desert Botanical Garden, and now as Chief Operating Officer of the South Coast Botanic Garden in Palos Verdes, Ca. In the last decade, she has served on the American Public Gardens Association (APGA) Board of Directors and is the current Vice President, the incoming President, as well as the inaugural Chair of the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility (IDEAS) Committee. She joins us to share more about her journey and some of her big-hearted, brave IDEAS for horticulture and public gardens as we move forward. She believes that public gardens can save 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.

This week on Cultivating Place, we continue our FRESH STARTS series in conversation with a long established friend in the gardening world, Doug Tallamy. His latest book Nature’s Best Hope envisions a fresh look at and commitment to rethinking how much of suburban United States sees, uses, and cultivates their places, with an eye toward a Homegrown National Park. Join us! All photos courtesy of Doug Tallamy and www.HomegrownNationalPark.org 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 the new year, Cultivating Place offers out the first in what will be an ongoing and intermittent series exploring Fresh Starts in our horticultural and gardening world. Following up on last week’s show with Duron Chavis, in which we explored some of the obstacles, hobbles and even failures of imagination in the botanic and garden world, this week we dive into a botanic garden endeavoring to imagine a fresh start to what they do, how they do it, and to whom it is of greatest service. The Botanic Garden at Smith College opened its well-endowed collection in 1895 and celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2020. This week’ we’re are in conversation with Tim Johnson Director of the Garden going on 4 years now, and Jamila dePeiza-Kern, a student in her Junior year at Smith and involved with the garden since the earliest days of her freshman year. As these two share in our conversation, the Botanic Garden at Smith College, the original design for which was created by Frederick Law Olmsted, is a venerable university-based botanic garden striving to meet the needs of our times with intelligence, heart and imagination. Join us to hear more on Cultivating Place 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 honor of the losses, griefs, revisions, and transformations in our world this last year, and in honor of the hopes we all hold in our gardens and our hearts for 2021 – we welcome today the muscular voice and vision of Duron Chavis. Duron is an urban farmer, community activist and advocate in Richmond, Virginia. His passionate voice for the power of gardening and people is loud and clear in our times. Join us to hear more on Cultivating Place 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 first week of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, Cultivating Place speaks this week with medicinal and habitat gardener Sayaka Lean of the Herb Pharm in Southern Oregon. Informed by her own Japanese cultural gardening traditions, Sayaka is the lead gardener of the Herb Pharm’s public medicinal plant display garden (the Botanical Education Garden), where she cultivates more than 500 native and non-native medicinal plants from around the world. Sayaka engages the garden as well in community collaborations with United Plant Savers, whose work is to protect and raise awareness about the medicinal plants of North America, and as a Flagship Farm for the Oregon Bee Project/Atlas out of Oregon State University. It is good medicine for the season. 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 honor of the Solstice on December 21st, Cultivating Place speaks this week with Brooklyn-born farmer/horticulturist/floral designer, activist, and daughter, Amber Tamm. Amber’s journey and work invite us to Imagine so much more in our gardened world. 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 continue our winter greening cheer in conversation with Todd Carr and Carter Harrington of Hort and Pott, a botanical studio in Upstate NY dedicated to embracing the seasons, celebrating the natural world through handcrafted botanical works, and reimagining the relationships between people and the natural world through botanically driven design. You won’t want to miss this cozy winter fireside chat encouraging us all to awaken the sublime as we welcome winter. Listen in next 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.

This week Cultivating Place kicks off December with a flourish in conversation with Teresa Sabankaya of the Santa Cruz-based Bonny Doon Garden Company and author of "The Posy Book – garden-inspired bouquets that tell a story" just in time for seasonal winter festivities and their greening and gifting. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Join us this week on Cultivating Place for our final episode in the Seed Change series. We are in conversation with Vivien Sansour, heart and head behind The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library aiming to revive and share forward Palestinian seed heritage and culture of care and gratitude. Vivien was born in Palestine and grew up in Bethlehem and then North Carolina. She writes: “The seed, the seed, the seed….for what is it but a continuation of ourselves? Aren’t we all seeds?" – Vivien Sansour 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place, the third in our 4 part Seed Change series with Cheryl Birker, Seed Conservation Program Manager at California Botanic Garden and with whom we go even deeper into what it means to seed bank a biodiversity hotspot in our world. It’s all about the beauty in the tiniest of details. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place, we continue our Seed Change series with Naomi Fraga, research assistant professor of Botany at Claremont Graduate University and Director of Conservation Programs at the California Botanic Garden dedicated to conserving the rich biodiversity of the native plants of California through field research, seed banking, and education programs. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place we continue our Seed Change series - a nod to faith and a vote for the next growing season. We’re joined this week by Chris Bolden-Newsome and Owen Smith Taylor - of Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram's Garden and True Love Seed respectively. Farmers and culture keepers, the two protect and steward seed and seed stories - encouraging others to steward their own stories and their own seeds 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In this season of colliding urgencies and not infrequent dismay - the garden offers so many lessons. Among the largest of these, brought to you in the smallest of things, is the hope proffered by seeds. And seed keepers. To kick off a new series on seed keepers of the world, this week we revisit our conversation with the UK’s Clare Foster, Garden Editor of House & Garden, UK. A gardener, author, and seed-sower herself, Clare’s newest book (with co-author, with Sabina Rüber) is "The Flower Garden: How to Grow Flowers From Seed” (Laurence King, 2019). It’s fun, colorful, and easy - a vote for hope and the future. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, Google Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by award winning landscape designer Judith Phillips of Albuquerque NM. Her Design Oasis, characterized by creative thinking, designing gardens, and growing plants born of her wider place in the high desert has been shifting ideas of beauty and meaning for other gardeners of the American Southwest since the 1980s. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place we speak with British gardener and psychiatrist/psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith, whose book, "The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature", and very explicitly of gardening, explores her many years of research and findings on the physiology of the brain and the creativity and connections cultivated in the brain when gardening. In this work “of science, insight, and anecdote,” Sue demonstrates that “our understanding of nature and its restorative powers is just beginning to flower.” 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

As we continue our exploration into creativity born of the garden –I share with you today a story and model for creativity coupled with kindness. On Cultivating Place, I talk a lot about gardens, gardeners, and gardens as intersectional agents and spaces of powerful potential & positive change in our world. While I see this as true in most of my interviews, this episode with the regenerative humans of the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz brings this truth to life more poignantly and tangibly than most. In July, thanks to the many efforts and encouragement of Homeless Garden Project Board Member Dana Rhine, I had the great pleasure of making a full-day field trip to the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz, California, where for 30 years a team of dedicated citizens and professionals have been putting the diverse lessons and heart of gardening to work to help offset the many challenges of homelessness in our world. John traveled with me and through the course of the day, we joined morning circle time with the staff and trainees, toured the current garden – full of flowers and fruit, migrating monarchs, seasonal vegetables and an abundance of fresh air, a stone’s throw from the ocean. I had the good fortune to speak with all the people there in the Homeless Garden Project working Farm that day – from long-time trainees to new ones - timidly, skeptically, hopefully - looking into the program; from the volunteer cook who every Tuesday brings the staff and trainees a morning snack and then prepares a hearty lunch for them to share together family-style, to the full -time year-round staff, to CSA shareholders – and you will hear a bit from all of them in this episode. Throughout, Executive Director Darrie Ganzhorn and others speak a lot about "structure” - and the symbolic importance of structure is not lost on me. Structure is simultaneously the form of a physical home, a container for and within our gardens, a scaffolding on which we try to build our days, our families, and our lives. The layers of language – such as the denotation and connotation of structure – comes up for me here. How important it is that we understand the impact of all of our words – how certain words or phrases, when we unpack them or really hear them – for instance the difference between hearing “homeless person” versus “person experiencing homelessness” - changes the power and the emphasis completely. It is never too late to listen to and hear our own word choices more clearly – how they confer dignity, respect, and equity, versus not doing any these things. How we tend our words is a direct manifestation of how we tend ourselves, our own gardens, and one another. The Homeless Garden Project is modeling structure and structural integrity - how we support, shelter, and hold each other up in the world. It is never too late to grow a better world. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week we kick off October with a dive into creativity – the way gardeners harness it, riff off it, and share its results forward with the larger world – and I am so pleased that our first creative in this exploration is the potter Frances Palmer, a previous guest on the program, one of the 75 women featured in my book The Earth in Her Hands, and a fantastic inspiration for any gardener maker out there. In a world that needs a great deal from us right now, we can almost never go wrong by igniting our creativity. Frances is a gardener, a knitter, a cook, a bee-keeper, and a businesswoman. Her one of a kind hand made pottery is a joy to the eye, the hands, and the heart – as full of personality as it is functional and beloved around the world. Thirty years into her career, her first book – Frances Palmer: Life in the Studio inspiration and lessons on creativity publishes October 6th by Artisan Press. She joins me this week from her studio in Connecticut. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Camilla Jorvad is a photographer, a gardener, a mental health and rewilding habitat gardening advocate based on the Danish Island of Aero. Her home-farm shared with her husband and children is known as Sigridsminde – meaning in memory of Sigrid – the gardener who first established a garden on this coastal bluff before her father and mother-in-law took on its care, prior to Camilla and her family partnering with the land soon after the birth of their eldest child. The partnership led to a deeper understanding and measurement of health - physical and mental - for Camilla, the land, and her family of humans and more-than-humans. Listen in. It is a story of restoration, redemption and trusting the true nature of our places and our selves. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Most gardens, gardeners, and gardening seasons are deeply informed first and foremost by a deep love of PLANTS. Of space, and design, and color, and food, and refuge and beauty, YES, but for many of us it all starts with a love of plants. This week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by an international gardener, designer, and horticulturist Wambui Ippolito - tracing the history of our own plant love, and the legacies and deeply human histories of the plants we all love. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Dustin Gimbel is a landscape designer and large scale outdoor ceramic artist inspired by the botanical world and based in Southern California. In a new episode in our ongoing series about the art of the garden and art in the garden, I am pleased to welcome Dustin this week to share more about his journey working his way through school and some notable internships to this summer installing his first public exhibitions at the Sherman Library and Gardens in Corona Del Mar and the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek. Art mirrors nature is some interesting and unexpected ways! 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In this very unusual back-to-school season here in the US, we’re joined this week by Julie Cerny a gardener, an outdoor enthusiast, and educator. Her new book, The Little Gardener: Helping Children Connect with the Natural World (out now from Princeton Architectural Press) provides some unusual and inspirational guidance for parents, grandparents, caregivers, and educators who want to help children explore the natural world through gardening. Part how-to, part teaching tool, and part inspiration, The Little Gardener shows gardeners of all ages how to envision and build their garden together by making the process an adventure to be treasured, with much to learn along the way. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.