Cultivating Place Jennifer Jewell / Cultivating Place

With the Chelsea Flower Show in the UK just completed, the gardening world as a whole has the concept of Garden Design awards and recognition - along with the garden world’s trends, concerns and priorities - top of mind.

Such display and attention – and recognition well beyond the garden world – has the potential to move hearts and minds and, more importantly, to change minds and behaviors. We hope for the better.

In 2023, Pacific Horticulture, a non-profit leader in horticultural thinking and gardening up and down the Pacific Region of the US since 1976 (and rooted back even earlier), jumped into the arena of how we encourage, celebrate, recognize, and even incentivize garden design when they launched their inaugural Design Futurist awards.

These awards demonstrate the power of garden design to achieve climate resilience, steward biodiversity, and connect people with nature.

In 2023, the first year of the awards, “visionary designers and regional plantspeople submitted designs illustrating that our gardens can conserve plants and wildlife, treat our water and soil as precious, and hold the wellbeing of people at their center.”

The Design Futurist Awards celebrate “garden design that is easily replicable, modest in scale, or designed for intimate neighborhood community use” and I hope serve as a model for how to not just award but reward good garden design anywhere and everywhere.

This week, Sarah Beck Pacific Horticulture’s Executive Director joins Cultivating Place to share more about the process and purpose of these awards – entries for which are being accepted now through July 26th, 2024. Listen in!

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations.

The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place, we’re in conversation with Kristen Bradley, Co-founder and Creative Director of the world-renowned Australian-based Milkwood Permaculture. 

Their new Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook is another perfect resource for our summer garden (and life) plotting, planning, and planting, with an emphasis on garden-life-based habits for hope in a changing world. Join us!

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations.

The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Just in time for your continued planning, plotting, and planting in order to grow the earliest and the latest and the biggest and the longest producing and the best tasting of the summer vegetable and fruit bounty, this week Cultivating Place returns to our intermittent series on seeds in conversation with Adam Alexander, author of The Seed Detective, Uncovering the Secret Histories of Remarkable Vegetables.

This conversation and gardening human go to show—once again—that all of life (and the histories of humans with their plants in their places) can be found in the garden if we’re looking. Enjoy!

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations.

The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Bevin Cohen and his wife Heather Marie co-founded Small House Farm, a homestead, garden, family, and bridge to the natural world around them.

Bevin writes: “The garden is where we meditate, harvest our seeds and learn about Mother Nature’s many wonders. We are avid seed savers, and amateur plant breeders. We believe that each seed is a connection to every grower that stewarded that variety before us – and every rower that comes after us.”

Through his books, his educational workshops and lectures, and now through his podcast, Seeds and Weeds, Bevin shares his small-farm big-life heartfelt world view. In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are and what they are growing in this world, I am so pleased to be in conversation with Bevin this week. Listen in!

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations.

The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

All photos courtesy of Bevin Cohen, Small House Farm. All rights reserved.

To kick off May, looking forward to Mother’s Day, Graduations, and the promise of Summer Gardening in general here in the US, this week we go all in for flowers in pots! with one of the world’s bright gardens and floral stars: Sarah Raven. Her newest book: A Year Full of Pots Container Flowers for All Seasons (Bloomsbury Press, 2024) notes that pots in the garden are like "bubbles in a glass of champagne.

In the past 25 years, Sarah has been a leadership voice in beautiful and productive gardening through her trial and research garden at Perch Hill, her many books and in-person educational offerings, and now through her podcast: Grow, Cook, Eat, Arrange.

What could be a better way to welcome May? Enjoy.

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations.

The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

The third week of April is California Native Plant week, this year being celebrated by the California Native Plant Society via 8 days of action in honor and protection of our native plant diversity.

Our celebratory action item here at Cultivating Place is being in conversation this week with Aaron Sims, Director of the Rare Plant Program for CNPS. 2024 year marks the 50th anniversary of the CNPS Rare Plant Inventory, tracking and analyzing rare plants and their status across the floristic province to help fight extinction (and subsequent biodiversity loss), to engage citizen scientists, including gardeners, across the state, and to inform land use decisions statewide.

Along with the beauty, joy, and life sustaining qualities of our native plant flora whereever we might live and garden, that is all worth celebrating.

Happy Native Plant (rare and common) Gardening to you - listen in!

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations.

The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.