Cultivating Place

Jennifer Jewell / Cultivating Place
  • 4.7 (334)
  • PHILOSOPHY
  • UPDATED BIWEEKLY
Cultivating Place

Gardens are more than collections of plants. Gardens and Gardeners are intersectional spaces and agents for positive change in our world. Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden is a weekly public radio program & podcast exploring what we mean when we garden. Through thoughtful conversations with growers, gardeners, naturalists, scientists, artists and thinkers, Cultivating Place illustrates the many ways in which gardens are integral to our natural and cultural literacy. These conversations celebrate how these interconnections support the places we cultivate, how they nourish our bodies, and feed our spirits. They change the world, for the better. Take a listen.

  1. For the Love of Soil, Start with Soil: Juliet Sargeant

    21H AGO

    For the Love of Soil, Start with Soil: Juliet Sargeant

    Juliet Sargeant is an award-winning English garden designer who blends beauty with purpose in every space she creates. Juliet’s unique background in medicine, science, and psychology gives her designs a whole new depth, focusing on wellbeing and connection. You might recognize her name from that time in 2016 when she made history as the first Black Woman garden designer to display at the Chelsea Flower Show, and her design - Modern Slavery Garden, won a Gold Medal and the People’s Choice Prize.  This Earth Day week, we’re celebrating Juliet's design background and digging in to her new book “Start With Soil: Simple Steps for a Thriving Garden” which publishes on May 1st from Frances Lincoln. 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

    1h 2m
  2. The Holy Earth & The Nature Study Idea, John Stempien on the Legacy of Liberty Hyde Bailey

    APR 17

    The Holy Earth & The Nature Study Idea, John Stempien on the Legacy of Liberty Hyde Bailey

    In this holy season of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, with the earth reviving herself in greenery and flowers, birds, bees, and butterflies all around us, I am so pleased to be in conversation today with a gardener who will represent another gardener -one in the here now and one from more than a century ago, whose words resonate into the present. I believe in the future, so beautifully. John Stempien is the emeritus director of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum in South Haven, Michigan. He joins us today to share more about his garden life path, following in the footsteps of the great garden life path sown, grown, and walked on by Liberty Hyde Bailey, Jr, avid and reverent gardener, often considered to be the "father of modern [Western] horticulture” 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

    1 hr
  3. Love Letter to a Garden, Debbie Millman of Design Matters

    APR 10

    Love Letter to a Garden, Debbie Millman of Design Matters

    Debbie Millman has written love letters before. Her 20 years of creating and hosting the popular podcast Design Matters is just one of them. Her many books, several of them established reference books in the design and branding worlds, are among others. I am guessing she’s written a few to her wife the author Roxanne Gay, who contributed recipes to Debbie’s newest book. While I enjoy all good love letters, Debbie’s newest love letter in book form, (launching next week - April 15th) entitled Love Letter to a Garden, is one that definitely caught my eye and ear.  I am going to wager that gardeners, young and old, new and longstanding, all feel that quickening of their pulse with Spring, sap rising, bulbs blooming, the new season all a bright shining blank page of possibility. It is a distinctive and palpable kind of love. With April and the season’s annual returning sense of rejuvenation, resurrection, and regeneration, Debbie Millman’s new book - Love Letter to a Garden – captures that particular passion many of us will recognize of falling in love with gardening…every single season. Debbie has accomplished in one beautiful seed-like book so much of what I have hoped to capture in 10 years of Cultivating Place – the WONDER of what it means to identify as a Gardener in our world, the EVERYTHING that Gardens bring to our lives. I am so pleased to welcome Debbie to CP this week. 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

    59 min
  4. The Vibrant New Natural Gardening of Kelly D. Norris

    APR 3

    The Vibrant New Natural Gardening of Kelly D. Norris

    You might remember Cultivating Place's first conversation with Iowa-based plantsman, Kelly D. Norris, back in 2021, in celebration of his book New Naturalism, designing and planting a resilient, ecologically vibrant home garden. And we’re so pleased to get him back this week in conversation with CP Guest Host Ben Futa to talk more about this current moment in naturalistic design, and Kelly’s newest and very useful book: Your Natural Garden, a practical guide to caring for an ecologically vibrant home garden, which published in January of this year. Kelly is one of the leading horticulturists of this generation, and in his practice, he explores the narrative of place through site-specific plantings and landscape interventions. An award-winning author and plantsman, his eponymous design studio works in public and private places across North America. The studio annually produces the New Naturalism Academy, a virtual school for enthusiastic designers, as a commitment to continuing education and lifelong learning. He’s also the founder and curator of The Public Horticulture Company, an emerging ecological landscape startup based in Des Moines, Iowa. He is the former director of horticulture and education at the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, where for eight years, he directed efforts in design, curation, programming, garden, and facility management to nearly $20 million in capital projects. We’re so pleased to share his plant-driven, utterly magic, paradigm shifting work with you all again. 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

    1h 5m
  5. Transformational: From banker to trailblazing IDEA leader in public horticulture, Mae Lin Plummer

    MAR 27

    Transformational: From banker to trailblazing IDEA leader in public horticulture, Mae Lin Plummer

    This week on Cultivating Place, guest host Abra Lee is in conversation with a horticultural leader with big IDEAs. Mae Lin Plummer is the Director of the IDEA Center for Public Gardens in Denver Colorado. Mae Lin’s journey into gardening started in her backyard in Charlotte, NC where she simply wanted "a pretty place to throw parties." That blossomed into a full-on plant obsession and a major career shift—from banking to horticulture. Mae Lin’s passion is connecting people to the natural world through gardens. Her story is filled with joy, life lessons, and a deep love for how gardens can transform lives. 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

    58 min
  6. Spring Equinox Special - Practicing re-enchantment: Encountering Dragonflies with Brooke Williams

    MAR 20

    Spring Equinox Special - Practicing re-enchantment: Encountering Dragonflies with Brooke Williams

    Happy Spring Equinox! To welcome Spring – especially this exact Spring in the US - practicing re-enchantment in our world seemed exactly the right focus. I think this is part of what Gardeners do: practice enchantment or love with the natural world we care for. We’re in conversation this week with Brooke Williams: writer, naturalist, amateur conservation ecologist, thinker, observer, and walker. Based in the Great Salt Lake region of Utah with his wife, acclaimed writer Terry Tempest Williams, Brooke writes about evolution, consciousness, and his own adventures exploring both the inner and outer wilderness in our world. He is also a Gardener, and author most recently of Encountering Dragonfly, Notes on the Practice of Re-Enchantment. Dragonflies are of course among our favorite and most enchanting of companions in the garden – our built-in pest control for other insects such as mosquitos; predators who are not themselves pests in our lives. Squadrons of dragonflies patrolling the garden or wild lands in Summer are symbols everywhere of transformation and balance. For the ecological and symbolic importance of dragonflies to our human lives, I am so pleased to welcome Brooke to Cultivating Place. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you so much for listening over the years and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

    1h 13m
  7. Life is Big: To Be A Poet Gardener, Tess Taylor

    MAR 13

    Life is Big: To Be A Poet Gardener, Tess Taylor

    Tess Taylor is a self-described Poet Gardener – and if there is ever a season to feel the poetry of life in the garden and with the plants in every cell of your body, it’s springtime! An award-winning poet with many collection titles to her name and editor of the life-supporting anthology Leaning Toward Light Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, Tess is also the Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, California. In honor of Women’s History Month AND the vernal equinox arriving next week on March 20th,  I thought we could all use some poetic focus. I am so pleased to share this conversation with Tess forward. 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

    1h 5m
  8. The Curious Dr. Margaret Funk, Flora & Frost

    MAR 5

    The Curious Dr. Margaret Funk, Flora & Frost

    Dr. Margaret Funk is the curious Midwest gardener (and doctor) behind the online name Flora & Frost. Cultivating her Minnesota garden for years, like so many of us, she really dove in deep in 2020. She and her family have now converted most of their lawn into a vibrant garden with a small greenhouse, raised beds for veggies, ornamental plants, and a growing collection of native plants. As an online communicator herself, Margaret combines her love of gardening with her with her love of science AND laughter. She has a remarkable skill at presenting often complex topics in an accessible, authentic, inspiring, and entertaining way. In honor of Women’s History Month, Margaret joins Guest Host Ben Futa this week on Cultivating Place - 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

    57 min
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Hosts & Guests

4.7
out of 5
334 Ratings

About

Gardens are more than collections of plants. Gardens and Gardeners are intersectional spaces and agents for positive change in our world. Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden is a weekly public radio program & podcast exploring what we mean when we garden. Through thoughtful conversations with growers, gardeners, naturalists, scientists, artists and thinkers, Cultivating Place illustrates the many ways in which gardens are integral to our natural and cultural literacy. These conversations celebrate how these interconnections support the places we cultivate, how they nourish our bodies, and feed our spirits. They change the world, for the better. Take a listen.

Information

  • Creator
    Jennifer Jewell / Cultivating Place
  • Years Active
    2016 - 2025
  • Episodes
    382
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2016 - Cultivating Place
  • Show Website
    Cultivating Place

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