Cultivating Place

Jennifer Jewell / Cultivating Place
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. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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
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.

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