
399 episodes

Cultivating Place Jennifer Jewell / Cultivating Place
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- Society & Culture
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4.7 • 300 Ratings
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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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The Miraculum and Cosmosis With Artist Libby Ellis
As we move toward October, the first a few intermittent episodes reminding us of the artistry behind our plant and garden love, the artistry underpinning mother nature herself. This week we’re in conversation with artist Libby Ellis – photographer who sees the fullness of creation in the many faces of the flowers who delight us.
Libby Ellis is a fine art photographer based on the island now known as Martha’s Vineyard homeland of the Wampanoag people and nation who named the beautiful island Noepe. Monochromoatic and often single focused Ellis’ work lands in my heart in a similar way as a Georgia O’Keeffe painting or a Dorothea Lange portrait – all of them capturing the essence of one subject while contributing insight into the workings of life itself – nature, plus the workings of humanity and its perceptions. In the case of Libby Ellis – the focal point include everyday flowers from Cosmos to musk roses, hibiscus to magnolia. And her work has been featured from various locations on Martha’s Vineyard including the Featherstone Center for the Arts and the Carnegie Museum to London’s Saatchi Gallery for the Royal Horticultural Society’s 2022 Botanical Art and Photography exhibit, from the Harvard Divinity School to large scale projection against a high rise building in Denver, CO.
Libby joins us from her studio in Edgartown MA (on the to share more about her photographic eye and gardener’s heart. -
The Marginalian, with Maria Popova BEST OF
This week, a Best OF episode revisiting our conversation with Maria Popova, the creator and writer behind The Marginalian (formerly known as Brain Pickings).
For the past 16 years, The Marginalia 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 tend toward the fullness of Autumn’s splendor. 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 Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com. -
WHAT WE SOW, with guest host Dave Schlom Interviewing Jennifer Jewell
On this special edition of the show, our guest will be Cultivating Place’s wonderful host, Jennifer Jewell. Jennifer has a new book out and it’s very special.
A very intimate and, at the same time, global take on the natural and social science aspects of one of the most fundamental things to life on Earth – seeds. Jennifer’s book is titled What We Sow: On The Personal, Ecological and Cultural Significance of Seeds.
It’s an exploration of the lives of plants and people through the cycle of a botanical year viewed through the fundamental lens of seeds. With our guest host, Dave Schlom of NSPR’s Blue Dot program and podcast, we’ll hear about the good and the bad when it comes to the modern world of seeds - from those produced by natural plants battling to adapt to climate change to those produced by human hands. 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. -
The High Line of NYC, with Director of Horticulture Richard Hayden
This week, our second episode on gardens and green spaces of New York City, getting us primed for The Garden Conservancy’s inaugural Garden Futures Summit being held at the New York Botanical Garden on Sept. 29th and at gardens across the city on Saturday, Sept. 30th.
This week, we head to The High Line – a 1.45 elevated linear garden - one of New York City’s green space highlights. We’re in conversation with Richard Hayden, Director of Horticulture at The High Line since 2022. A horticulture and public garden enthusiast, Richard is all about connecting people with the power of plants. Join us!
All photos courtesy of Richard Hayden and The Friends of The High Line, unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved.
The self-seeded wild high line prior to revitalization and curation demonstrates the biodiversity of flora and fauna possible on this elevated railway line. Top image by Joel Sternfeld.
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. -
New York Green, with photographer & author Ngoc Minh Ngo
To kick off September, we head to the Big Apple, where at the end of the month, the Garden Conservancy is holding its inaugural Garden Futures Summit on September 29th and 30th.
In preparation, we thought we’d dedicate two episodes to checking in on some garden lives in the city. This week we’re in conversation with photographer, artist, author, and gardener Ngoc Minh Ngo, sharing more about her newest work, “New York Green,” profiling in word and uplifting photography more than 40 exceptional parks and gardens of the five boroughs that comprise New York City.
“From tiny corner lots to acres of old-growth forests, New York is filled with a wealth of beautiful green spaces–if you know where to look,” and Ngoc Minh Ngo’s book shows us just where to look.
Ngoc was a previous guest on Cultivating Place in 2018, and I am so pleased to welcome her back. 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. -
Dancing in the Dragon's Jaw Design Studio Course, UTenn, Knoxville
Chad Manley is a fellow and lecturer in the School of Landscape Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Nora Jacobs and Carlos Velasco were two of the Masters of Landscape Architecture students in Chad’s spring 2023 Landscape Architecture Design Studio entitled Dancing the Dragon’s Jaw – a deeply imagined course of study designed by Chad “inviting students on a smokey dance of space-making along a continuum of Northern and Central California landscapes," and that resulted in an "accretive semester’s long individual-collective physical and digital collage."
As a culmination of the students' learning and creative term, they traveled as a group to California to “dance through its communities, meadows, and mountains, meet with fire keepers; land managers; scientists; artists; and designers, situating the journey within both the urgencies and poetic potentials of a land-on-fire.” The studio-developed ‘pyro-loci,’ worked to consider and “re-imagine an empathetic landscape architecture born of regenerative fire" – and regenerative, inclusive, and expansive learning mindsets.
They learned from books, from other designers and design history, from the drawing board, but they also learned on and from the land and people for whom their design might be of greatest benefit. In our second week of back-to-school-themed episodes devoted to plant education in school and in life, the three join Cultivating Place this week to share more.
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.
Customer Reviews
A respite an an ear full of nourishment
There are few offerings from the
online world I genuinely look forward to, but this program is at the top of a very short list. Thank you Jennifer Jewell and team for creating this online space of inspiration and beauty for us all to gather.
Jennifer Jewell’s Podcasts are Beautiful & Inspiring
If you love gardens, history, social justice, community and education, Jennifer’s work will nourish your soul like fresh garden fruit. Her series of interviews with the Black gardening community this year were both timed perfectly for Juneteenth and stories that we all need to hear. Gardens and farms heal us after tragedy and trauma. I can’t thank Jennifer enough for doing this work in the style of a “Fresh Air” interview on NPR, these are brilliant and hopeful life stories worth listening too.
“On Being” for Gardeners
This podcast is full of thoughtful, contemplative conversations between the host and guests that the audience gets to listen in on. I have really enjoyed the back catalog, and tend to scroll back to the current month in prior years, since the content often has seasonal rhythms. Only complaint from me is that in recent months I have felt that the interview spends so much time on the guest’s background, childhood, or detailed path to where they are now that there is little time to hear about their current endeavors and how listeners might use their work as inspiration for cultivating where we are. It sometimes strays into backstory so long we don’t get enough of now and what’s next.