Cultivating Place – Details, episodes & analysis

At this back-to-school, change-of-seasons moment, I thought we would all enjoy a good bedtime-story vibe. Enjoy this Best of CP conversation with Gwendolyn Wallace.  Gwendolyn Wallace is a gardener, a student, a teacher, a historian, and the author of two new works of illustrated children’s literature. Joy Takes Root, and The Light She Feels Inside (both published this year) are works grounded in the human impulse to garden. In words, stories, and images these additions to the world of children’s literature help to grow us all. Using her own history and experience with gardens and gardening, Gwendolyn’s stories remind us (no matter our age) that our gardens raise and tend to us as much as we raise and tend to them! 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.

This week, A BEST OF conversation. In this long, hot, fiery summer here in Northern CA and wet and windy summer in other parts of the country – I really needed some flowers – and thought our conversation with the UK’s Shane Connolly might be just the thing. ENJOY! As we tend toward summer’s end, with end of summer and fall events and celebrations perhaps in mind, maybe even winter events in the planning, we turn this week to floristry and how and where it intersects with sustainability – and as our guest today shares, with thoughtfulness. British floral designer Shane Connolly is well-known for his world-class floristry and floral design, which gracing several weddings within the British Royal Family and the recent coronation of King Charles. While his floral design is known for this kind of high-profile event, Shane is also known as one of the preeminent ambassadors for a more sustainable, organic, local, seasonal, and low-waste floral design and floral supply industry.  Cultivating Place now has a donate button! 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.

Happy (almost) Summer Solstice! In celebration of the planetary moment of the longest day and the shortest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, taking place on June 20th, we get Still. We hold a moment of stillness to notice and honor our places, our selves, and our many companions in time and space. We’re in conversation with Artist/Photographer Mary Jo Hoffman all about her more than a decade-long daily photographic practice and her new book: Still: The Art of Noticing. From my seat, the act of being still and the art of noticing are perfect intentions for any season. 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.

As another offering to all of you in this Autumnal planting and planning period, a revisit and reminder of the poetics involved as well as the pragmatics, in conversation with award-winning poet and long-time home gardener Camille Dungy. Camille is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade (Wesleyan UP, 2017), winner of the Colorado Book Award, and the essay collection Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys into Race, Motherhood and History (W.W. Norton, 2017), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Camille is also a University Distinguished Professor at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado. In our conversation, we explore the intertwining of poetry, gardening, life, and trophic cascades in each of them. 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 we look to our fall and winter planting and planning windows, this week, Cultivating Place is back in conversation with Uli Lorimer, native plantsman and Director of Horticulture at the Native Plant Trust. His new book, "The Northeast Native Plant Primer: 235 Plants for an Earth Friendly Garden," is a great resource no matter where you garden. 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 first full week of Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere – looking toward the month of October and its many harvest celebrations, we look to our seeds – the beginning and end of the lives of the seed-bearing plants who make our lives possible.  Stacey Denton, of Flora Farm & Design Studio in Williams, Oregon, is an organic flower farmer, bioregional seed grower, and homesteader based in the Klamath Siskiyou region of Southern Oregon. Trained in ecology, permaculture, organic farming, and seed growing and saving, Stacey makes her community-and-land-based life with her daughter Hannah and with her parents nearby. Stacey and I connected over the importance of bioregional seed growing, sourcing, knowing, and supporting at the Slow Flowers Summit held at Filoli in the summer of 202, and she joins cultivating Place this week to share more about the literacy - and joy - of specifically bioregional seeds.  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 look at culture and ecology with Farmer Rishi. Rishi is a farmer/gardener, teacher, thinker, and lover of life-based in Southern California. The executive director of the Sarvodaya Institute there, Rishi leads by example and by invitation. His intention for working in the fields of regeneration and urban farming is to joyfully increase understanding around the basic principles behind the healing of our bodies: both our physical bodies and our shared Earthen body. From his experiences farming in suburban Southern California as well as at Vandana Shiva’s Navdanya Farm in India, Rishi believes that our individual footprints can and should leave the world with rich soil, running rivers, and smiling faces. 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.

Anna Andreyeva is a Russian-born UK- based garden designer, plantswoman, and mother. She is currently pursuing a horticultural and ecological research Ph.D. focused on perennial steppe plants around the world for green roofs and general urban planting in a changing world under British plantsman Nigel Dunnett in Sheffield, England. Anna designed the plantings for many public spaces, including the so-called Highline of Moscow prior to moving to the UK four years ago. In 2022, she collaborated on the planting plans for the “What Does Not Burn” garden, symbolizing the ongoing conflict in Ukraine and reflecting the country’s culture and tradition at the Hampton Court flower show. Sponsored by the GLAU (Guild of Landscape Architects of Ukraine) and Studio Toop, the garden won an award for Global Impact. Anna joins us this week to share more about gardens and plants as common grounds and art forms to help meet the challenges ahead. 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.

If you ask me, the independent nurseries and growers of our world – especially those focused on helping us as gardeners create not only beautiful gardens but also gardens that contribute to the ecologies of our places, are some of our great national treasures. This week following Labor Day, we celebrate these treasures wherever they may be in conversation with one: Barton Springs Nursery in Austin, TX, where since 1986 the owners and staff having been raising both plants and gardeners right. In 2021, Barton Springs Nursery succeeded from the founders Conrad and Bernadine Bering into the skillful and passionate hands of garden designer Amy Hovis, and horticulturist William Glenn and photographer and systems designer Greg Thomas. The three, plus their dedicated and knowledgeable staff continue the long and beautiful Barton Springs Nursery legacy of offering in-house, seed-grown, native and climate adapted plants (without the use of toxic chemicals), inspiring display gardens, and garden education ensuring low-impact, high contribution - and even higher joy - gardening for Austin – and the planet. 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.

Pam Penick is the gardener behind the well-known long-time garden blog known as Diggi ng. Based in Austin, Texas, Pam is an avid and audacious gardener and garden writer. She is also a determined garden community builder in all that she does from digging, to writing, to organizing gatherings like the Garden Bloggers Fling, a convening of garden communicators in a different city or gardening region of the US each year. In 2017, she dug in deeper and began organizing and hosting a garden design speaker series called Garden Spark, to facilitate bringing some of the best voices in gardening for the benefit and expansion of her garden region. Pam joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about life in a hot & dry climate as a thinking gardener. 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.