Podcast
Cultivating Place
Hosted by Jennifer Jewell / Cultivating Place · EN
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. Take a listen.
30episodes
Episodes
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A Radical Plan: Village Homes in Davis, CA turns 50!
6d ago01:01:54Tap to summarizeThis week, we continue plumbing the potential of gardens and gardeners for growing a future we want to cultivate- for the benefit of all. In order to look forward, we look back to the radical plan of a 50-year-old intentionally-designed community and sustainability-oriented housing development, Village Homes, in Davis, California. Central to the intelligent design? You got it, Gardens and Green spaces at every turn, and accessible to all. With the community now celebrating its 50th year, Cultivating Place is joined by Carol Hillhouse, UC Davis Student Farm Associate Director Emeritus, and Robert Thayer, Landscape Architect, both Gardeners by nature and longtime residents of Village Homes. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
Transcribe →Tiny Gardens Everywhere, with MIT's Kate Brown
2w ago00:58:08Tap to summarizeKate Brown is an MIT Distinguished Professor in the History of Science. Across her career, her research has sometimes inadvertently documented the impact of urban, often small and under-resourced gardens and gardeners in our world. Her new book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, compiles this research and her own lived experience of its truth and potential benefits. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
Transcribe →Flora Culture with Christin Geall of Cultivated by Christin
3w ago00:59:07Tap to summarizeThis week on Cultivating Place, we continue with our flower theme as we celebrate May, looking toward the most floral of celebrations, Mother’s Day in the US. We discuss not us as gardeners growing flowers, but rather, how flowers shape our world, our cultures, our economies, our thinking and outlooks. We're in conversation with Christin Geall, author of Cultivated: Elements of Floral Style. Her newest title is Flora Culture: How Flowers Shape our World. It’s a revealing and thought-provoking cultural compendium. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
Transcribe →REALLY ROSES, with Robin Jennings of Oregon-based Heirloom (Roses)
4w ago00:51:48Tap to summarizeRoses are one of those topics in the garden world: they can be polarizing or energizing. And yet, given that there are roses native to most environments of North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and humans have revered this family and genus and the hundreds of rose species for millennia, they can also be connective tissue for so much–generationally, culturally, environmentally, medicinally, and certainly, aesthetically. So do you love 'em, do you hate ‘em? Do you think they’re fussy, or old-school? Maybe. But in so many ways, they are a real deal OG garden staple. From beautiful flowers, medicinal natures, habitat value galore, Robin Jennings of Heirloom – formerly known as Heirloom Roses – joins us this week to share her belief that roses really are the way. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
Transcribe →Between Soil and Self - A conversation with John Sonnier
Apr 2300:53:49Tap to summarizeThis week, Cultivating Place host Abra Lee explores diplomacy and gardens. She’s in conversation with John Sonnier, Head Gardener at the British Ambassador's residence in Washington, D.C. There since 2009, John focuses on organic and sustainable methods of care AND he has created one of the United State’s most significant historic orchid collections. Orchids are known for their extraordinary forms, relationships, and resilience and John, a distinguished horticulturalist, artist, and self-taught orchidist, brings us into that world – sharing what it means to grow them, care for them, and stay curious about them over time. We consider how the environment we cultivate – from gardens to shared community spaces – shape our thoughts and our lives. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
Transcribe →Mid-Atlantic Regional Seed Bank (MARSB) with Ed Toth and John Price
Apr 1600:54:19Tap to summarizeThis week, when we think about Cultivating Place well, we get to the seed of the matter in conversation with the team at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Seed Bank, also known as MARSB. We’re in conversation with Ed Toth the Executive Director, and John Price, MARSB’s Associate Director and Native Seed Collection Coordinator. As a collective, MARSB is wisely managing and conserving its region’s wild seed resources, and encouraging the development of the sustainable and ethical Native Plant Material supply chain throughout the region – a gift to private and public landscapes and economies. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
Transcribe →Gardens as Social Infrastructure, Gardeners as Public Servants, with Chris Felhaber
Apr 900:56:23Tap to summarizeChris Felhaber is a gardener, a husband, and a father. Now based in the Chicago area, Chris has worked in public horticulture in a variety of capacities and with well-known organizations, including with plantsman Roy Diblik in Wisconsin, at Chanticleer Garden outside of Philadelphia, with the Perennial Plant Association, and as the host of the Native Plant Podcast. After nearly 2 decades working with people and places of great privilege and with people and places who would like more gardens and more garden opportunities, Chris now understands that gardens are critical social infrastructure and that gardeners are public servant leaders whose greatest tools are empathy and meeting people and places where they are. This is a fascinating Quantum Gardening conversation - join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
Transcribe →Pansies! It's What's for Spring! with Brenna Estrada
Apr 200:55:08Tap to summarizeBrenna Estrada is the owner and founder of Three Brothers Blooms, a flower farm located on 2.5 acres of Camano Island in the Pacific Northwest. Brenna is also the author of Pansies, How to Grow, Reimagine, and Create Beauty with Pansies and Violas, published by Timber Press just over a year ago. Brenna makes a compelling case for revisiting our relationship to pansies, and her book was CP Host Ben Futa's own gateway to growing nearly 1,000 plants from seed in 2026. Their conversation this week spans many topics, with pansies as a worthy and common thread. As happens often in this work, we're reminded how this process of growing plants is just as much about cultivating ourselves as it is about cultivating our places. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
Transcribe →Spring's Wild Dreams, with Jen Williams
Mar 2601:02:31Tap to summarizeSpring is, of course, perfect for some wild dreams about what we can and will sow in the seasons to come. With plants, and with ourselves. Jen Williams’ vision for her work as the founder of Wild Dreams Farm and Seed on Washington’s Vashon Island is to ensure abundance and biodiversity in our culture, and in our gardens, by growing and breeding open-pollinated vegetable, flower, and herb seeds that nourish our human and more-than-human communities. We revisit this best of conversation this week, just in time for some of our own wild dreaming. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
Transcribe →Vernal Equinox Special: The Glorians, with Terry Tempest Williams
Mar 1900:59:52Tap to summarizeIn honor of the Vernal Equinox, and the balance we long for, we are joined this week by humanist, conservationist, Professor, and writer in residence at the Harvard Divinity School, Terry Tempest Williams. From her 1991 classic, Refuge, An Unnatural History of Family & Place, published in 1991, to her newest title out now from Grove Atlantic, The Glorians, Visitations from the Holy Ordinary, and the more than 100 publications in between, Terry’s writing is grounded in her love of the landscapes of the U.S. West. Her love and her writings profoundly expand our love for and understanding of this whole world we call home. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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