Jennifer Jewell
Host, Cultivating PlaceJennifer Jewell is the creator and host of the national award-winning, weekly public radio program and podcast, Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History & the Human Impulse to Garden, Jennifer Jewell is a gardener, garden writer, and gardening educator and advocate. Particularly interested in the intersections between gardens, the native plant environments around them, and human culture, she is the daughter of garden and floral designing mother and a wildlife biologist father.
Jennifer has been writing about gardening professionally since 1998, and her work has appeared in Gardens Illustrated, House & Garden, Natural Home, Old House Journal, Colorado Homes & Lifestyles, and Pacific Horticulture. She worked as Native Plant Garden Curator for Gateway Science Museum on the campus of California State University, Chico, and lives and gardens in Butte County, California. Her book, The Earth In Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Reimagine Life With Plants, is due out from Timber Press in late 2019. For more information on Jennifer, please see: Cultivatingplace.com.
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This week, with Spring and seeding season fully underway—indoors and out—we speak with gardener entrepreneur Anne Fletcher of Orta Kitchen Gardens, creators of non-toxic ceramic, self-watering Orta seed pots. -
To round out Women’s History Month in style, this week, we are back in conversation with Leslie Bennett, an Oakland, CA-based landscape designer who creates gardens that help to nourish and tell the story of who we are, individually and communally. -
In honor of the vernal equinox pulling us into the light, enjoy this conversation with Owen Wormser, author of Lawns into Meadows, Growing a Regenerative Landscape. -
The combining of sculpture and gardens dates back centuries if not millennia, and there are few public gardens I know of that do not incorporate sculpture into their aesthetics and identity at some point. This week we are in conversation with an exemplary public garden, whose identity grows out of this pairing: the art of horticulture and the art of sculpture. -
To kick Women’s History Month off on Cultivating Place, we visit with the woman known as the Queen of Herbs, Jekka McVicar of Jekka’s Herb Farm in the UK this week. Her long and notable career has brought the gardened world the best the herbs of the world have to offer to our gardens, to our environments, to our kitchens, and to our souls. -
Writer and gardener Marta McDowell is with us this week for our Leap Day Special - sharing more about her newest title, Gardening Can Be Murder: How Poisonous Poppies, Sinister Shovels, and Grim Gardens Have Inspired Mystery Writers, in which she delves into the literary history of mysteries and crime fiction being long inspired by life and death in the garden. -
We’re in conversation with Jane Perrone, host of the “On The Ledge” Podcast and author of “Legends of the Leaf: Unearthing the secrets to help your plants thrive.” -
In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, what they are growing in this world, and why that matters to all of us, we are joined this week by Brent Leggs, Senior Vice President of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and Executive Director of the Trust’s African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, whose mission focuses on telling the full American story. -
Staci Catron has been the Library’s Director since 2000, and Jennie Oldfield is the collection’s Senior Technical Librarian/Supervisory Archivist. The two join Cultivating Place this week to share so much more about the fertile ground of their work – enriching all of our garden lives. -
Camille Dungy is perhaps best known for her remarkable and award-winning, often environmentally focused poetry and editing of collections of environmentally focused poetry and writing by people of color exploring the intersections of gender, race, art, environment, and culture. In honor of Black History Month, we revisit this best-of conversation with Camille from May of 2023.
