Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden

This week our guest is something of a renaissance man. A Colorado native of Greek descent, Panayoti Kelaidis has a background in Chinese literature and as a computer systems analyst in addition to being an expert in — and enthusiastically curious about — most things that photosynthesize and contain chlorophyll. 

On Cultivating Place this week, we are energized by Lorene Edwards Forkner: award-winning garden designer, author, writer, Editor of the esteemed Pacific Horticulture magazine, mother and, above all, great lover of life, based in Seattle.

Dragged, as she likes to relate, into the garden by her lively young son many years ago, Lorene chats with us about the importance of gardens and horticulture in our individual and communal lives at this particular moment in time. She shares her experiences of how gardens help us to enjoy and embrace life’s inevitable seasons and sometimes its chaos. 

For more than 25 years, Julie Moir Messervy has inspired gardeners, readers and thinkers with her garden designs and her garden philosophy. She inspired host Jennifer Jewell years ago when she first read her book “The Inward Garden.”  In our interview we hear about her education as a gardener, her seminal work as a designer and some of her deeply held beliefs, including that “deep within each of us lies a garden.”

This week on Cultivating Place, the program’s conversations begin with Bernard Trainor, the Australian-born landscape designer. Known for his iconic California gardens, Trainor is both a hands-on gardener and a big view, large concept designer. His philosophy and work illustrate the power of specific place in any garden or cultivated landscape — no matter how big or small, urban or rural.