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.
Original Theme Music by Ma Muse, Engineer and Producer Matt Fidler, Executive Producer Sarah Bohannon.
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This week on Cultivating Place we gain a little perspective with a lot of altitude as we begin a two-part series on 'Gardening at Elevation’. -
Hannah Gardner is a gardener, writer, and mother. She is a garden designer and plantswoman with a passion for traveling the world to learn about and meet plants and their communities in their places, from Estonia to the Canaries, Northern Israel to the wildflower meadows of the United Kingdom, where she makes her home. Her longtime column in Gardens Illustrated entitled "The Outsider”, which ran from 2017 to 2020 is a trove of adventurous armchair plant and garden travel.
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David Godshall is a landscape architect, gardener, and meta-garden philosopher who joins Cultivating Place this week, as he shares in our conversation: "Garden building is civilization-building,” it should be done with creativity and integrity at all levels. Listen in!
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Professor Bonnie J Clarke joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about what it means to be a gardener and a human. Listen in!
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Ali Meders-Knight is a Mechoopda tribal member whose traditional and present homelands are based in interior Northern California, a mother of five, and a traditional basketweaver in Chico, CA she is also a tribal liaison working to form partnerships for federal forest stewardship contracting and tribal forestry programs authorized in the 2018 Farm Bill.
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Kelly is an avid gardener, a former nursery owner and plant breeder, and an award-winning author. Based in Des Moines Iowa, he is recently retired from his role as Director of Horticulture and Education at the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden. His newest book, "New Naturalism, Designing and Planting a Resilient, Ecologically Vibrant Home Garden” (Cool Springs Press, 2021) helps all of us to demystify what an ecologically functional and still incredibly beautiful and gratifying home garden means.
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Listen in this week as we discuss how far we’ve come in our mainstream gardening practices this past 50 years, from companion planting to cover cropping, interplanting to the joys of watching predatory robber flies help control Japanese beetles. We also cover the even greater joy of knowing that more life in your garden equals more health in your garden life.
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Claire Bowen is the woman behind Honeysuckle and Hilda: a florist who likes to write and her two little dogs. Based in Oxfordshire, in a tiny village nestled in England’s Chiltern Hills she has a love of country walks, foraging in hedgerows, and dreaming about flowers in her studio, where she looks out into her in-process garden.
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Debra Prinzing is the founder and leader of The Slow Flowers Society – She joins Cultivating Place in this first week of summer (after Memorial Day in the US and before the Summer Solstice in a few weeks) to share more about the many facets of her passion for being a voice for the floral world.
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Just outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, a team of plant folks known as Refugia is growing connection among places and people from their beautifully designed native plant gardens and radiating out from those.
