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Cultivating Place: Innovate & Integrate: Ecological Lessons From The Human Built, Brooklyn Bridge Park, With Rebecca McMackin

All photos courtesy of Brooklyn Bridge Park and Rebecca McMackin, all rights reserved.

In our final episode focusing specifically on ecologically rich and contributing gardens, we learn some innovative lessons in built ecology. Literally.

Rebecca McMackin is an ecologically focused horticulturist and garden designer. For the past decade, she has been the Director of Horticulture for Brooklyn Bridge Park, an ecologically minded landscape constructed from the soil up on repurposed post-industrial shipping piers jutting out over New York’s East River beneath the iconic namesake bridge.

Rebecca and her horticultural team care for the diversity of life within this 85-acre parkland organically and with an emphasis on habitat creation for birds, butterflies, and soil microorganisms – as well as visiting humans.

Rebecca introduced me earlier this year at the Metro Hort Group’s annual Plant-O-Rama event, and I have had the pleasure of hearing her speak several times since then. Rebecca joins us this week to share more about rebuilding ecology where you can – and, she notes, if they can do it on concrete shipping piers over the East River in New York City – we can all do it on our own terms and in our unique conditions too. 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 onSoundCloud,iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit cultivatingplace.com.

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Jennifer 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.
Matt Fidler is a producer and sound designer with over 15 years’ experience producing nationally distributed public radio programs. He has worked for shows such as Freakonomics Radio, Selected Shorts, Studio 360, The New Yorker Radio Hour and The Takeaway. In 2017, Matt launched the language podcast Very Bad Words, hitting the #28 spot in the iTunes podcast charts.