Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations
We are off the air on our Redding transmitter. Unfortunately, all attempts to resolve the audio issue remotely have not been successful, so we will be sending one of our engineers to the transmitter site as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

Cultivating Place: Back to school (with plants) - Sean Doherty, VP of Education, Missouri Botanical Garden

Taylor Visitor Center Landscape South. All photos courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden; photographer credits in image titles. All rights reserved.
Nathan Kwarta
Taylor Visitor Center Landscape South. All photos courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden; photographer credits in image titles. All rights reserved.
All photos courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden; photographer credits in image titles. All rights reserved.
All photos courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden; photographer credits in image titles. All rights reserved.

It’s back to school time – you can tell by the ads on television and radio (yes, I was watching the Olympics!) and by the displays at the stores with notebooks, pencils, backpacks, and lunch boxes being on prominent display.

As you and I know, one of the best classrooms available to us all is the outdoors – from the wildlands of fields, woods, and waysides around us to more formal state and national parks and monuments, our own gardens, and very specifically, our many public gardens.

Being outdoors is a great classroom, and plants are among our best teachers.

Joining me this week to explore all of this and more is Sean Doherty, a gardener, a plant lover, a 25-year-career public educator: in the classroom, as a principal, and for six years as a St. Louis School’s district superintendent. Sean is now the Vice President of Education at the Missouri Botanical Garden in downtown St. Louis.

All photos courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden; photographer credits in image titles. All rights reserved.
All photos courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden; photographer credits in image titles. All rights reserved.

From school groups to mindfulness walks, botanical art, and identification classes to therapeutic horticulture, from seed banking to historic herbarium collections, this botanic garden in St. Louis continues to expand how they and we think about the phenomenal educational capacity and imperative of plants and their conservation. Join us!

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! 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 on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit cultivatingplace.com.

Stay Connected
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.