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Cultivating Place: Kiss My Aster's Aster Gardens, with Amanda Thomsen

Photos are courtesy of Aster Gardens, Amanda Thomsen. All rights reserved.
Photos are courtesy of Aster Gardens, Amanda Thomsen. All rights reserved.

Amanda Thomsen is a horticulturist, garden designer, keynote speaker, freelance writer, backyard consultant, and author living in suburban Chicago. 

Amanda wants to help the world live more sustainably (but without a load of effort and twice the fun!).

Amanda has been a professional horticulturist, landscape designer, and project manager for the past twenty-plus years. Her focus is bringing rule-breaking fun, a little kitsch, and a lot of humor into an industry that is often thought of as stodgy and full of rules. Amanda speaks and gives classes at events of all sizes throughout the United States.

Photos are courtesy of Aster Gardens, Amanda Thomsen. All rights reserved.
Photos are courtesy of Aster Gardens, Amanda Thomsen. All rights reserved.

Many of you will remember Cultivating Place's previous conversation with Amanda Thomsen back in the spring of 2019 about her latest book, “Backyard Adventure: Get Messy, Get Wet, Build Cool Things, and Have Tons of Fun.” 

In 2022, she opened a plant shop in the small, midwestern town and Chicago suburb of Lemont, IL. Today, Amanda is back to share with us her journey to becoming a business owner, building community, and growing more than just plants. Their motto: "Practical, fun, imperfect gardens for everyone!"

It’s a fun, funny, heartbreaking, uplifting, and very candid conversation about the business of Cultivating Place and how small plant businesses can be integral to Cultivating Place and the community.

IN ADDITION, this is the first CP episode featuring one of our two new regular guest hosts: Ben Futa of Botany, a growing plant-based endeavor in South Bend, Indiana. Join us!

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 on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Bio photo new CP guest host: Ben Futa by Myriam Nicodemus. All rights reserved.
Bio photo new CP guest host: Ben Futa by Myriam Nicodemus. All rights reserved.

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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.