Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Cultivating Place: Longwood Reimagined with Horticultural Leader, Paul Redman

All photos courtesy of Longwood Gardens, All rights reserved.
All photos courtesy of Longwood Gardens, All rights reserved.

This week, when many in the US have time off with family and friends, we note our gratitude for Public Gardens and green spaces around our country and in our lives.

Guest-Host Abra Lee is in conversation with one of North America’s public garden leaders, Paul Redman.

All photos courtesy of Longwood Gardens, All rights reserved.
All photos courtesy of Longwood Gardens, All rights reserved.

As President and Chief Executive Officer of Longwood Gardens for the last 16 years, Paul has implemented institutional and strategic reforms that have positioned the Gardens as a premier horticultural, cultural, and educational institution of the 21st Century while respecting the values of its founder, Pierre S. du Pont.

The result has been nothing short of astounding with overall attendance doubling to almost 1.54 million visitors per year; an incredible climb in membership support from 17,000 to 78,000 households; and earned income has almost tripled – all in the last decade. Longwood Gardens is now North America's most visited paid public garden and the most visited paid cultural attraction in Philadelphia.

In their conversation, Abra and Paul explore ideas of leadership, envisioning public gardens for the future, and fearlessness. Enjoy!

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.

All photos courtesy of Longwood Gardens, All rights reserved.
All photos courtesy of Longwood Gardens, All rights reserved.

The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.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.