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Cultivating Place: The Vibrant New Natural Gardening of Kelly D. Norris

All photos are courtesy of Kelly D. Norris.
All photos are courtesy of Kelly D. Norris.

You might remember Cultivating Place's first conversation with Iowa-based plantsman, Kelly D. Norris, back in 2021, in celebration of his book New Naturalism, designing and planting a resilient, ecologically vibrant home garden.

We’re so pleased to have him back this week in conversation with CP Guest Host Ben Futa to talk more about this current moment in naturalistic design and Kelly’s newest and very useful book: Your Natural Garden, a practical guide to caring for an ecologically vibrant home garden, published in January of this year.

Kelly is one of the leading horticulturists of this generation, and in his practice, he explores the narrative of place through site-specific plantings and landscape interventions. An award-winning author and plantsman, his eponymous design studio works in public and private places across North America.

All photos are courtesy of Kelly D. Norris.
All photos are courtesy of Kelly D. Norris.

The studio annually produces the New Naturalism Academy, a virtual school for enthusiastic designers, as a commitment to continuing education and lifelong learning. He’s also the founder and curator of The Public Horticulture Company, an emerging ecological landscape startup based in Des Moines, Iowa.

All photos are courtesy of Kelly D Norris.
All photos are courtesy of Kelly D Norris.

He is the former director of horticulture and education at the Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden, where for eight years, he directed efforts in design, curation, programming, garden, and facility management to nearly $20 million in capital projects. We’re so pleased to share his plant-driven, utterly magical, paradigm-shifting work with you all again.

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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.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.