Cultivating Place: Looking Forward by Looking Back: New Zealand to London, Philip Norman's Life Shaped by Gardens

By Jennifer Jewell,

Published December 25, 2025 at 10:16 AM PST

All photos courtesy of Philip Norman, Garden Museum, London. All rights reserved.

For our final Cultivating Place episode of 2025, Abra Lee is looking forward by looking back. She’s in conversation with Philip Norman, longtime curator at the Garden Museum in London. From New Zealand to London, Philips' is a life shaped by gardens. Happy Holidays and New Year!

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Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden

Jennifer Jewell

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.

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Matt Fidler

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.

See stories by Matt Fidler