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Cultivating Place: Between Soil and Self - A conversation with John Sonnier

All photos courtesy of John Sonnier, all rights reserved.
All photos courtesy of John Sonnier, all rights reserved.

This week, Cultivating Place host Abra Lee explores diplomacy and gardens. She’s in conversation with John Sonnier, Head Gardener at the British Ambassador's residence in Washington, D.C.

There since 2009, John focuses on organic and sustainable care methods, and he has created one of the United States’ most significant historic orchid collections.

Orchids are known for their extraordinary forms, relationships, and resilience, and John, a distinguished horticulturalist, artist, and self-taught orchidist, brings us into that world – sharing what it means to grow them, care for them, and stay curious about them over time.

We consider how the environment we cultivate – from gardens to shared community spaces – shapes our thoughts and our lives. Listen in!

Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place.

We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these.

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.