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Cultivating Place: A New Garden Society, with Erika Rumbley and Renee Portonova

Photos courtesy of The New Garden Society; all rights reserved. Individual photographer credits in image captions.
Photos courtesy of The New Garden Society; all rights reserved. Individual photographer credits in image captions.

Erika Rumbley and Renee Portanova are Co-Founders and Directors of The New Garden Society. Now, you may hear that phrase and think of a garden club or a plant society. But this organization’s very name invites you to consider a new angle on the words Garden + Society.

The New Garden Society is a Boston-based organization run by horticulturists, landscapers, and farmers who seek to expand green industry opportunities for their incarcerated and formerly incarcerated neighbors in greater Boston.

They believe in the transformational potential of working with plants, and in connecting incarcerated people with green-industry professions to transform landscapes within and beyond prison walls. Together, they tend to green spaces where both people and plants can flourish.

Photos courtesy of The New Garden Society; all rights reserved. Individual photographer credits in image captions.
Photos courtesy of The New Garden Society; all rights reserved. Individual photographer credits in image captions.

Erika and Renee join Cultivating Place host Jennifer Jewell this week to share more about their intersectional work and why it matters in growing our world better. 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.