Cultivating Place

To welcome the fullness of June, this week on Cultivating Place, guest host Ben Futa is back and in conversation with Marc Sardi, a Montreal-based scientist turned floral artist who has reinvented his relationship with the natural world, and himself, along with changing careers.  It’s an authentic conversation exploring how rediscovering our most authentic relationship with plants also allows us to know ourselves, and our world, better. It’s lush, it’s life-affirming, and it’s grounding in all the best ways. Listen in and 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. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com. All photos are courtesy of Marc Sardi, and all rights reserved. Bio Image of Marc by Christophe Roberge, all rights reserved.

Summer makes it easy to move your body – to get out for a walk, to work in the garden, to hike, bike, stroll, boat, climb, swim, dance under the stars. Whatever calls you. But as we know, many of us – most of us? Do not move enough, and even if we do, we don’t get a balanced diet of movement. Which Gardening can help with, and which physical movement, expert Katy Bowman says, is essential to a healthy body, mind, heart, and attitude. Katy is the founder of Nutritious Movement, and she joins us on Cultivating Place this week to share more. Listen in! 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.

Guina Hammond is the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's program manager of sustainable communities. She is also deeply involved in her hometown of Philadelphia as a certified organic landcare professional, PHS Tree Tender, Penn State Master Gardener, and planning team member for the Mid-Atlantic Woody & Perennial Plant Conference.  In addition to that incredible list of accomplishments, Guina is a down-to-earth plant lover at heart who desires to bring gardening to the doorstep of your everyday neighbor. As the founding member of the Chester Avenue Community Garden, a PHS-supported garden, she has grown award-winning produce for the past 38 years. CP Guest Host Abra Lee is in conversation with Guina this week to learn and share more. 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. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

As the summer gardening season rolls into full-throated song, the idea of who has access to the work, joy, and benefits of this practice also comes into view—and feeds what Occupational Therapist and author Jill Mays calls that "green thing inside of us all." As an occupational therapist by career and calling, over the course of her professional life, it became increasingly clear to Jill how many of the occupational therapy goals she set for her diverse clients were well met by the variety of activities, sensory stimulations, and social, mental, and physical benefits of gardening—preferably outside and in the company of others. After several years of developing gardening programs in her now-home town of Truro, MA, Jill has documented the journey of her work, research, and garden program designs for a wide range of special needs in her new book: Nurturing Nature, A Guide to Gardening for Special Needs. 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.

This second week of May, we welcome gardener and plantswoman Holly Shimizu. Her four decades of work in some of America’s notable public gardens have tracked and traced some of the most impactful changes in public garden standards, expectations, and accountability in that same time frame. From her visionary leadership roles at the National Herb Garden, the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, and the US Botanic Garden to her current board position at the American Horticultural Society, Holly’s garden life is a beautiful public-garden journey that benefits us all. 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. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place we welcome May, with all of her floral and plant profusion, revisiting a conversation we loved with Kristin Currin and Andrew Merritt of Humble Roots Nursery in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge. Acclaimed for their native plant passions, knowledge, and integrity, Kristin and Drew are the authors of the Pacific Northwest Native Plant Primer - one of a series of such primers from around the country steering us as gardeners toward beautiful ecological gardens and place based relationships. Cheers to May and our gardens' weaving us back into the wonder of the world. Humble Roots is a native plant nursery acclaimed for its efforts in sustainability and promoting native plant passion, knowledge, and ethics across the wider eco-regions of the Pacific Northwest. The Pacific Northwest Native Plant Primer, 225 plants for an Earth Friendly Garden (Timber Press, 2023), or one of its relations might be just the inspiration we all need to get us planting in the right direction this spring and summer! 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.

Juliet Sargeant is an award-winning English garden designer who blends beauty with purpose in every space she creates. Juliet’s unique background in medicine, science, and psychology gives her designs a whole new depth, focusing on wellbeing and connection. You might recognize her name from that time in 2016 when she made history as the first Black Woman garden designer to display at the Chelsea Flower Show, and her design - Modern Slavery Garden, won a Gold Medal and the People’s Choice Prize.  This Earth Day week, we’re celebrating Juliet's design background and digging in to her new book “Start With Soil: Simple Steps for a Thriving Garden” which publishes on May 1st from Frances Lincoln. 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. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

John Stempien, Emeritus Director of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum and co-editor of the Gardener's Companion, dives into the legacy of Liberty Hyde Bailey, the 'father of modern horticulture.' He explores how Bailey's timeless work, particularly 'The Holy Earth,' remains relevant today. Stempien reflects on his transformative journey in gardening, emphasizing the emotional connections we form with nature. He also discusses integrating nature study into education, celebrating gardening as a spiritual practice that fosters deeper bonds with the world around us.

Debbie Millman has written love letters before. Her 20 years of creating and hosting the popular podcast Design Matters is just one of them. Her many books, several of them established reference books in the design and branding worlds, are among others. I am guessing she’s written a few to her wife the author Roxanne Gay, who contributed recipes to Debbie’s newest book. While I enjoy all good love letters, Debbie’s newest love letter in book form, (launching next week - April 15th) entitled Love Letter to a Garden, is one that definitely caught my eye and ear.  I am going to wager that gardeners, young and old, new and longstanding, all feel that quickening of their pulse with Spring, sap rising, bulbs blooming, the new season all a bright shining blank page of possibility. It is a distinctive and palpable kind of love. With April and the season’s annual returning sense of rejuvenation, resurrection, and regeneration, Debbie Millman’s new book - Love Letter to a Garden – captures that particular passion many of us will recognize of falling in love with gardening…every single season. Debbie has accomplished in one beautiful seed-like book so much of what I have hoped to capture in 10 years of Cultivating Place – the WONDER of what it means to identify as a Gardener in our world, the EVERYTHING that Gardens bring to our lives. I am so pleased to welcome Debbie to CP this week. 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. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

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. And we’re so pleased to get 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, which 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. 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. 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 magic, 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.