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Cultivating Place

Latest episodes

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Apr 6, 2023 • 1h 5min

Prairie Up! With Plantsperson Benjamin Vogt

I know the adage goes that April showers bring May flowers, but based on images from across the Northern Hemisphere – from snowdrops in Vermont, Cherry Blossoms in DC, wildflowers in California, and daffodils peeking out in parts of Colorado between snow storms – April has plenty of her own bloom and the growing season is underway. To inspire your planting and designs for the season ahead, this week we’re back in conversation with Benjamin Vogt of Monarch Gardens, a fierce advocate on behalf of our gardens being critically important links in our world’s broken and fragmented ecological chains. You may remember my 2018 conversation with Benjamin about his first book – A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future?  Well that ethical manifesto now has an instruction manual in Benjamin’s second book - Prairie Up: An Introduction to Natural Garden Design – it might be just the reference you need to get your growing season off to a great start. Join us this week for more with Benjamin Vogt! All images courtesy of Benjamin Vogt, Monarch Gardens, LLC., all rights reserved. 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, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Mar 30, 2023 • 1h 1min

Why Women Grow, with Alice Vincent (aka Noughticulture)

Alice Vincent is a multi-platform storyteller based in London, and examining with gusto and curiosity the intricacies of words and language, of what it is to be human, to be a woman, and to be always in service to the wonders – large and small, grief-laden and joy-spangled - of everyday life. The author of several previous books, including her nature memoir - Rootbound, Rewilding a Life, Alice goes by the name Noughticulture online. For our final episode in this year's five-part series of Cultivating Place in honor of Women’s History Month, I caught up with Alice just a few short weeks ago to talk in-depth about her newest work: Why Women Grow, Stories of Soil, Sisterhood, and Survival. It is a moving, indeed verdant, tapestry of Alice’s own story as a woman "going to ground" to grow herself, intertwined with that stories of other women gardening across Great Britain and beyond and what that has meant to their own lives and to our collective understanding of both gardens and women. Since we spoke, Alice has added one more title to her life list: mother. 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, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Mar 23, 2023 • 59min

Tyra Shenaurlt, the W. W. Seymour Botanical Conservatory in Wright Park, Tacoma, WA

For this penultimate episode of Women’s History month, Cultivating Place heads to Tacoma, Washington, to chat with Tyra Shenaurlt, horticulture resource supervisor at Metro Parks Tacoma, overseeing, among other things, a hundred fifteen-year-old glass house known as the W.W. Seymour Botanical Conservatory in Tacoma’s wright park. From March 2021 to May of 2022, the historic structure underwent a massive restoration. Now almost one year out from re-opening, Tyra is with us to share more about her own story as a black woman in horticulture and the story of the historic conservatory where she has made the most of her career and leadership. Join us! 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, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Mar 16, 2023 • 57min

The Seed Keeper(s), with Diane Wilson BEST OF

This week we revisit a best-of Cultivating Place conversation focusing on seeding our imaginations—metaphorically and literally, with Diane Wilson writer, gardener, emeritus executive director of Dream of Wild Health and, more recently, emeritus executive director of The Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance. Diane has long interwoven her gardening and her advocacy work with her writing, and her first novel, The Seed Keeper, was published by Milkweed press in 2021. Join us for more about Diane’s journey of discovering, sharing, and celebrating seeds and Indigenous cultural recovery through the knowledge and history that seeds hold and the future they make possible. 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, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Mar 9, 2023 • 1h 2min

Bringing Back the Natives Tour, Kathy Kramer

In a continuation of Women’s History Month and our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are, and what they are growing in this world, especially as it relates to improving the impact of our gardening lives on the larger planet, I am so pleased to be in conversation this week with Kathy Kramer. Kathy is a long-time advocate for native plant and ecological gardening based on the natives of your area, and she has been determined for many, many years to demonstrate just how beautiful that concept of gardening can be. She is the founder of The Bringing back the Natives Garden Tour, based in the Bay Area of Northern California, but which after 19 years in operation, has country-wide acclaim. The tour and the gardening-ethos it cultivates and celebrates can be replicated anywhere we as humans garden. As Spring draws closer - 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, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Mar 2, 2023 • 1h 17min

Loving the Surface of the Earth: Orwell's Roses, with Rebecca Solnit

In this first week of March, we kick off Women’s History Month in conversation with one of the great critical thinkers and writers of our time, Rebecca Solnit. Writer, historian, feminist, and activist, Rebecca’s long bibliography epitomizes her wide-ranging humanitarian interests—from politics to cultural geography to environmentalism and an abiding love of the earth herself. In her hands, all of these topics are revelations on our culture’s many fault lines and the human actions and responses—from walking, to reading, to traveling or gardening with open minds, eyes, and hearts—that might bridge these fault lines. Rebecca’s many books include Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Far Away Nearby, Men Explain Things to Me, and Orwell’s Roses, “a lush exploration of politics, roses, and pleasure, and a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded [and sometimes refueled] by his passion for the natural world.” While many of Rebecca’s titles fall firmly under the purview of the concerns of Cultivating Place, it was her 2021 title, Orwell’s Roses, the was the catalyst for my inviting her to be a guest on the program – that and a generous nudge from Maria Popova. 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, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Feb 23, 2023 • 1h 2min

Winter Keepers, Cookers, and Ciders: James Rich, orchardist and chef

This last week of February, we return to our love of apples – and the warm comfort of eating and cooking with homegrown ones, a particular joy in late February when spring and summer seem close but also still too far away. We’re in conversation with the UK’s James Rich, orchardist, chef, and author of Apple: Recipes from the Orchard and his latest Orchard: Sweet and Savoury Recipes from the Countryside, out now from Hardie Grant Books. I caught up with James in late November, and I knew this would be a warming conversation for this end-of-February time of year. 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, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Feb 16, 2023 • 1h 8min

The Uplifting Ujaama with Bonnetta Adeeb and Nathan Kleinman

Now more than halfway from the winter solstice to the spring equinox, many of us have seeds of spring and summer foods on our minds (and hearts). So, this week we continue our celebration of Black History Month, and love stories, centered on the cooperative, and communal concept of Ujaama, in conversation with Bonnetta Adeeb of Ujaama Seeds, and the Ujaama Cooperative Farming Alliance, and Nathan Kleinman of the Experimental Farm network, a member and collaborator in the Ujaam alliance and all that it is growing – which is both uplifting and delicious. Join us! 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, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Feb 9, 2023 • 1h 13min

The Love Stories of Abra Lee, Atlanta, GA

Love is already a theme in the work of Cultivating Place, to be sure, but with last week’s loving work around the restoration of historic apple orchards in southwestern Colorado, and this week’s episode, which I think of as the Love Letters of Abra Lee, love letters, love stories, and loving gardeners is an explicit theme here this month!  In celebration of Black History Month in progress and Valentine’s Day coming up – this week we’re rejoined in conversation by Abra Lee, gardener, garden scholar under the name of Conquer the Soil, horticulturist, and graduate of the Longwood Gardens Fellows program, a 13-month leadership in public horticulture fellowship. In addition to co-creating a public garden exhibition called Music x Flowers, Abra has recently accepted a position as Director of Horticulture at the Oakland Cemetery, a historic Victorian garden cemetery in downtown Atlanta. This week’s conversation is a valentine to gardeners and garden lovers everywhere. 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, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Feb 2, 2023 • 1h 5min

For the Love of Apples: The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project

As February is upon us we turn from a love letter to biodiversity writ large to a labor of love in conserving the biodiversity of one iconic fruit in large part born of human labor across the ages and the globe – apples. We’re in conversation with Jude Schuenemeyer, who with his wife Addie, has spent decades discovering, researching, documenting, protecting, restoring, and propagating the rich diversity of heritage apple varieties in Colorado’s southwestern-most Montezuma county.  The diversity of apple genetics in this region traces back 150 years or more, and in this traditional winter season of apple tree pruning, and apple scion wood selection, and the first of grafting season, Jude shares with us more about how The Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project ( affectionately referred to as MORP) is preserving historic trees and orchards and simultaneously cultivating food, economic, and environmental vigor in their region, which makes a wonderful model for all of our regions. 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, iTunes, Google Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

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