Cultivating Place

IN the spirit of May, this week we’re headed out in the garden, or down the block, or up the trail for some planty wonder and magic in the company of Bridget Beth Collins – the creative force, glittering vision, and imagination behind the botanical art of Flora Forager. Bridget is a gardener, a mother, and an artist who often brings all three of her life roles together in her work. She founded the Instagram feed and custom artistry known as Flora Forager in the 2000-teens and has since been the author of three books – The Art of Flora Forager, the Flora Forager ABCs, and most recently the Flower Fairy Journals. Bridget joins us this week from her home and garden in Seattle, Washington to share more about the importance of looking at the world through glittering (flowery) eyes. Listen in! 170617-123_480x480.jpg 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.

Any gardener and their muscles, bones, joints, and ligaments know that gardening is a full-contact sport (or religion), this week we’re joined by Madeline de Vries Hooper and Jeff Hughes, the founders of GardenFit, a new PBS series focusing on a holistic approach to fitness and taking care of your body while you take care of your garden, because as Madeline and Jeff believe: your body is your best garden tool. 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.

David Rawle is the founder and force (with contribution and support from his wife, Carol Perkins, and a wide variety of community members in Charleston, SC), behind Theodora Park, a public park in Charleston - designed and cared for (with financial and care planning for the long haul) in a way that is reminiscent of the very best of private gardens: it is open, it is both lively and tranquil, it is filled with beautiful seasonal (native and non-native) plants, it offers places to sit, to play, to splash as well as to gather; it offers artful views representative of and inviting for the entire community - residents and visitors alike - human and more-than-human alike. Theodora Park was opened in 2015 and is dedicated to the memory of David’s mother - Theodora. Happy Mother’s Day to all mothering souls and spaces - may all of our gardens, public and private, be welcoming, nurturing – shall we say mothering - places for all. 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.

In preparation for May and Mother’s Day here in the US, we’re in conversation with Lorene Edwards Forkner, a gardener, a writer, a cook, a mother, a daughter, the garden columnist for the Seattle Times, and known as gardener cook on-line. Lorene joins CP this week to share more about her artistic garden-based daily practice for the last four years, which has resulted in the new book: Color in and Out of the Garden, Watercolor Practices for Painters, Gardeners, and Nature Lovers, out now from Abrams Press. The practice and the book are invitations to lean into her own mission statement in life, seen primarily through the lens of the garden: "look closely, with great heart”. A good blessing for all mothering souls in the world. 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.

In honor of Earth Day on April 22nd, this week, Cultivating Place is in conversation about a person who committed their career to the idea, design, and championing of Parks for the Nature of Everyone. April 26th is the 200th birthday of Frederick Law Olmsted – in celebration and recognition, the National Association for Olmsted Parks is joining with celebration partner locations around the US to host Olmsted200 events, reminding us of the long and valuable legacy of Olmsted – which remains highly relevant for us today. To hear more about Frederick Law Olmsted and his influence on our green spaces to this day, Cultivating Place is joined by Dede Petri, Executive Director of the National Association for Olmsted Parks and John Rowden Senior Director of Bird-Friendly Communities with the Audubon Society. 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.

Nitasha Manchanda is a genetic scientist, a mother, a wife, a gardener and the creator and host of a podcast series entitled The Indian Edit – exploring the inspiring lives of women of the Indian diaspora – living everywhere from Boston, where Nitasha now makes her home, to Germany, Canada, and even returned to India. Subtitled conversations with innovators in design, culture, and entrepreneurship, The Indian Edit launched in May of 2018. While the podcast is not plant-focused, as a gardener herself - from a family of scientists (including a beloved botanist aunt) and gardeners - Nitasha‘s perspective as host of The Indian Edit is a beautiful illustration of how we all - from spice company founders to sari designers, to photographers - take the vocabulary of our landscapes and plants of origin into the rest of our lives with us, no matter where we go. For Nitasha, that is building (and growing) a creative bridge back to India. 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.

Rose Ramirez is a California native plant gardener, basketweaver, photographer, and educator of Chumash descent; Deborah Small is an artist, photographer, and professor at the School of the Arts at California State University, San Marcos.  In preparation for California Native Plant Week 2022 (April 16 - 23), celebrating the botanical biodiversity of the California Floristic Region, Rose and Deborah join Cultivating Place to share more about their new educational and advocacy initiative, Saging the World, on behalf of California’s iconic native white sage, Saliva apiana, sacred to the Indigenous cultures of what is now Southern California and Baja California, Mexico. As part of Saging the World, Rose and Deborah, along with David Bryant of the California Native Plant Society, have coproduced a documentary of the same name, which premieres in LA county on Earth Day, and to which all are invited (tickets required): Saging the World Premiere, Earth Day, Friday, April 22 7 pm - 9 pm, Warner Grande Theatre, 78 W 6th St, San Pedro, CA 90731  The film, created to foster awareness and inspire action for white sage, spotlights the ecological and cultural issues intertwined with white sage, centering the voices of Native advocates who have long protected and cherished this plant. “Saging” has become common in movies, TV shows, social media, and cleansing rituals –people burning sage bundles in the hope of purifying space and clearing bad energy. Instead of healing, the appropriated use of saging in popular culture is having a harmful effect. Indigenous communities have tended a relationship with white sage for thousands of generations. White sage (Salvia apiana) only occurs in southern California and northern Baja California, Mexico. Today, poachers are stealing metric tons of this plant from the wild to supply international demand. The screening will include a panel discussion with Native advocates from the film, as well as a white sage plant giveaway. This Earth Day, go from smudging to seeding as we come together to see plants not just as “resources,” but as “relationships.” The event is sponsored by the Palos Verdes Peninsula Land Conservancy. 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.

John Forti is a garden historian, historic garden horticulturist, and slow food advocate. He has put his years of experience and knowledge into The Heirloom Gardener, Traditional Plants, and Skills for the Modern World – inviting us to lean into the breadth and depth of human millennia-long relationship with plant life.   John joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about his work and this compilation, which introduces and/or reminds readers of age-old skills for a more directly lived life - from the distillation of floral essences to the uses of kelp to the relationship between the Algonquin culture’s word for the fruit that in English is known as strawberry, wuttahimneash (or heart berry), being related to the heart health associated with the fruit.  Most importantly, however, The Heirloom Gardener, amplified by Mary Azarian’s brilliant woodcut images, encourages us to upset the apple cart of mass production and commodification and look back to the many streams of land-based wisdom still available to us in order to find a better way forward. 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.

This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by medical ethnobotanist and Emory professor, Dr. Cassandra Quave who shares with us the very personal story of her quest to develop new ways to fight illness and disease through the healing powers of plants. In today’s world of synthetic pharmaceuticals, Dr. Quave belives our connection to the natural and plant world is in fact our greatest opportunity to discover new life-saving medicines needed in the medical challenges of our time – including pandemics and rising anti-biotic resistance. 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.

Emily Murphy is an ecological gardener, an educator, and an author whose two books focus on gardens of personal and communal purpose. Her 2018 book Grow What You Love, is joined this year by Grow Now: How We Can Save our Health, Communities and Planet One Garden at a Time. With the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reporting on the impacts, adaptations, and vulnerabilities and dangerous disruption of climate change on our natural systems - disruption affecting billions of people and millions of species - there is an ever greater urgency to act on all levels. Emily Murphy joins us this week to highlight the importance of our gardens as really immediate and direct points of climate activism - contributing to saving our planet one garden at a time. 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.