CAITLIN ATKINSON is a photographer of places, spaces, and all things botanical. She has been my partner this past 2 + years in creating our new book Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast, publishing on May 11 of 2021. Conceived by Caitlin, the book is really an expression of our shared love for the places and plants and plantspeople of the West crafting garden spaces of soul, and this week on Cultivating Place, Caitlin joins me in conversation to discuss more deeply this passion project of ours. Listen in - the views are stunning (and soulful). 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.

Claire Ratinon is a gardener, a writer, and a passionate advocate for the growing a food no matter where you live or how small a space you might live it. She herself first fell in love with growing her own food while living in a one-room flat. Born in Mauritius and raised in England, her horticultural work is deeply interested in how the hunger and heartache of our times, and of re-finding or rooting our own senses of identity starting in the vegetable garden. 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.

It’s spring in the northern hemisphere (even though snow is still making visitations to parts of North American right now), and gardeners across the hemisphere are itching to get started with their summer vegetable gardens. That age-old and annual question of “when warm summer crops can safely be planted outside" is already high on peoples' lists of garden excitements and anxieties. Cultivating Place is joined this week by the leader of an event and author of a book both known as TOMATOMANIA. Scott Daigre is the owner of PowerPlant Garden Design in Ojai California, and he is a dedicated home gardener and self-proclaimed tomatomaniac. It's earth week and among the garden’s earthiest pleasures are these succulent summer fruits. Scott joins us from his home and trial garden in Ojaiwhere he is deep into the planning for the warm season vegetable garden and all her delights. 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.

April 17 through 24th 2021 is California Native Week, designated by the California State Legislature in 2010 as an annual celebration of the fantastic diversity of plants on whom this large expanse of unique and uniquely beautiful land and history rests in so many ways. The California Floristic Province is one of the Biodiversity Hot Spots on Earth and as the most populous state in the US, California also has an incredible diversity of humans making their lives here as well. In honor of these plants and their communities, Cultivating Place speaks this week with members of the California Native Plant Society community to chat about what CNPS is, and what it is striving to grow into more fully. It is a small, candid look into how the environmental conservation world generally is meeting this moment in time through the lens of one organization. In looking back over the course of this last year, and many years and decades prior, there is renewed clarity and urgency around the environmental world generally having quite a bit of acknowledging and resetting to do for itself and for the greater benefit of the human and greater than the human world around us. It is in that spirit that I am joined today by CNPS staff member Liv O’Keefe, Senior Director of Public Affairs; by Cris Sarabia, Conservation Director of the Palos Verdes Peninsula land Conservancy and the chair of the board of CNPS, a volunteer position; and finally, by John L. Sanders, Founder, and Director of the Delphinus School of Natural History, who is a CNPS community member and volunteer consultant for the society. 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.

Amyrose Foll is a mother, a farmer, and a big thinker. As the executive director and founder of the multifaceted Virginia Free Farm at Spotted Pig Holler in Kents Store Virginia – she is looking to reimagine the foodshed of her world – and ours. As Spring takes hold and the warm growing season greens our northern Hemisphere gardens and farms, Amyrose sees a greater foodshed model within reach. Join Cultivating Place in conversation with Amyrose this week! 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.

Just in time for spring and that itch we gardeners - new and long time - have to get the summer vegetables into the ground, Cultivating Place revisit a favorite conversation with grow-your-own revolutionary, Brie Arthur – author of the "Foodscape Revolution" and "Gardening with Grains". Her enthusiasm will get your season growing – 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.

Having just moved across the seasonal threshold of the Vernal Equinox here in the Northern Hemisphere, this week we continue our focus on land and land and ecology-based garden projects – this time in conversation with horticulturist and plantswoman Laura Ekasetya. I spoke with Laura late last season checking in with her on her work as Director and Head Horticulturist at the famed Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park -landscape architecture by Gustafson, Guthrie & Nichol and planting plans by Piet Oudolf. Laura’s decade at the Lurie Garden ended in January of 2021. Listen in this week! 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.

Here we are – mid-way into Women’s History Month, one year after the publication of The Earth in Her Hands. In honor of these two thresholds, this week on CP we offer out a conversation with one of the extraordinary women working in the world of plants featured in the book: Edwina Von Gal - a landscape designer based on New York’s Long Island. Having designed landscapes for the rich and famous in the New York area it was midway through her career that Edwina had an epiphany about the potential impact for the better or worse of how gardens are cared for in our world. In order to help tilt the balance back toward gardens large and small being positive contributors to the life, health, habitat and biodiversity of our world – she founded The Perfect Earth Project – promoting toxin free lawns and landscapes for the people, pets, and the planet. In the last few years, Edwina has expanded her mission with advocacy known as 2/3rd for the birds – in collaboration with the research of Dr. Doug Tallamy – urging all residential and campus landscapes to dedicate 2/3rd of their plantings to be native plants for habitat value and to commit to going toxin free. 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.

As the vernal equinox is imminent for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, a conversation on balance and our importance as humans in the balance of natural systems. Lorena Gorbet is a Mountain Maidu elder in Northeastern California, a mother, a basket weaver, a land restoration activist, and an educator. She joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about the balanced systems thinking of the traditional ecological knowledge of her culture. Listen in! The Maidu Summit Consortium’s mission is "to preserve, protect, and promote the Mountain Maidu Homeland with a united voice. The Maidu Summit Consortium envisions re-acquired ancestral lands as a vast and unique park system dedicated to the purposes of education, healing, protection, and ecosystem management based upon the Maidu cultural and philosophic perspectives, as expressed through traditional ecology.” 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.

It’s the first week of March and true spring let alone summer is still a ways off for many of us. This week on Cultivating Place, we lean into the last aspects of the winter season and head North - to learn more about the enthusiastic and intrepid deep winter and season extending gardening of the inimitable Niki Jabbour. Her abundant year-round gardening on the 45th parallel will inspire anyone. 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.