Cultivating Place

This week is a timely and rich with agency conversation on gardens by and for refugee populations. Areti Athanasopoulos is a Denver, Colorado-based landscape architect. After many seasons studying and working around the world, and in collaboration with the International Rescue Committee’s New Roots program, and while in Denver with Denver Urban Gardens, she has recently founded her own non-profit entity focused on gardens for and by refugee populations: ReGeneration Now, continuing her focus on creating gardens for and by refugee populations. 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.

Lisa Waud is a collaborative, large-scale floral and installation artist who likes to invite people in to enjoy flowers, and from there into a conversation about the world, she was the artist behind the 2015 Flower House Detroit – a floral phenomenon in downtown Detroit. Erin Preston-Johnson Bevel is an unschooling mom, a full-time lecturer at Howard University, and a “recovering lawyer” putting her legal experience to work advocating within her Detroit community. She serves on the board of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which came together with two other longstanding food advocacy groups - Keep Growing Detroit and Oakland Avenue Urban Farm - to create the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund. The DBFLF was co-founded by Erin, Jerry Hebron, Tepfirah Russian, and Dr. Shakara Tyler; the Fund officially launched on Juneteenth 2020. Both Lisa and Erin are advocates and voices for community, integrity, and a healthy regrowing and interweaving of community and land, of growing thoughtfully and intergenerationally into our collective futures.  This is the story of that time when Flower House Detroit decided its next chapter was in the embrace of the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund, where it would grow up into a Children’s Sensory Garden for the community. Having just completed Black History Month and just entered Women’s History Month, this seemed like the perfect - floral and restoration - tale to share forward. 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.

Deep into the Winter season, with February’s full moon behind us, this week Cultivating Place is in conversation with British-based garden photographer Andrew Montgomery, about his new book Winter Gardens. Photographed by Andrew, written by Clare Foster of House & Garden UK and published by Andrew’s new imprint, Montgomery Press, Winter Gardens, in evocative images and crafted words, celebrates the very specific, spare, sometimes hard, nuanced and moody, beauty of cold-climate gardens in this season. 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.

Reports from around the globe in the last 25 years about the alarming loss of biodiversity on our planet sit heavily with every gardener I know. With that in mind and with the hope and the knowledge of the agency we as Gardeners hold in this world, I’m so pleased to be in conversation this week with two men who’ve been working and studying this very aspect of our world, in their place. In July of 2021, they along with their organizations published a report entitled “Conserving Plant Diversity in New England”. This report was conceived by author William Brumback, Director of Conservation Emeritus of the Native Plant Trust. The report is co-authored by Brumback and my two guests this week, The Nature Conservancy’s Director of Conservation Science for the Eastern United States, Mark Anderson, and Michael Pientadosi, current Director of Conservation for the Native Plant Trust. 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 cultivatingplace.com.

Plantlife International is a British conservation charity working nationally and internationally to save threatened wild flowers, plants, and fungi.  With more than 30 years in this work, Plantlife’s members and team of dedicated conservation experts work with landowners, businesses, conservation organizations, community groups and governments, pushing boundaries to save our rarest flora and ensure familiar flowers and plants continue to thrive.  From roadside verge rewilding, to no-mow May, to RuneScape and meadow protection, to conservation campaigning and policy work, Plantlife’s CEO Ian Dunn is with us this week to share more about their goals and strategies – including the important work being done by home gardeners to integrate these goals into the fabric of our everyday lives and spaces. 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.

Coming up on Cultivating Place this week, we’re in conversation with a new generation seed farmer, Petra Page-Mann. Petra is a co-founder with her husband Matthew Goldfarb of Fruition Seeds, a young seed company with a big calling. Fruition is a team of 12 humans "cultivating over 300 varieties of certified organic vegetables, herbs & flowers to surround us all with beauty & abundance in short seasons. In the heart of the Finger Lakes of western New York, unceded Haudenosaunee/Seneca lands, Fruition shares the seeds as well as the tools, inspiration & insight for growing ourselves as well as our gardens, especially those in short growing seasons. They are currently transitioning to being an employee-owned company, and they grow about 60% of their own seed, sourcing the rest primarily from other regional organic seed growers. Fruition is cultivating and learning from an ecosystem-like web of people and places growing and sharing relational seed and seed knowledge at human scale as a direct response to the industrial scale commodification of seed as a way of imagining a new (old) way forward. 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.

Judith Larner Lowry is the plantswoman behind Larner Seeds – Seeds for the California Landscape – Restoring California One Garden At A Time, founded in 1977 and still growing strong, based in Bolinas, CA.  Judith is the author of "Gardening with a Wild Heart, Restoring California’s Native Landscapes at Home," published by the University of California Press in 1999, as well as the author of "The Landscaping Ideas of Jays, A Natural History of the Backyard Restoration Garden," published by The UC Press in 2007.  Combined, Judith's seed work, writing, and advocacy have laid and continue to lay critical groundwork for the ecological gardening precepts we are hearing more and more about today, including from the likes of Dr. Doug Tallamy, whose best-selling book “Bringing Nature Home” urging far more planting of native plants in our home gardens to help offset catastrophic biodiversity loss, was also published in 2007. If there is such a thing as an elder statesman, Judith is such an elder seedswoman, and she joins us this week on Cultivating Place to share more about her growing work journey.  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.

On Cultivating Place this week, as we revisit a Best Of conversation with Vivien Sansour, the heart and head behind The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library aiming to revive and share forward Palestinian seed heritage and a culture of care and gratitude. Vivien was born in Palestine and spent her early childhood in Bethlehem before she and her family immigrated to North Carolina when she was ten. She writes: “The seed, the seed, the seed….for what is it but a continuation of ourselves? Aren’t we all seeds?" – Vivien Sansour 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 seed catalogues continue to arrive in our mailboxes and in-boxes daily, filling our notebooks and dreams, we take a behind the scenes look at an independent seed source well-known to gardeners and market growers throughout North America: Johnny’s Selected Seeds. We are in conversation with current CEO Dave Melhorn and Lauren Giroux, Director of Product Selection and Trialing Research. Johnny’s stewards one of the largest in-ground seed-trialing programs in the United States. For over 48 years Johnny's Selected Seeds has dedicated to "helping families and friends to feed one another.” Now 100% employee-owned, Johnny’s offers organic seed, F1 hybrid, open-pollinated, and heirloom seed varieties. "Johnny's does not knowingly sell genetically modified seeds"; nor do they "breed new varieties using genetic engineering." Their breeders use "traditional, painstaking methods of natural crossing to create hybrid seeds that are healthy and safe.” They are proud to be "one of the nine original signers of the Safe Seed Pledge,” in 1999, an initiative of the Council for Responsible Genetics. 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.

To welcome the new year, Cultivating Place stays with the theme of seeds – this time focusing on seeding our imaginations in conversation 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.