
Cultivating Place
Gardens are more than collections of plants. Gardens and Gardeners are intersectional spaces and agents for positive change in our world. Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden is a weekly public radio program & podcast exploring what we mean when we garden. Through thoughtful conversations with growers, gardeners, naturalists, scientists, artists and thinkers, Cultivating Place illustrates the many ways in which gardens are integral to our natural and cultural literacy. These conversations celebrate how these interconnections support the places we cultivate, how they nourish our bodies, and feed our spirits. Take a listen.
Latest episodes

Dec 24, 2020 • 55min
GOOD MEDICINE, With Sayaka Lean Of The Herb Pharm
In this first week of winter in the Northern Hemisphere, Cultivating Place speaks this week with medicinal and habitat gardener Sayaka Lean of the Herb Pharm in Southern Oregon.
Informed by her own Japanese cultural gardening traditions, Sayaka is the lead gardener of the Herb Pharm’s public medicinal plant display garden (the Botanical Education Garden), where she cultivates more than 500 native and non-native medicinal plants from around the world.
Sayaka engages the garden as well in community collaborations with United Plant Savers, whose work is to protect and raise awareness about the medicinal plants of North America, and as a Flagship Farm for the Oregon Bee Project/Atlas out of Oregon State University. It is good medicine for the season. 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.

Dec 17, 2020 • 59min
IMAGINE: A Conversation With Amber Tamm
In honor of the Solstice on December 21st, Cultivating Place speaks this week with Brooklyn-born farmer/horticulturist/floral designer, activist, and daughter, Amber Tamm. Amber’s journey and work invite us to Imagine so much more in our gardened world. 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.

Dec 10, 2020 • 59min
Something Wild & Composed for Winter, with Hort & Pott
This week on Cultivating Place we continue our winter greening cheer in conversation with Todd Carr and Carter Harrington of Hort and Pott, a botanical studio in Upstate NY dedicated to embracing the seasons, celebrating the natural world through handcrafted botanical works, and reimagining the relationships between people and the natural world through botanically driven design.
You won’t want to miss this cozy winter fireside chat encouraging us all to awaken the sublime as we welcome winter. Listen in next 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.

Dec 3, 2020 • 56min
A Handful of Gratitude & Fortitude, Teresa Sabankaya "The Posy Book"
This week Cultivating Place kicks off December with a flourish in conversation with Teresa Sabankaya of the Santa Cruz-based Bonny Doon Garden Company and author of "The Posy Book – garden-inspired bouquets that tell a story" just in time for seasonal winter festivities and their greening and gifting. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Nov 26, 2020 • 1h
Seed Lessons on Transformation, Vivien Sansour & The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library
Join us this week on Cultivating Place for our final episode in the Seed Change series. We are in conversation with Vivien Sansour, heart and head behind The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library aiming to revive and share forward Palestinian seed heritage and culture of care and gratitude.
Vivien was born in Palestine and grew up in Bethlehem and then North Carolina.
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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Nov 19, 2020 • 55min
SEEDBANKING A FLORISTIC PROVINCE II: Cheryl Birker, California Botanic Garden
This week on Cultivating Place, the third in our 4 part Seed Change series with Cheryl Birker, Seed Conservation Program Manager at California Botanic Garden and with whom we go even deeper into what it means to seed bank a biodiversity hotspot in our world. It’s all about the beauty in the tiniest of details. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Nov 13, 2020 • 57min
Seed Banking A Floristic Province, Naomi Fraga Of California Botanic Garden
This week on Cultivating Place, we continue our Seed Change series with Naomi Fraga, research assistant professor of Botany at Claremont Graduate University and Director of Conservation Programs at the California Botanic Garden dedicated to conserving the rich biodiversity of the native plants of California through field research, seed banking, and education programs. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Nov 5, 2020 • 57min
SEED CHANGE: Seeds And Their People, Owen Smith Taylor And Chris Bolden-Newsome
This week on Cultivating Place we continue our Seed Change series - a nod to faith and a vote for the next growing season. We’re joined this week by Chris Bolden-Newsome and Owen Smith Taylor - of Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram's Garden and True Love Seed respectively. Farmers and culture keepers, the two protect and steward seed and seed stories - encouraging others to steward their own stories and their own seeds as well. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Oct 29, 2020 • 54min
Best Of: Hope Springs - Growing Flowers From Seed, Clare Foster
In this season of colliding urgencies and not infrequent dismay - the garden offers so many lessons. Among the largest of these, brought to you in the smallest of things, is the hope proffered by seeds. And seed keepers.
To kick off a new series on seed keepers of the world, this week we revisit our conversation with the UK’s Clare Foster, Garden Editor of House & Garden, UK. A gardener, author, and seed-sower herself, Clare’s newest book (with co-author, with Sabina Rüber) is "The Flower Garden: How to Grow Flowers From Seed” (Laurence King, 2019). It’s fun, colorful, and easy - a vote for hope and the future. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Oct 22, 2020 • 1h 3min
Beauty & Balance: Southwest High Desert Gardens with Judith Phillips Albuquerque, NM
This week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by award winning landscape designer Judith Phillips of Albuquerque NM. Her Design Oasis, characterized by creative thinking, designing gardens, and growing plants born of her wider place in the high desert has been shifting ideas of beauty and meaning for other gardeners of the American Southwest since the 1980s. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.