Cultivating Place

This week on Cultivating Place we get a booster shot of energy and inspiration as we enter the dog days of summer when we’re joined by Colah B. Tawkin – the voice and vibrant life force and distinctive VOICE of the Black in the Garden podcast - where Black Culture Meets Horticulture. You will not want to miss her - 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.

Jasna Guy is an artist whose visionary and liminal work is based in close observation of the plants and pollinators – specifically bees – of her garden and natural environments. Her ethereal representations bring heightened understanding and awareness to the miraculous life processes - like bee and flower pollination and pollinator co-evolution and mutual interdependence - going on around us everyday everywhere. 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.

In the throes of high summer, Cultivating Place continues to explore the fruits of the imaginative nature of the garden. We begin a two-part series on visual artists deriving their inspiration from the garden and its diverse life, and going from there. Jennifer is joined this week by the Australian three-dimensional paper artist Colleen Southwell whose finely drawn, detailed, and designed compositions pull from the natural and the fantastical. Part herbarium or entomological specimen displays, part pure imagination, whimsy and fine, fine handwork. 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.

A good read often plumbs the depths of imagination, for Matthew Hall - gardener & researcher at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand – it’s the Imagination of Plants he’s interested in, especially how and why plants are or are not positioned as central characters in the most important cultural narratives and mythologies of societies across time and place. Matthew joins Cultivating Place this week to explore Botanical Mythology. 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.

This week on Cultivating Place we take a summer amble with British-based Californian Kathryn Aalto – a historian, designer, and writer whose most recent book Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks offers all of us some much needed outdoor adventure with some admirable women of words. 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.

In honor of the Fourth of July, Cultivating Place is joined this week by the acclaimed writer and gardener Jamaica Kincaid, whose work "My Garden (Book)" published in the late 1990s, explores how the length and depth of human history - beautiful and terrible - is a narrative fully legible in our gardens and horticulture of today. As a citizen gardener, she sees potential redemption for humanity in kindness and in striving to honor one another the best we can - in our places, with our plants. 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.

Amy Goldman is a gardener, author-artist, and longtime advocate for seed saving, plant breeding, and heirloom fruits and vegetables. Her mission has for many years been to celebrate and catalog the magnificent diversity of standard, open-pollinated, heirloom varieties, and their conservation. Her books include The Compleat Squash – A Passionate Growers Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes, and Gourds, and most recently The Melon, which will entice and educate, whether you are a passionate gardener, a locavore, or simply delight in the inherent beauty and evanescence of the fruits of the vine. Illustrated by Victor Schrager, and many years in the making, The Melon is a comprehensive and definitive work that includes portraits in words and photographs of 125 extraordinary varieties, expert advice on cultivation and seed saving, and delicious melon recipes. Amy Goldman’s mission is to celebrate, catalog, and conserve standard, open-pollinated fruit, and vegetable varieties. As we come back she shares more on how her newest book The Melon encourages everyone to grow, enjoy, save seed from and share forward the great diversity of melons and watermelons, plants whose ancient wild progenitors hail from Africa, India, and Persian regions and whose histories are intertwined with the people of these places and their diasporas across time and space. 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 cultivatingplace.com.

Nadia Ruffin is an entomologist, gardener, and educator. She is the founder of Agricademy Inc and Urban Farm Sista based in Cincinnati, Ohio. A lover of bugs and all insects and life forms since she was very young, Nadia loves sharing this admiration and curiosity, with youth especially. In 2018 the Cincinnati City Council honored Nadia’s farming and agriculture initiatives, the primary focus of which is to share her knowledge and passion for the biological world and all that it offers to us in the way of endless and healthy wonder, food, beauty, and learning. It's National Pollinator Week and this week we revisit our 2019 conversation with Nadia to explore this wonder and this work. As a bonus - we talk about the importance of meeting and managing our own irrational fears. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

June is traditionally a month in which many, many weddings are celebrated with family, food, and FLOWERS. With many of these weddings on hold this year due to Covid-19, we catch up with floral creative Philippa Craddock to talk about the business of floristry, the sustainability of it on several levels, and to reminisce about the lovely florals - from epic arches to the most romantic of bouquets which Philippa designed for the Lovely Meghan Markle and her Prince Harry, now the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. The world was watching this wedding for a variety of reasons, I was watching for the flowers and they did not disappoint. 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.

Ross Gay is a gardener - he is also an award-winning poet and a professor. A founding board member of the Bloomington Community Orchard, a food justice and joy project, Ross joins Cultivating Place this day of Thanksgiving to share more about his garden life journey, the structure of care it represents, and the unabashed gratitude and delight it brings him daily. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.