Cultivating Place

There is a flower farming revolution sweeping across our country and I for one am all for it. A few months back, Cultivating Place was joined by Debra Prinzing, the founder of the aptly named “slow flowers” and "American Grown Flower" movement in the floral industry. This week we’re joined by Erin Benzakien – the name and face behind the beautiful and impassioned Floret Flower Farms, based in the Skagit Valley of Washington State. Floret is at the heart of encouraging and educating would be flower farmers on the whens, whys and hows of getting started and making a go of this new-again small farm-based industry, which is rooting itself across the country and even around the globe. Erin’s new book "The Cut Flower Garden," aimed at new and beginning flower farmers, is out this month - March - from Chronicle Books.

As gardeners or naturalists, we often share an urge to display our love – flowers or fruits of the season arranged in bottles and vases, in bowls and on platters. The deep beauty of the harvest and the season have a strong call. As gardeners who harvest food and flowers, as nature lovers who gently forage fallen moss, lichen, stones, feathers, or cooks who prepare our fruits, vegetables and foraged edibles we all experience that moment – perhaps daily of saying: what will I put that in? What vase, large or small, what dinner plate, what cake plate, what bowl? Thirty years ago, Frances Palmer answered this question in its various forms with this answer: I will set my table with items I have hand formed from an idea in my imagination, from the energy of my hands from the earth beneath my feet. Almost ever since, her hand thrown and built terra cotta, porcelain and earthenware creations have been sought after by gardeners, cooks, floral and tablescape artists. This week I am joined by Frances Palmer to hear more about the symbiotic relationship between her garden and her art. She joined us via Skype from her studio in Weston, CT.

Late winter early spring might be kind of quiet in the garden in terms of flowers, but it is very busy in terms of plant care – especially in the care of keeping of our roses. Roses are a favorite of many gardeners, a staple of many gardens, they have been cultivated, celebrated, bred and judged for more than 5,000 years around the world. Roses can and are grown just about anywhere in the world. Their history and mythology runs deeply through the roots of cultures around the world. Roses are among the pluralists of the world. They can be ancient or modern, they can be brassy and bright or elegant and understated. They can be edible, native, tenaciously perennial, fragrant, large, small, climbing, cuttable and endlessly arrangeable. The roses have it all. And late winter, early spring is an active time for caring for your roses: everything from choosing and planting bare root selections to pruning and feeding your established roses. This week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by Jolene Adams, a recent past president of the American Rose Society, an active rosarian and dedicated home gardener with more than 150 roses in her Hayward, CA home cottage garden.

Have you ever noticed how every garden has a story? No matter how many gardeners might have worked that spot: just 2 - for instance mother nature AND you, or multitudes: you and the many who known or unknown may have worked that ground before you – the land you cultivate, hike, or gaze at, has a story. Likewise, every gardener has a story – no matter how many gardens they’ve cultivated or at what point in their lives they came to their engagement in gardening or love of natural history - there are stories there. Figuratively, these stories might take the form of haikus, a well-crafted short story, a rambling run-on sentence, or an epic novel. But as Alfred Austin famously said: Show me your garden and I’ll show you who you are. In the first year of Cultivating Place, I heard a good lot of feedback from listeners and friends. One piece of feedback from a friend was this: “I want to hear from real home gardeners, too, what they’re doing, what they’re thinking, how they cope.” I liked the idea of this kind of sharing – a kind of Dispatches from the Home Garden. While every garden and every gardener have this act of cultivation in common, they are all necessarily different in their living details. We all have fingerprints, and they are all unique. I think something meaningful is learned in sharing both our commonalities and our differences. This week we’ll hear from the very friend that sent this feedback/request. She sent it more than once, so it only seemed fair that she would help to craft and kick off our Dispatches from the Home Garden story time. In the interest of full disclosure, she is one of my oldest friends in the world: Christl Findling - satellite builder and home gardener from Lookout Mountain, Colorado. Join us!

“Anyone who’s gazed at the moon or stood still in a magnificent stand of trees knows what it’s like to experience the Power of Awe – it seems to slow time, proffer reverence for life and connect us to one another. Recent research shows that when we spend time outside in nature, engaging all our senses, our heart rates slow, our stress hormones dip, our thoughts grow both more expansive and less self-focused.” This week on Cultivating Place, award winning author Florence Williams discusses her newest book “The Nature Fix – How Nature Makes Us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative," which is out on shelves from Norton the first week of February. Having grown up in New York City, Florence went on to spend a large part of her professional writing career, which focuses on science, the environment and health, till now living in or close to the wide open wild spaces of the West - notably Colorado. When her husband’s career took their young family to Washington DC, she found herself experiencing a depression and irritability that ultimately led her to a curiosity about the physical, emotional and intellectual effects of access to nature on not just her but the human body and soul as a whole. The Nature Fix is the story of her researching and reporting on the scientific research going on around the globe into this question. Join us!

Digging deep: this is a phrase that has a wide variety of meanings and uses – both literal and figurative — in the garden, and in the body, mind and heart. In a new year, many of us have a tendency to generate a to-do list of tasks and projects to start, to get in order or to finally this year complete in our lives – and if we are gardeners, our gardens are not left out of this energetic attention and intention. To help integrate some of this energy — shore up your resolve and energize your physical, spiritual and artistic muscles — this week I am joined by Fran Sorin, “best-selling author, unshakeable optimist, coach and CBS radio news contributor.” In 2004, with a well-established career in garden design, garden journalism and garden coaching, Fran published, “Digging Deep – Unearthing Your Creative Roots Through Gardening.” In 2016, a new revised edition of the book was published.

It is mid-January. It is deep mid-winter, even in my relatively mild USDA zone 9, Sunset zone 8. While I am fortunate enough to have a year-round Saturday farmer’s market available to me, my own home garden is looking spare. Which is at it should be this time of year, but it could be looking a little less spare while still remaining seasonally appropriate. One of MY New Year’s resolutions is to strive to do a little better on this front. After the calendar year 2016, I would like to feel a little more self-reliant. Call me crazy - I’m starting with adding a few raised vegetable beds to my little home garden. For a little refresher course, I pulled out my trusty-old “The Four-Season Harvest” by Eliot Coleman (Chelsea Green, 1992), which was formative to my first on-my-own adult garden in the 1990s. Today, I am joined by Eliot Coleman, esteemed plantsman, gardener and author based in Harborside, Maine, where he lives and gardens year round at Four Season Farm. Eliot and his wife, Barbara Damrosch (a noted gardener and garden writer herself — perhaps you follow her regular contributions to The Washington Post?) were early proponents and continue to be enthusiastic advocates for growing your own seasonally appropriate, sustainably tended, food year-round — no matter where you live. Eliot is also the author of "The New Organic Grower" and “The Winter Harvest Handbook."

As a celebration of the many ways that one’s cultivation of place can benefit not only the individual cultivator – gardener or naturalist – this week on Cultivating Place I’m joined by John Carlon, president of River Partners, a nonprofit organization working to create wildlife habitat for the benefit of people (economically and environmentally), water (quality and conservation), wildlife and the wider environment (including benefitting agricultural productivity and quality) by restoring successional riparian corridors throughout watersheds of the Western United States.

Happy New Year! For over 100 years Sunset magazine has been inspiring gardens and gardeners in the American West. This year marks the first full year for Sunset’s gorgeous, innovative new demonstration and display gardens at Cornerstone Sonoma. Join me this week when Cultivating Place converses with Sunset’s Garden Editor Johanna Silver - inspiring New Year’s resolutions for garden living. Join us.

There is something inherently satisfying about a full circle – a completion – a beginning brought to its fullness and coming to its natural end, which leads right into the next beginning. This full circle satisfaction is true for cycles of the moon, cycles of the seasons and cycles of the field and garden. For me this is especially apparent at the Winter Solstice and, of course, the full circle of a calendar year. It’s long been customary to celebrate the year’s end by toasting to the old and welcoming the new with a glass of something bubbly – and I decided Cultivating Place should too – but not just any bubbly, rather one that is deeply grounded in this cultivation of place and all its systems and intricacies we find so vital and fascinating. A glass of bubbly that embodies and is as interdependent with the soil, water, wildlife and plant life of place as we are. So what better bubbly than the most ancient of fermented spirits, nectar of the gods — honey-based mead. To that end, and to new beginnings, today, I am joined by Gordon Hull, mead maker and owner of Heidrun Meadery – makers of dry, sparkling mead based in Point Reyes, California.