Cultivating Place

Landscape architects create outdoor spaces with intention and thought. While the effects are often unnoticed consciously, they are absorbed and experienced nonetheless — impacting us, our culture, and our understanding of place — historically and right now. Kelly Comras explores some of these ideas with us on Cultivating Place this week.

Dr. Peter Raven is one of the leading plant biologists in the world today, having begun his botanical and natural history journey falling in love with the plants and animals of Central California, the Sierra Nevada and under the encouragement and mentorship of many leaders in the field at the California Academy of Sciences beginning when he was 8 years old. Dr. Raven is President Emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Gardens, one of the country’s top three botanical research institutions. Dr. Raven retired in 2011 after 40 years at the helm in Missouri, but his tireless advocacy and outreach in defense of conservation and the protection of biodiversity continues. He joins me this week on Cultivating Place to share his passion.

It's late summer. The light is shifting incrementally each day now — tilting toward a new season. I notice especially in those transitory, crepuscular moments of dawn and dusk. The light is moving towards a new, quieter season in the garden and the colors of my garden are shifting with it. Some of the saturation is waning, other shades are deepening, bright giving way — very slowly, almost imperceptibly — to earthy

This week on Cultivating Place, life in the garden gets a little more wild when we speak with Beth Pratt-Bergstrom, California director of the National Wildlife Federation. Beth is the author of the recently released book titled "When Mountain Lions are Neighbors - People and Wildlife Working it Out in California.”

Sometimes when you use the word garden – people immediately conjure up images of the ornamental perennial border. Other people, however, conjure up colorful visions of the summer vegetable garden – beginning to groan this time of year under the abundance and literal weight of the summer harvest of tomatoes, peppers, corn, zucchini and so on. Throughout history, these two distinct kinds of gardens – let’s call them the ornamental garden on one hand and the edible garden on the other – have had lots of overlap sometimes inadvertently and sometimes very intentionally. Who among us has not noted the beauty of the blossoms on any fruit tree, the freshness of the first peas of spring, or comforting shape and color of the apples of autumn? And who does not fully appreciate the double duty of some of our flowers and flowering plants – roses and salvias and nasturtiums, for example, in being both edible and beautiful? Today we are joined by Stefani Bittner, co-owner with fellow plantperson, floral and garden designer Alethea Harampolis of Homestead Design Collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area. They design gardens that are both beautiful and incorporate edible plants throughout. Stefani is co-author with fellow edible garden designer, Leslie Bennett, of “The Beautiful Edible Garden” (2013, Ten Speed Press). In February of 2017 Ten Speed Press will publish a book co-authored by both Stefani and Alethea entitled “Harvest.”

Kristin Currin is owner and founder with her husband Drew Merritt of Humble Roots Native Plant Nursery in Mosier, Oregon. Situated at the interface between temperate rain forest, the Great Basin and the Columbia River Gorge, Humble Roots has a mission to inspire gardeners, nature lovers and conservationists to deepen their relationship with native plants.

Cultivating Place this week welcomes Debra Prinzing, the producer of slowflowers.com, the online directory to American flower farms, and florists, shops and studios who source domestic and local flowers. I would be surprised if most people I spoke to today — pretty much no matter where I might be in the US — were not familiar with the term slow food. Are you familiar with the term and movement known as Slow Flowers?

In this election year, and with the Independence Day holiday just past, we have something of a patriotic garden theme going. This week, we’re joined by Marta McDowell, a gardener, historian and writer who lives in Chatham, New Jersey. Her self-described greatest interest lies in the relationship between writers and their gardens — the connection, as she says, “between pen and trowel.” This interest is well-illustrated and developed in her titles to date including “Emily Dickinson’s Gardens,” “Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life,” and most recently the patriotic history of the White House Gardens entitled: “All the Presidents’ Gardens” out now from Timber Press, and the focus of our conversation.

Are you a person who takes refuge in the natural world or your home garden? If so, then you appreciate the many benefits of these for regrouping from life’s stresses, large and small. As we look to the Fourth of July, we’re joined this week by Ann Mead Daniel, co-founder with her husband Scott Robertson of Gardens for Heroes. It’s a young non-profit in the Washington DC area, whose work seeks to help wounded veterans and their families find space and resources for regrouping and healing in the context of their own home gardens.

This week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by Genny Arnold, Seed Program Manager at the Theodore Payne Foundation who speaks with us about the care and long-term keeping of our native geophytes — those coolest of plants which have an underground storage organ, like a bulb or tuber or corm, which helps them to withstand some of the planet’s harshest conditions: cold, heat, drought and dark. Or a hot dry California summer. California is home to close to 300 species of native geophytes, many of which are now rare or endangered. This spring, after a winter of closer-to-normal rainfalls, many of our bulbs are treating us to a particularly spectacular year of bloom.