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Erin Benzakein of Floret Flower Farm needs little introduction to most garden-minded listeners. She has been so instrumental is cultivating a flower-farmer and flower-farming economy in our country. Her innovative and dedicated seed research and breeding work of the past almost decade, however, is whole new lens through which to appreciate her work. Back in 2017, when I first interviewed Erin for the program & for The Earth in Her Hands, she was already a tireless advocate for local flowers, and for supporting more flower farmers and local-flower florists in our everyday lives here in the US. Through her on-farm and subsequently online flower farming Floret Workshops, for more than a decade, she has been renowned for encouraging and training eager new flower-farmer-florists in order to transform the cut flower industry from the multi-billion dollar large-corporate-owned international import (with little ecological or economic oversight) behemoth it had become, back into the more lovely, and loving, organic, locally-based circular and community oriented economy she envisioned it could be â and should be.Floret - once a flower farm and training center â is now more fully (and perhaps even more beautifully) described as âa family-owned flower farm and seed company specializing in breeding new cut flower varieties for gardeners, farmers & designers.â They add: â Our thriving research & education farm is dedicated to giving flower lovers the tools & information they need to grow the gardens of their dreams.âIn honor of the Autumnal Equinox, and its seeds of the next season feeling - I am so pleased to once again welcome Erin to Cultivating Place â just as Floret's free seed saving mini-course launches on their website. Erin shares much more about this newest heart of Floret's growing work. 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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One day in his mid-adulthood, at a particularly low point after many years of battling debilitating depression, Jarod K. Anderson witnessed the presence of a Great Blue Heron fishing in a creek in the woods near his home. In the opening pages of his new book, Something in the Woods Loves You, he describes the transformative moment of meeting this âpoem of ancient slownessâ as a âbridge to when nature was family.âJarod is the poet and nature enthusiast behind the popular scripted fiction podcast The CryptoNaturalist - about real love for imaginary nature. In Something in the Woods Loves You (out this week from Hachette), Jarod poignantly shares how real nature, and its lessons as to our human place within it, was one of his primary allies along his mental health journey, helping to bring him home to himself.Jarod joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about his love of nature, his garden life, and his thoughts on how an improved relationship with nature is key to everyoneâs health (mental and physical), including the health of the planet we live on and her nature. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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This week, in honor of Labor Day just passed, we venture into the world of garden preservation, history through the lens of spaces of incarceration, and how these can help all of us consider, with clearer eyes, the great diversity of ways in which the word Garden is used.Weâre in conversation with Dr. Elizabeth Lara, a cultural geographer and Garden Historian who is looking at the role and uses of gardens in spaces of incarcerationâhistoric and contemporaryâand what this might teach us as gardeners and as a society as we look forward and back.Dr. Lara earned her doctorate through extensive research at Mission Santa Barbara, the Gardens of Alcatraz, and Manzanar National Historic Site. 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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At this back-to-school, change-of-seasons moment, I thought we would all enjoy a good bedtime-story vibe. Enjoy this Best of CP conversation with Gwendolyn Wallace. Gwendolyn Wallace is a gardener, a student, a teacher, a historian, and the author of two new works of illustrated childrenâs literature. Joy Takes Root, and The Light She Feels Inside (both published this year) are works grounded in the human impulse to garden. In words, stories, and images these additions to the world of childrenâs literature help to grow us all.Using her own history and experience with gardens and gardening, Gwendolynâs stories remind us (no matter our age) that our gardens raise and tend to us as much as we raise and tend to them!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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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This week, A BEST OF conversation. In this long, hot, fiery summer here in Northern CA and wet and windy summer in other parts of the country â I really needed some flowers â and thought our conversation with the UKâs Shane Connolly might be just the thing. ENJOY!As we tend toward summerâs end, with end of summer and fall events and celebrations perhaps in mind, maybe even winter events in the planning, we turn this week to floristry and how and where it intersects with sustainability â and as our guest today shares, with thoughtfulness.British floral designer Shane Connolly is well-known for his world-class floristry and floral design, which gracing several weddings within the British Royal Family and the recent coronation of King Charles. While his floral design is known for this kind of high-profile event, Shane is also known as one of the preeminent ambassadors for a more sustainable, organic, local, seasonal, and low-waste floral design and floral supply industry. Cultivating Place now has a donate button! 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Itâs back to school time â you can tell by the ads on television and radio (yes, I was watching the Olympics!) and by the displays at the stores with notebooks, pencils, backpacks, and lunch boxes being on prominent display. As you and I know, one of the best classrooms available to us all is the outdoors â from the wildlands of fields, woods, and waysides around us to more formal state and national parks and monuments, our own gardens, and very specifically, our many public gardens. Being outdoors is a great classroom, and plants are among our best teachers.Joining me this week to explore all of this and more is Sean Doherty, a gardener, a plant lover, a 25-year-career public educator: in the classroom, as a principal, and for six years as a St. Louis Schoolâs district superintendent. Sean is now the Vice President of Education at the Missouri Botanical Garden in downtown St. Louis. From school groups to mindfulness walks, botanical art, and identification classes to therapeutic horticulture, from seed banking to historic herbarium collections, this botanic garden in St. Louis continues to expand how they and we think about the phenomenal educational capacity and imperative of plants and their conservation. Join us!Cultivating Place now has a donate button! 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Late July, August, and September (the dog days of summer with the constellation Sirius high in the night sky) are perhaps the stretch of the year in most climates of the Northern Hemisphere that really show you what your garden and plants are made of (for better or worse) after months of them producing and growing under long hours of sun, high heat, and either humidity or drought. Or smoke.Itâs also the season when many of our most durable and prismatic shrubs are showing off to great advantage in rounded forms, seed, fruit, and foliage colors, certainly in our wildlands. And possibly in our gardens?This is where Kevin Philip Williams and Michael Guidi of the Denver Botanic Gardens come in. Their new book Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands celebrates the great diversity, incredible beauty, and many gifts and lessons that the wild shrublands of our world have to offer our gardens and cultivated landscapesâenvironmentally and aestheticallyâno matter where you garden.I want to echo Kevin and Michaelâs email greeting when I invited them to be guests on Cultivating Place: Welcome to the Shrub Club! 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Tim Johnson is engaged in the native plant and garden worlds on both personal and professional levels. Having worked with Seed Savers Exchange earlier in his career, Tim last joined us on Cultivating Place a few years back as Executive Director for The Botanic Garden of Smith College.Tim is a spouse, a father, a life long learner and gardener, and since January of this year, he is the CEO of the Native Plant Trust. He is leading this oldest of U.S. plant conservation organizations into its 125th year working to conserve the great biodiversity of native plants in our world starting with their place in the U.S. Northeast.We caught up with him this week to learn more about Timâs botanical journey and to discuss some of the Native Plant Trustâs past, present, and future vision. This vision is both on the ground, including their part in manifesting the new Northeast Native Seed Network as foundational to shifting the possibilities for great native plant supply for all landscapes, and increasingly, this vision is in policy at all levels of local and federal government. NPT is collaborating with other plant conservation people around the country and world, and serve as a model for how good plant stewardship can literally grow our world better. Join us 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Working under the online name Trackless Wild, Janisse Ray is an American writer, naturalist, and environmental activist.Just about everything she does speaks to me of the largest meaning and importance of what it means to be a capital G gardener in our world.A moving storyteller, speaker, and teacher, her book titles include Ecology of A Cracker Childhood (1999), a memoir; Wild Spectacle, Seeking Wonders in A World Beyond Humans (2021), a collection of essays; Red Lanterns (2021), a collection of poems; The Woods of Fannin County (2023), a novel, and many more. Her most recent title is based on her many years teaching writing, particularly place-based creative non-fiction: Craft & Current, A Manual for Magical Writing.Her acclaimed work has earned Janisse a Pushcart Prize, an American Book Award, the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature, a Nautilus Award, and the Arlene Eisenberg Award for Writing that Matters, among other well-deserved awards.For me, the most striking aspect of her talents (expressed ardently across genres) is the precision with which she lovingly gives voice to her own place, specifically her home ground of rural South Georgiaâs uplands and coastal plains â and from there, the greater U.S. Southeast generally. The climatic and seasonal fluctuations and moods of the flora and fauna across mountains, and meadows, roadside verges and meandering creeks, Janisse is always documenting the lives and ground out of which places grow people.Her work Seed Underground, A Growing Revolution to Save Food (2012), was one of handful of books about the poetics and politics of seed and seed people in their places that inspired me in my writing of What We Sow, On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (2023) (along with the likes of Henry David Thoreauâs posthumously-published writings on seed dispersal, and Gary Nabhanâs Enduring Seed). While very much rooted in the Southeast, Janisse, like all great nature writers, gives voice to the importance of all places through her devotion to her singular place.Janisseâs teaching (online and at various universities across her career) focuses on encouraging the practice of place-based, heartfelt observation and writing as a way to grow better people, and therefore as a way to durably tend to all places.Janisse joins Cultivating Place this week to explore what it means to be devoted to place - in word, action, and spirit.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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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This week we revisit a favorite conversation from the archive, âThe Comfort of Crows, A Backyard Year," with author and backyard tender and observer, Margaret Renkl. Reminding us that even on days when we feel overheated and overwhelmed, there is always some comfort, intelligence, and agency to be found among the flora and fauna of this generous planet. Many of you will remember our previous conversation with writer and gardener Margaret Renkl about one of her previous titles, âLate Migrations.â Her opinion pieces in The New York Times document the nature of our humanity weekly. I am so pleased to welcome her back this week to share more about her newest title â what is aptly described as âa literary and nature- based devotionalâ from one of our favorite backyard nature devotees. Join us, 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, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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âAre Humans Parasites sowing our own hunger, or fruit, gifts from Earth to our future? Is the edge of our lives, civilization, and species a cliff to catastrophe or a bridge to transformation?â These are the words, questions, and motivations of poet and gardener, Frederick Livingston author of Trees are Bridges to the Sky a collection of essays and poems exploring the human/climate connection.I first met Frederick when I served as keynote speaker for the National Native Seed Conference earlier this year. The conference was kicked off by an address from Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, and another by Tracy Stone-Manning, Director of the Bureau of Land Management, both of whom preceded me on the first day. The two days of events were punctuated throughout by readings from Frederick â the Conference poet.The fact that this conference of policy makers and advocates across such a range had a Conference Poet at all, says a lot. The fact that their chosen poet was Frederick, says even more. Frederick has studied and practiced sustainable agriculture, experiential education, and peace building across the world and he joins us this week to share more. 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 program to grow even more of these types of conversations.The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Itâs the seedy time of summer. This week of the fourth of July weâre working from the premise that foundational to good citizenship is great stewardship of place (plants and people) and we are looking to the desert Southwest in conversation with Alexandra Zamecnik, Executive Director of Native Seed/SEARCH. For more than four decades, Native Seeds/SEARCH (NS/S) has stewarded the seeds of the desert Southwest and Mexico. Founded in 1983 in response to the concern of farmers, gardeners, Indigenous community members, and conservationists about the devastating loss of seed diversity, NS/S today conserves more than 1,800 regional culturally and climatically significant seed varieties. The work is not only the preservation of these seeds for the future, but also for their distribution today, celebrating and in support of communities of this desert region who have stewarded these seeds for time far longer than memory.I met Alexandra and many of her team back in 2021, while researching What We Sow took me to the NS/S HQ in Tucson. I am so pleased to welcome her and share this growing work forward finally. 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 program to grow even more of these types of conversations.The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Itâs full summer - for us and for the fauna of the Northern Hemisphere. That means many of our most charismatic, sun-loving pollinators are at the peak of their seasonal cycles â and we are celebrating National Pollinator Week with Tora Rocha of the Pollinator Posse based in Oakland, CA â sharing all things love of pollinators. Tora is a gardener and ecosystem steward, leader, and innovator in public gardening.Along with Terry Smith, a STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) education specialist, in 2012 Tora co-founded the Pollinator Posse, an Oakland, CA-based organization developing and encouraging pollinator-friendly landscaping and fostering appreciation for local ecosystems through outreach, education, community science, and habitat creation. With eco-friendly landscape techniques at the heart of the work, they teach respect for the creatures which keep their place â and the world â blooming.Tora and the Pollinator Posse envision a day when life-enhancing, thought-inspiring green spaces will grace every corner of world. Tora joins Cultivating Place this week to share her garden-life, Pollinator Posse, journey story. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Happy (almost) Summer Solstice! In celebration of the planetary moment of the longest day and the shortest night of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, taking place on June 20th, we get Still.We hold a moment of stillness to notice and honor our places, our selves, and our many companions in time and space.Weâre in conversation with Artist/Photographer Mary Jo Hoffman all about her more than a decade-long daily photographic practice and her new book: Still: The Art of Noticing.From my seat, the act of being still and the art of noticing are perfect intentions for any season. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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In honor of Juneteenth celebrations coming up, we check in on the Anne Spencer House & Garden in Lynchburg, VA. The home and garden of Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer and her husband Edward, this garden remains the only known fully restored historic garden of an African American in the U.S.Weâre in conversation with Anne and Edwardâs granddaughter, Shaun Spencer-Hester â who serves as the Executive Director and Curator of the House & Garden Museum. Shaun shares so much more information on the history, including new discoveries, the present, and the vibrant future of this important historic treasure of a garden and its gardeners. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Cultivating our places with attention, intention, thought and care is certainly an ethos I hold dear and advocate for with some measure of ferocity. When student and gardener FĂ©lix de Rosen reached out to me in 2021 seeking advice on a new book project. His thinking and design resonated with me, and we have communicated back and forth ever since. Now an ecological designer and artist, and graduate of UC Berkeley and Harvard University, FĂ©lixâs design practice, Polycultura Studio, is based in Oakland, California, on traditional Ohlone territory. His now published book is: A Gardenâs Purpose, which invites us to understand gardens as places where we build mutually beneficial relationships with the living world around us. Amen to that. FĂ©lix joins me this week on Cultivating Place to share much more about his garden life journey, his philosophy, and the experience of considering the idea of "a Gardenâs purposeâ from a multitude of perspectives. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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With the Chelsea Flower Show in the UK just completed, the gardening world as a whole has the concept of Garden Design awards and recognition - along with the garden worldâs trends, concerns and priorities - top of mind. Such display and attention â and recognition well beyond the garden world â has the potential to move hearts and minds and, more importantly, to change minds and behaviors. We hope for the better.In 2023, Pacific Horticulture, a non-profit leader in horticultural thinking and gardening up and down the Pacific Region of the US since 1976 (and rooted back even earlier), jumped into the arena of how we encourage, celebrate, recognize, and even incentivize garden design when they launched their inaugural Design Futurist awards. These awards demonstrate the power of garden design to achieve climate resilience, steward biodiversity, and connect people with nature.In 2023, the first year of the awards, âvisionary designers and regional plantspeople submitted designs illustrating that our gardens can conserve plants and wildlife, treat our water and soil as precious, and hold the wellbeing of people at their center.âThe Design Futurist Awards celebrate âgarden design that is easily replicable, modest in scale, or designed for intimate neighborhood community useâ and I hope serve as a model for how to not just award but reward good garden design anywhere and everywhere.This week, Sarah Beck Pacific Horticultureâs Executive Director joins Cultivating Place to share more about the process and purpose of these awards â entries for which are being accepted now through July 26th, 2024. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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This week on Cultivating Place, weâre in conversation with Kristen Bradley, Co-founder and Creative Director of the world-renowned Australian-based Milkwood Permaculture. Their new Milkwood Permaculture Living Handbook is another perfect resource for our summer garden (and life) plotting, planning, and planting, with an emphasis on garden-life-based habits for hope in a changing world. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Just in time for your continued planning, plotting, and planting in order to grow the earliest and the latest and the biggest and the longest producing and the best tasting of the summer vegetable and fruit bounty, this week Cultivating Place returns to our intermittent series on seeds in conversation with Adam Alexander, author of The Seed Detective, Uncovering the Secret Histories of Remarkable Vegetables.This conversation and gardening human go to showâonce againâthat all of life (and the histories of humans with their plants in their places) can be found in the garden if weâre looking. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
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Bevin Cohen and his wife Heather Marie co-founded Small House Farm, a homestead, garden, family, and bridge to the natural world around them.Bevin writes: âThe garden is where we meditate, harvest our seeds and learn about Mother Natureâs many wonders. We are avid seed savers, and amateur plant breeders. We believe that each seed is a connection to every grower that stewarded that variety before us â and every rower that comes after us.âThrough his books, his educational workshops and lectures, and now through his podcast, Seeds and Weeds, Bevin shares his small-farm big-life heartfelt world view. In our ongoing exploration of who gardeners are, where gardeners are and what they are growing in this world, I am so pleased to be in conversation with Bevin this week. 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, and Google Podcasts. To read more and see more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.All photos courtesy of Bevin Cohen, Small House Farm. All rights reserved.
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