As autumn and harvest begins to color the edges of our awareness, this week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by two people whose work is all about perennial and abundant harvest as represented by the concept, and the endless generosity, of an Orchard.  The Giving Grove, based in Kansas City, lives a purpose of providing healthy calories, strengthening community, and improving the urban environment through a nationwide network of sustainable little orchards. Jennifer is in conversation with the Giving Grove’s Co-Executive Director, Ashley Vernon,  and Ryan Watson, the National Orchard Operations and Education Manager, who share more about their work nurturing communal orchardists across the country in 16 sites and 650 little orchards with big impact. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Looking back, even just this year, Cultivating Place has had multiple conversations with plantspeople from around the country about the inspirational plants from, and places known as, prairies. An iconic and beloved ecosystem strongly identified with the American Midwest. As summer warms and mellows into its Augustness, we’re in conversation this week with two humans who are cultivating their place with the specific purpose of keeping native extant prairie alive and thriving. Stephen Packard and Eriko Kojima of the Somme Prairie Grove Nature Preserve in Illinois join CP today to share more about their prairie place. In the summer of 2021, the Forest Preserves of Illinois’ Cook County Board of Commissioners approved a resolution recognizing Somme Prairie Grove as the 27th dedicated Illinois Nature Preserve managed by the Forest Preserves of Cook County. Part of the Somme Preserves located in Northbrook in north Cook County, Somme Prairie Grove offers 85 acres of high-quality mesic savanna and dry-mesic woodland. The site supports many conserved native plant species, and savanna and shrubland breeding birds. Somme Prairie Grove has benefited from a vibrant stewardship community—led by the North Branch Restoration Project—since 1980 and represents one of the oldest and most comprehensive savanna and woodland restorations in the Midwest. The recovery of Somme Prairie Grove is credited to the longstanding participation of this cohort of dedicated and talented community volunteers, including both the volunteer who kicked it all off, Stephen Packard, and a volunteer since 2015, Eriko. In this back-to-school moment here in the U.S. let us remember there is always more to learn, and we owe a great deal to the teachers – be they 4th grade teachers, nobel prize winning professors, other big G gardeners, prairies or other beloved ecosystems of our places. Listen in - and Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Hot August nights turn to bright August nights at the Olbrich Botanical Gardens in Madison, WI.  The Garden's annual GLEAM light show is celebrating its 10th anniversary and opens August 30th, transforming the very bright-by-day gardens into equally bright in a different way by night. The award-winning display runs through October 25th, and this year’s exhibit will center on the concept of reflection. Illuminated art installations by light artists from around the country will brighten the Gardens’ landscape, reflecting a language of love for the natural world. Concepts such as the intrigue of plants at night, photosynthesis, bioluminescence, and dynamic equilibrium have all been highlighted in past year’s displays. Join CP host Ben Futa in conversation this week with Benjamin Smith, Show Curator and Missy Jeanne, Public Programs Manager at Olbrich to talk all things bright and beautiful at Olbrich for this GLEAM season. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Ahhh, high summer, my friends – this week we continue with our CP summer-break reprisals, reminding us of the importance of the great outdoors and the care and cultivation of it, revisiting ecological-plantsman Benjamin Vogt’s great work Prairie Up! To inspire your planting and designs for the season ahead, a fierce advocate on behalf of our gardens being critically important links in our world’s broken and fragmented ecological chains. You may remember my 2018 conversation with Benjamin about his first book –A New Garden Ethic: Cultivating Defiant Compassion for an Uncertain Future? Well, that ethical manifesto now has an instruction manual in Benjamin’s second book - Prairie Up: An Introduction to Natural Garden Design – it might be just the reference you need to get your fall planting and planning season off to a great start. Join us this week for more with Benjamin Vogt! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

The garden in summer is at its fullest sensory delight and overwhelm – the peak of sunlight, growing hours, heat, and growth, ripening, and even rotting. This week, we revisit a BEST OF conversation that embraces this sublime sensuality from a variety of perspectives, in conversation with master naturalist Nancy Lawson.  Nancy is perhaps best known as "The Humane Gardener", the title of her first book, and her online signature. And a humane gardener she is. Nancy is a habitat consultant and founder of The Humane Gardener, LLC. She observes, researches, and pioneers creative wildlife-friendly landscaping methods in her own home habitat and for others. In other words – and in all senses of the phrase – Nancy puts her gardening where her words are, and words and action come together beautifully in her newest book, Wildscape, Trilling Chipmunks, Beckoning Blooms, Salty Butterflies, and other Sensory wonders of Nature.  Together this week, we delve into her newest research and reporting on the complexity and richness of the sensory life of other than human lives: from the botanical to the birds, bugs, mammals, amphibians other wildlife all around us. Wildscape is eye, ear, nose and heart opening! Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week we’re getting back to nature for summer camp: ALL ages invited. We’re in conversation with Rebecca Schwarz and Paige Manges of The Nature Place in La Crosse, WI. It’s a place where we all belong and can keep growing – for sustenance, for survival, and for joy. The Nature Place is dedicated to inspiring and cultivating meaningful connections between people and nature, for the benefit of both, through all-ages programming at their nature-focused community center open to the public, located in La Crosse’s beautiful Myrick Park. With summer vacation in full swing, enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place, you are in for a real summer adventure on a global garden armchair tour of sorts with a plantswoman who has studied and gardened at some of the Western world’s best from Sissinghurst, Hidcote, and Monk’s House in the UK to Sparoza in Greece. Lucie Willan has great garden tales to tell. A perfect summer garden beach, listen if there is one. Enjoy! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

THIS WEEK on CP - OUR NEXT CP LIVE podcast! And we head to Indiana with our very own Ben Futa. Botany & Co. in South Bend, Indiana is dedicated to “empowering more people to plant more plants in more places!” In a town that has seen more than its share of social, economic, and environmental challenges in the past few decades, Botany & Co., Ben’s dream come true, is stimulating community, biodiversity, economic growth, and joy.  It was bitterly cold in South Bend last March, but Botany Shop was warm with sharing, with growing, and with community – all of which you can hear in this conversation. The full cohort of the ten 2024/2025 transformative CP LIVE experiences is right now being crafted by the CP LIVE team into a powerful documentary film experience, sharing the many–often surprising and unseen–ways that (big G) Gardeners cultivating their places with care grow us ALL better. And when we see the full power of Gardeners, we value them more appropriately. When we value and support them, they can grow our world better, even more beautifully, more intentionally, and more effectively. This July 4th week here in the U.S., as we think about the privileges, opportunities and responsibilities of being citizens of our places, we’re so pleased to share forward this conversation with Ben, a remarkable plantsperson, ecosystem and community steward, and regular host here on Cultivating Place.  For much more about the CP LIVE documentary film in-process:  ➡️ cultivatingplace.org/film to see, share, and support for yourself 💚. 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 and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com. All photos are courtesy of Ben Futa, Botany & Co., Myriam Nicodemus, and Jennifer Jewell. All rights are reserved.

This week on Cultivating Place, guest host Abra Lee is joined in conversation by someone whose path into horticulture is both inspiring and honest—Richard M. Smith, director of the School of Professional Horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden. Richard grew up in Belle Glade, Florida—folks there call it Muck City, thanks to their deep, rich soil. And while Richard didn’t start off in horticulture, that love for plants was always in him. Now his career is focused on helping people from all walks of life find their way into this field—building careers, finding purpose, and growing something meaningful. As someone who is growing more than just plants, Richard is all about access, mentorship, and ensuring the door stays open behind him. 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 and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Have you ever heard of a Moth-er? Yes, it is the moth equivalent of a birder – someone who loves and follows and studies the incredible diversity of moths. Creatures whose lives benefit ours and yet take place primarily under the cover of the dark of night. In this week of the Summer Solstice, in our seasonal period of longest days and shortest nights in the Northern Hemisphere, we pause to consider and revel in the importance—the life-nurturing, life-giving, and restorative magic of the dark. Leigh Ann Henion is the author of Night Magic, Adventures among Glowworms, Moon Gardens and other Marvels of the Dark – a beautiful road map for all of us in better knowing and appreciating the greater fullness of the lives of our places – especially those lives that bloom, grow, and come out at night. Listen in and 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Every year since 2007, when the US Senate passed sanctions declaring it, the third week of June is celebrated as National Pollinator Week. It is no accident that this is the same week as the Summer Solstice, when many pollinators reach their peak. Since 2017, however, the state of Colorado has celebrated June as National Pollinator Month, and this week we hear more, celebrate wins, and focus on the work remaining with two members of PPAN – Colorado’s own People & Pollinators Action Network. Promotes pollinator-friendly land management and landscaping practices through community education, engagement, and advocacy to preserve biodiversity and safeguard public health. They beautifully envision a world with healthy, sustainable ecosystems where people and pollinators can thrive now and for generations to come. They conduct their world-improving work at the grassroots, municipal, and state levels, advocating for policies and practices that reduce or eliminate the use of pesticides and create and connect swaths of pollinator-safe habitat with the intent of reversing the drastic decline of pollinator populations. Joyce Kennedy, PPAN's executive director, and Emily KenCairn, director of communications and development, will join us this week to share more about how they are doing all that they are doing and how we can, too. Both of them are Gardeners with a capital G. 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

To welcome the fullness of June, this week on Cultivating Place, guest host Ben Futa is back and in conversation with Marc Sardi, a Montreal-based scientist turned floral artist who has reinvented his relationship with the natural world, and himself, along with changing careers.  It’s an authentic conversation exploring how rediscovering our most authentic relationship with plants also allows us to know ourselves, and our world, better. It’s lush, it’s life-affirming, and it’s grounding in all the best ways. Listen in and 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com. All photos are courtesy of Marc Sardi, and all rights reserved. Bio Image of Marc by Christophe Roberge, all rights reserved.

Summer makes it easy to move your body – to get out for a walk, to work in the garden, to hike, bike, stroll, boat, climb, swim, dance under the stars. Whatever calls you. But as we know, many of us – most of us? Do not move enough, and even if we do, we don’t get a balanced diet of movement. Which Gardening can help with, and which physical movement, expert Katy Bowman says, is essential to a healthy body, mind, heart, and attitude. Katy is the founder of Nutritious Movement, and she joins us on Cultivating Place this week to share more. 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Guina Hammond is the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society's program manager of sustainable communities. She is also deeply involved in her hometown of Philadelphia as a certified organic landcare professional, PHS Tree Tender, Penn State Master Gardener, and planning team member for the Mid-Atlantic Woody & Perennial Plant Conference.  In addition to that incredible list of accomplishments, Guina is a down-to-earth plant lover at heart who desires to bring gardening to the doorstep of your everyday neighbor. As the founding member of the Chester Avenue Community Garden, a PHS-supported garden, she has grown award-winning produce for the past 38 years. CP Guest Host Abra Lee is in conversation with Guina this week to learn and 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 young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

As the summer gardening season rolls into full-throated song, the idea of who has access to the work, joy, and benefits of this practice also comes into view—and feeds what Occupational Therapist and author Jill Mays calls that "green thing inside of us all." As an occupational therapist by career and calling, over the course of her professional life, it became increasingly clear to Jill how many of the occupational therapy goals she set for her diverse clients were well met by the variety of activities, sensory stimulations, and social, mental, and physical benefits of gardening—preferably outside and in the company of others. After several years of developing gardening programs in her now-home town of Truro, MA, Jill has documented the journey of her work, research, and garden program designs for a wide range of special needs in her new book: Nurturing Nature, A Guide to Gardening for Special Needs. 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This second week of May, we welcome gardener and plantswoman Holly Shimizu. Her four decades of work in some of America’s notable public gardens have tracked and traced some of the most impactful changes in public garden standards, expectations, and accountability in that same time frame. From her visionary leadership roles at the National Herb Garden, the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, and the US Botanic Garden to her current board position at the American Horticultural Society, Holly’s garden life is a beautiful public-garden journey that benefits us all. 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place we welcome May, with all of her floral and plant profusion, revisiting a conversation we loved with Kristin Currin and Andrew Merritt of Humble Roots Nursery in Oregon’s Columbia River Gorge. Acclaimed for their native plant passions, knowledge, and integrity, Kristin and Drew are the authors of the Pacific Northwest Native Plant Primer - one of a series of such primers from around the country steering us as gardeners toward beautiful ecological gardens and place based relationships. Cheers to May and our gardens' weaving us back into the wonder of the world. Humble Roots is a native plant nursery acclaimed for its efforts in sustainability and promoting native plant passion, knowledge, and ethics across the wider eco-regions of the Pacific Northwest. The Pacific Northwest Native Plant Primer, 225 plants for an Earth Friendly Garden (Timber Press, 2023), or one of its relations might be just the inspiration we all need to get us planting in the right direction this spring and summer! 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Juliet Sargeant is an award-winning English garden designer who blends beauty with purpose in every space she creates. Juliet’s unique background in medicine, science, and psychology gives her designs a whole new depth, focusing on wellbeing and connection. You might recognize her name from that time in 2016 when she made history as the first Black Woman garden designer to display at the Chelsea Flower Show, and her design - Modern Slavery Garden, won a Gold Medal and the People’s Choice Prize.  This Earth Day week, we’re celebrating Juliet's design background and digging in to her new book “Start With Soil: Simple Steps for a Thriving Garden” which publishes on May 1st from Frances Lincoln. 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In this holy season of spring in the Northern Hemisphere, with the earth reviving herself in greenery and flowers, birds, bees, and butterflies all around us, I am so pleased to be in conversation today with a gardener who will represent another gardener -one in the here now and one from more than a century ago, whose words resonate into the present. I believe in the future, so beautifully. John Stempien is the emeritus director of the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum in South Haven, Michigan. He joins us today to share more about his garden life path, following in the footsteps of the great garden life path sown, grown, and walked on by Liberty Hyde Bailey, Jr, avid and reverent gardener, often considered to be the "father of modern [Western] horticulture” 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Debbie Millman has written love letters before. Her 20 years of creating and hosting the popular podcast Design Matters is just one of them. Her many books, several of them established reference books in the design and branding worlds, are among others. I am guessing she’s written a few to her wife the author Roxanne Gay, who contributed recipes to Debbie’s newest book. While I enjoy all good love letters, Debbie’s newest love letter in book form, (launching next week - April 15th) entitled Love Letter to a Garden, is one that definitely caught my eye and ear.  I am going to wager that gardeners, young and old, new and longstanding, all feel that quickening of their pulse with Spring, sap rising, bulbs blooming, the new season all a bright shining blank page of possibility. It is a distinctive and palpable kind of love. With April and the season’s annual returning sense of rejuvenation, resurrection, and regeneration, Debbie Millman’s new book - Love Letter to a Garden – captures that particular passion many of us will recognize of falling in love with gardening…every single season. Debbie has accomplished in one beautiful seed-like book so much of what I have hoped to capture in 10 years of Cultivating Place – the WONDER of what it means to identify as a Gardener in our world, the EVERYTHING that Gardens bring to our lives. I am so pleased to welcome Debbie to CP this week. 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 and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.