Cultivating Place

Plant Relates

John Forti is a garden historian, historic garden horticulturist, and slow food advocate. He has put his years of experience and knowledge into The Heirloom Gardener, Traditional Plants, and Skills for the Modern World – inviting us to lean into the breadth and depth of human millennia-long relationship with plant life.  

John joins Cultivating Place this week to share more about his work and this compilation, which introduces and/or reminds readers of age-old skills for a more directly lived life - from the distillation of floral essences to the uses of kelp to the relationship between the Algonquin culture’s word for the fruit that in English is known as strawberry, wuttahimneash (or heart berry), being related to the heart health associated with the fruit. 

Most importantly, however, The Heirloom Gardener, amplified by Mary Azarian’s brilliant woodcut images, encourages us to upset the apple cart of mass production and commodification and look back to the many streams of land-based wisdom still available to us in order to find a better way forward. 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 Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

The Heirloom Gardener, Traditional Plants and Skills for the Modern World" with John Forti

This first full week of Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere – looking toward the month of October and its many harvest celebrations, we look to our seeds – the beginning and end of the lives of the seed-bearing plants who make our lives possible. 

Stacey Denton, of Flora Farm & Design Studio in Williams, Oregon, is an organic flower farmer, bioregional seed grower, and homesteader based in the Klamath Siskiyou region of Southern Oregon.

Trained in ecology, permaculture, organic farming, and seed growing and saving, Stacey makes her community-and-land-based life with her daughter Hannah and with her parents nearby.

Stacey and I connected over the importance of bioregional seed growing, sourcing, knowing, and supporting at the Slow Flowers Summit held at Filoli in the summer of 202, and she joins cultivating Place this week to share more about the literacy - and joy - of specifically bioregional seeds. 

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 Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Seed season & Bioregional seed sense with Stacey Denton of Flora Farm & Design Studio

On this special edition of the show, our guest will be Cultivating Place’s wonderful host, Jennifer Jewell. Jennifer has a new book out and it’s very special.  

A very intimate and, at the same time, global take on the natural and social science aspects of one of the most fundamental things to life on Earth – seeds. Jennifer’s book is titled What We Sow: On The Personal, Ecological and Cultural Significance of Seeds. 

It’s an exploration of the lives of plants and people through the cycle of a botanical year viewed through the fundamental lens of seeds. With our guest host, Dave Schlom of NSPR’s Blue Dot program and podcast, we’ll hear about the good and the bad when it comes to the modern world of seeds - from those produced by natural plants battling to adapt to climate change to those produced by human hands. 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 Podcast, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

WHAT WE SOW, with guest host Dave Schlom Interviewing Jennifer Jewell

This week we lean into a particular aspect of our garden lives – but perhaps a favorite winter activity in the northerly climates in winter: tending to our houseplant and indoor garden family. 

We’re in conversation with Jane Perrone, host of the “On The Ledge” Podcast, and author of “Legends of the Leaf: Unearthing the secrets to help your plants thrive”. 

In this deep end of the winter season, when our indoor gardening might be holding us through till we can get back outside, Jane shares more about her many plant love motivations. 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.

Legends of the Leaf, with Jane Perrone, of On The Ledge Podcast

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 Georgia’s uplands and coastal plains – 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 Thoreau’s posthumously-published writings on seed dispersal, and Gary Nabhan’s 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.

Janisse’s 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.

A Devotion to the Mysterium of Place as an Antidote to Existential Homesickness, with Janisse Ray

The wilds of New Jersey might sound like a humorous oxymoron to many – many who don’t live in New Jersey. 

Humor is one of our guests' great traits this week, along with his deep love of the plants and places making up New Jersey and its wilds—whether scrappy and unlikely roadside verges or extant majestic old-growth forests.  

Jared Rosenbaum and his wife Rachel Mackow own and operate New Jersey’s Wild Ridge Plants, an all-native, all-natural, all-nursery-propagated endeavor in Alpha, New Jersey. 

Jared is also the face and voice behind the Wild Plant Culture Podcast, and, along with documentary filmmaker Jared Flesher, Jared Rosenbaum is the host of the Rooted Series of Wild Plant videos. 

A certified ecological restoration practitioner and author of Wild Plant Culture, A Guide to Restoring Native Edible and Medicinal Plant Communities, Jared has an abiding curiosity about the intersection of ecology and culture. From his deeply rooted place there in New Jersey – I am so pleased to welcome Jared to Cultivating Place this week – 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.

All the wild rhythms: Wild Plant Culture with Jared Rosenbaum

Gardens are more than collections of plants. Gardens and Gardeners are intersectional spaces and agents for positive change in our world. Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden is a weekly public radio program & podcast exploring what we mean when we garden. Through thoughtful conversations with growers, gardeners, naturalists, scientists, artists and thinkers, Cultivating Place illustrates the many ways in which gardens are integral to our natural and cultural literacy. These conversations celebrate how these interconnections support the places we cultivate, how they nourish our bodies, and feed our spirits. They change the world. Take a listen.

All the wild rhythms: Wild Plant Culture with Jared Rosenbaum

Cultivating Place: Natural History & Our Gardens