Cultivating Place

This week on Cultivating Place we speak with British gardener and psychiatrist/psychotherapist Sue Stuart-Smith, whose book, "The Well-Gardened Mind: The Restorative Power of Nature", and very explicitly of gardening, explores her many years of research and findings on the physiology of the brain and the creativity and connections cultivated in the brain when gardening. In this work “of science, insight, and anecdote,” Sue demonstrates that “our understanding of nature and its restorative powers is just beginning to flower.” 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

As we continue our exploration into creativity born of the garden –I share with you today a story and model for creativity coupled with kindness. On Cultivating Place, I talk a lot about gardens, gardeners, and gardens as intersectional agents and spaces of powerful potential & positive change in our world. While I see this as true in most of my interviews, this episode with the regenerative humans of the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz brings this truth to life more poignantly and tangibly than most. In July, thanks to the many efforts and encouragement of Homeless Garden Project Board Member Dana Rhine, I had the great pleasure of making a full-day field trip to the Homeless Garden Project in Santa Cruz, California, where for 30 years a team of dedicated citizens and professionals have been putting the diverse lessons and heart of gardening to work to help offset the many challenges of homelessness in our world. John traveled with me and through the course of the day, we joined morning circle time with the staff and trainees, toured the current garden – full of flowers and fruit, migrating monarchs, seasonal vegetables and an abundance of fresh air, a stone’s throw from the ocean. I had the good fortune to speak with all the people there in the Homeless Garden Project working Farm that day – from long-time trainees to new ones - timidly, skeptically, hopefully - looking into the program; from the volunteer cook who every Tuesday brings the staff and trainees a morning snack and then prepares a hearty lunch for them to share together family-style, to the full -time year-round staff, to CSA shareholders – and you will hear a bit from all of them in this episode. Throughout, Executive Director Darrie Ganzhorn and others speak a lot about "structure” - and the symbolic importance of structure is not lost on me. Structure is simultaneously the form of a physical home, a container for and within our gardens, a scaffolding on which we try to build our days, our families, and our lives. The layers of language – such as the denotation and connotation of structure – comes up for me here. How important it is that we understand the impact of all of our words – how certain words or phrases, when we unpack them or really hear them – for instance the difference between hearing “homeless person” versus “person experiencing homelessness” - changes the power and the emphasis completely. It is never too late to listen to and hear our own word choices more clearly – how they confer dignity, respect, and equity, versus not doing any these things. How we tend our words is a direct manifestation of how we tend ourselves, our own gardens, and one another. The Homeless Garden Project is modeling structure and structural integrity - how we support, shelter, and hold each other up in the world. It is never too late to grow a better world. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week we kick off October with a dive into creativity – the way gardeners harness it, riff off it, and share its results forward with the larger world – and I am so pleased that our first creative in this exploration is the potter Frances Palmer, a previous guest on the program, one of the 75 women featured in my book The Earth in Her Hands, and a fantastic inspiration for any gardener maker out there. In a world that needs a great deal from us right now, we can almost never go wrong by igniting our creativity. Frances is a gardener, a knitter, a cook, a bee-keeper, and a businesswoman. Her one of a kind hand made pottery is a joy to the eye, the hands, and the heart – as full of personality as it is functional and beloved around the world. Thirty years into her career, her first book – Frances Palmer: Life in the Studio inspiration and lessons on creativity publishes October 6th by Artisan Press. She joins me this week from her studio in Connecticut. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Camilla Jorvad is a photographer, a gardener, a mental health and rewilding habitat gardening advocate based on the Danish Island of Aero. Her home-farm shared with her husband and children is known as Sigridsminde – meaning in memory of Sigrid – the gardener who first established a garden on this coastal bluff before her father and mother-in-law took on its care, prior to Camilla and her family partnering with the land soon after the birth of their eldest child. The partnership led to a deeper understanding and measurement of health - physical and mental - for Camilla, the land, and her family of humans and more-than-humans. Listen in. It is a story of restoration, redemption and trusting the true nature of our places and our selves. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Most gardens, gardeners, and gardening seasons are deeply informed first and foremost by a deep love of PLANTS. Of space, and design, and color, and food, and refuge and beauty, YES, but for many of us it all starts with a love of plants. This week on Cultivating Place, we’re joined by an international gardener, designer, and horticulturist Wambui Ippolito - tracing the history of our own plant love, and the legacies and deeply human histories of the plants we all love. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Dustin Gimbel is a landscape designer and large scale outdoor ceramic artist inspired by the botanical world and based in Southern California. In a new episode in our ongoing series about the art of the garden and art in the garden, I am pleased to welcome Dustin this week to share more about his journey working his way through school and some notable internships to this summer installing his first public exhibitions at the Sherman Library and Gardens in Corona Del Mar and the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek. Art mirrors nature is some interesting and unexpected ways! 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In this very unusual back-to-school season here in the US, we’re joined this week by Julie Cerny a gardener, an outdoor enthusiast, and educator. Her new book, The Little Gardener: Helping Children Connect with the Natural World (out now from Princeton Architectural Press) provides some unusual and inspirational guidance for parents, grandparents, caregivers, and educators who want to help children explore the natural world through gardening. Part how-to, part teaching tool, and part inspiration, The Little Gardener shows gardeners of all ages how to envision and build their garden together by making the process an adventure to be treasured, with much to learn along the way. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place we’re focused on growing food and community when we’re joined by Patricia Spence, President and CEO of the Urban Farming Institute of Boston, working to grow more food, train more farmers, and build healthier communities everywhere. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Toni Gattone is a businesswoman, a master gardener, and a lifelong gardener of Italian descent. After struggling herself with a bad back, and the limitations this put on her as an active human and gardener, she began to research the idea of adaptive gardening. Based on all that she discovered and her own experiments and adaptations in her small Bay area garden that she shares with her husband, she wrote: “The Lifelong Gardener – Garden With Ease and Joy at Any Age” (Timber Press, 2019). In the late stages of our current growing season here in the Northern Hemisphere, and in my own mid-to-late middle age, I figure there is never a better time than now to learn more about adapting to the realities of where we are, who we are, and how to make the best of both. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Farmer Meg is an urban beekeeper turned flower and market grower turned farmer. Meg has been farming in NJ and NY city and state for almost a decade. Just over two years ago, she and her partner Neil migrated to upper Schoharie County NY to being to establish Meg’s dream homestead on a former dairy farm. Biscuitwood Farm grows cut flowers, raises egg-layers on pasture, breeds Red Wattle pigs, and has small-scale soap enterprise wit their dairy goats. She is instrumental to a regionally based collaborative known the 607 CSA, and she believes firmly in abundance, the generosity of the garden, and that collaborative growing is the future. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place we get a booster shot of energy and inspiration as we enter the dog days of summer when we’re joined by Colah B. Tawkin – the voice and vibrant life force and distinctive VOICE of the Black in the Garden podcast - where Black Culture Meets Horticulture. You will not want to miss her - 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Jasna Guy is an artist whose visionary and liminal work is based in close observation of the plants and pollinators – specifically bees – of her garden and natural environments. Her ethereal representations bring heightened understanding and awareness to the miraculous life processes - like bee and flower pollination and pollinator co-evolution and mutual interdependence - going on around us everyday everywhere. 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 Play, and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

In the throes of high summer, Cultivating Place continues to explore the fruits of the imaginative nature of the garden. We begin a two-part series on visual artists deriving their inspiration from the garden and its diverse life, and going from there. Jennifer is joined this week by the Australian three-dimensional paper artist Colleen Southwell whose finely drawn, detailed, and designed compositions pull from the natural and the fantastical. Part herbarium or entomological specimen displays, part pure imagination, whimsy and fine, fine handwork. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

A good read often plumbs the depths of imagination, for Matthew Hall - gardener & researcher at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand – it’s the Imagination of Plants he’s interested in, especially how and why plants are or are not positioned as central characters in the most important cultural narratives and mythologies of societies across time and place. Matthew joins Cultivating Place this week to explore Botanical Mythology. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week on Cultivating Place we take a summer amble with British-based Californian Kathryn Aalto – a historian, designer, and writer whose most recent book Writing Wild: Women Poets, Ramblers, and Mavericks offers all of us some much needed outdoor adventure with some admirable women of words. 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 Play and Stitcher. To read more and for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.