A year full of flowers (in pots!), with the UK's Sarah Raven

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 show—once again—that all of life (and the histories of humans with their plants in their places) can be found in the garden if we’re 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.

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: “The garden is where we meditate, harvest our seeds and learn about Mother Nature’s 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 – and every rower that comes after us.” Through 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.

To kick off May, looking forward to Mother’s Day, Graduations, and the promise of Summer Gardening in general here in the US, this week we go all in for flowers in pots! with one of the world’s bright gardens and floral stars: Sarah Raven. Her newest book: A Year Full of Pots Container Flowers for All Seasons (Bloomsbury Press, 2024) notes that pots in the garden are like "bubbles in a glass of champagne. In the past 25 years, Sarah has been a leadership voice in beautiful and productive gardening through her trial and research garden at Perch Hill, her many books and in-person educational offerings, and now through her podcast: Grow, Cook, Eat, Arrange. What could be a better way to welcome May? 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.

The third week of April is California Native Plant week, this year being celebrated by the California Native Plant Society via 8 days of action in honor and protection of our native plant diversity. Our celebratory action item here at Cultivating Place is being in conversation this week with Aaron Sims, Director of the Rare Plant Program for CNPS. 2024 year marks the 50th anniversary of the CNPS Rare Plant Inventory, tracking and analyzing rare plants and their status across the floristic province to help fight extinction (and subsequent biodiversity loss), to engage citizen scientists, including gardeners, across the state, and to inform land use decisions statewide. Along with the beauty, joy, and life sustaining qualities of our native plant flora whereever we might live and garden, that is all worth celebrating. Happy Native Plant (rare and common) Gardening to you - 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 for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

Following on from native plant week, this week we revisit a BEST OF conversation about some of our favorite native plant visitors: our native bumble bees. Bumble bee conservation has recently had some good news: the Xerces Society recently kicked off their newest Bumble Bee Atlas project, this time in the US Midwest. With that in mind, please enjoy our conversation from 2023 with Leif Richardson, Conservation Biologist with the Xerces Society, sharing so much about conservation, about bumble bees, about the nation-wide Bumble Bee Atlas projects generally, and his spearheading of the California Bumble Bee Atlas.

Hummingbirds are a beloved and charismatic creature of the America’s, the more than 350 species of hummingbirds have coevolved with the flora of the Americas for millions of years. For this fourth week in our series of 5 episodes on our gardens as important habitat and we gardeners as important stewards of land and biodiversity, we check in on the state of things for the Hummingbird. Cultivating Place is joined in this by Dr. Susan Wethington, research scientist, Program Developer and Executive Director of the Hummingbird Monitoring Network, based in Arizona. "Hummingbirds are unique in that every culture that lives with hummingbirds has a positive interaction with hummingbirds and it seems to me that if we can maintain hummingbird diversity in this world - because we all love them - then we have a chance to maintain biodiversity in other species that are so critical in our functioning natural world. That if we can let one animal into our hearts - the others can follow." Dr. Susan Wethington, Executive Director, The Hummingbird Network The hummingbirds are among our smallest of birds, but our largest – and of course avian – pollinators. These little birds, many of which migrate vast distances, need to drink more than their body weight in nectar every day, and are voracious and effective insectivore. Having co-evolved with the native flora of the Americans – including with the vast diversity of salvias, penstemons, lobelia, agastache, manzanitas, honeysuckles and more – they love nothing more than beautiful flowering native or other nectar/pollen rich plants in our gardens to help them on their way. 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 for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

This week, with Spring and seeding season fully underway—indoors and out—we speak with gardener entrepreneur Anne Fletcher of Orta Kitchen Gardens, creators of non-toxic ceramic, self-watering Orta seed pots. These pots' material lives help eliminate plastic right from the start in your plants’ growing lives, seeding more circularity into our garden lives! They have a seed club, too….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 for many more photos please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.

To round out Women’s History Month in style, this week, we are back in conversation with Leslie Bennett, an Oakland, CA-based landscape designer who creates gardens that help to nourish and tell the story of who we are, individually and communally. Leslie lives out her horticultural and cultural ethos in her landscape design work with Pine House Edible Gardens and Black Sanctuary Gardens, as well as in her writing and advocacy. Her newest book, Garden Wonderland, written in collaboration with Julie Chai and photographed by Rachel Weill, will be published on April 2nd from Ten Speed Press.  Garden Wonderland brings together all of Leslie’s wisdom, spirit, experience, and paradigm-shifting passions while also bringing together the power of women and gardens. 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.

The Great Unlawning of America has been underway for some time now, and as we have just crossed the threshold of the spring equinox earlier this week, I want to celebrate how far we have come and give us all a forceful nudge to help us stay the path with the many millions of acres of the progress we have to go in this work to trade lifeless monoculture chemically dependent lawns for a happy healthy habitat. This work was given a beautiful boost in 2020 with the publication of Owen Wormser’s book Lawns into Meadows, Growing a Regenerative Landscape (updated second edition out now in paperback!) Owen is a gardener, designer, author and ecological gardening advocate working under the name of Abound Design, based in Western Massachusetts. In honor of the vernal equinox pulling us into the light, enjoy this conversation with Owen Wormser. 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.

The combining of sculpture and gardens dates back centuries if not millennia, and there are few public gardens I know of that do not incorporate sculpture into their aesthetics and identity at some point. This week we are in conversation with an exemplary public garden, whose identity grows out of this pairing: the art of horticulture and the art of sculpture. The Frederik Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park in Grand Rapids, Michigan is “proudly ranked as one of the top 45 most visited museums in the world” and their award winning gardens “showcase over 200 captivating sculptures,” inviting visitor to experience what they see as the “perfect blend of art and nature.” We’re joined this week by Steve LaWarre, the Vice President of Horticulture at Frederick Meijer Gardens and Sculpture Park to share more. 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.