Cultivating Place
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. Take a listen.
Episodes
July 24, 2025 • 60 mins
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. ...
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July 17, 2025 • 54 mins
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 programmi...
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July 10, 2025 • 64 mins
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...
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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.
...
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June 26, 2025 • 54 mins
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 al...
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June 19, 2025 • 64 mins
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—t...
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June 12, 2025 • 77 mins
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...
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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, b...
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May 29, 2025 • 67 mins
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 attitu...
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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 he...
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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 ...
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May 8, 2025 • 61 mins
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 boa...
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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 steer...
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April 24, 2025 • 61 mins
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 - Moder...
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April 17, 2025 • 60 mins
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 o...
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April 10, 2025 • 59 mins
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 l...
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April 2, 2025 • 65 mins
You might remember Cultivating Place's first conversation with Iowa-based plantsman, Kelly D. Norris, back in 2021, in celebration of his book New Naturalism, designing and planting a resilient, ecologically vibrant home garden. And we’re so pleased to get him back this week in conversation with CP Guest Host Ben Futa to talk more about this current moment in naturalistic design, and Kelly’s newest and very useful book: Your Natura...
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This week on Cultivating Place, guest host Abra Lee is in conversation with a horticultural leader with big IDEAs. Mae Lin Plummer is the Director of the IDEA Center for Public Gardens in Denver Colorado.
Mae Lin’s journey into gardening started in her backyard in Charlotte, NC where she simply wanted "a pretty place to throw parties." That blossomed into a full-on plant obsession and a major career shift—from banking to horticult...
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Happy Spring Equinox!
To welcome Spring – especially this exact Spring in the US - practicing re-enchantment in our world seemed exactly the right focus. I think this is part of what Gardeners do: practice enchantment or love with the natural world we care for.
We’re in conversation this week with Brooke Williams: writer, naturalist, amateur conservation ecologist, thinker, observer, and walker. Based in the Great Salt Lake regio...
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March 12, 2025 • 65 mins
Tess Taylor is a self-described Poet Gardener – and if there is ever a season to feel the poetry of life in the garden and with the plants in every cell of your body, it’s springtime! An award-winning poet with many collection titles to her name and editor of the life-supporting anthology Leaning Toward Light Poems for Gardens and the Hands that Tend Them, Tess is also the Poet Laureate of El Cerrito, California.
In honor of Women...
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