Cultivating Place

Irish plantswoman Mary Reynolds has cultivated a deep love of her place in the mountains of Wicklow, Ireland - in all its complexity and mystery. As a plantswoman and guardian/gardener - she listens to her place and works in partnership with her place to move us all forward towards a better world. Mary is a nature activist, a self-described reformed Landscape Designer, the author of "The Garden Awakening", and the inspiration behind the 2015 movie Dare to be Wild – Cultivating Place revisits this BEST OF episode in celebration of NSPR’s Fall Membership Drive. 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.

Gardening is a specifically human endeavor. It is a characterizing feature of our species, fairly well documented throughout our evolution. Which fascinates me. And each of us come to this endeavor for our own reasons and needs – sometimes very practical, sometimes very esthetic, sometimes spiritual. Our gardens are like some larger version of our very fingerprints. Today Cultivating Place welcomes a home gardening member of the so called “millennial” generation, and self-described Urban Homesteader. Despite having grown up around gardening, she did not begin to really absorb its importance and her own attraction to it until her own early adulthood. Today, she shares with us her journey so far, some of the lessons and highlights, her first experience leaving an established garden, and the opportunities presenting themselves to her in her new garden. Melissa Keyser, along with her husband Matt, have recently relocated from Santa Rosa, CA to Sacramento, CA. After four years spent building and establishing what they imagined to be their “forever home,” their journey has taken a twist. She is blogs about their pursuit of a sustainable urban homesteading life at sweetbeegarden.com. Listening to the story of Melissa and Matt’s gardening and homesteading journey I am struck by a couple of things – the first being that there is little new under the sun, but that the fun part is often part and parcel of discovering and learning some of these things for ourselves. The second thing I am struck by is hope. Each generation of horticulturists, gardeners and plant lovers will necessarily respond to the prevailing social, cultural, economic and political winds of their own moment in time, and for me there is beauty, taste and hope in their resourcefulness and resilience in doing just this.

Sometimes when you use the word garden – people immediately conjure up images of the ornamental perennial border. Other people, however, conjure up colorful visions of the summer vegetable garden – beginning to groan this time of year under the abundance and literal weight of the summer harvest of tomatoes, peppers, corn, zucchini and so on. Throughout history, these two distinct kinds of gardens – let’s call them the ornamental garden on one hand and the edible garden on the other – have had lots of overlap sometimes inadvertently and sometimes very intentionally. Who among us has not noted the beauty of the blossoms on any fruit tree, the freshness of the first peas of spring, or comforting shape and color of the apples of autumn? And who does not fully appreciate the double duty of some of our flowers and flowering plants – roses and salvias and nasturtiums, for example, in being both edible and beautiful? Today we are joined by Stefani Bittner, co-owner with fellow plantperson, floral and garden designer Alethea Harampolis of Homestead Design Collective based in the San Francisco Bay Area. They design gardens that are both beautiful and incorporate edible plants throughout. Stefani is co-author with fellow edible garden designer, Leslie Bennett, of “The Beautiful Edible Garden” (2013, Ten Speed Press). In February of 2017 Ten Speed Press will publish a book co-authored by both Stefani and Alethea entitled “Harvest.”

The famous British gardener and writer Vita Sackville-West stated that no room is ever complete without flowers. This week on Cultivating Place we explore this idea with Vietnamese-born New York Based photographer and writer Ngoc Minh Ngo. Her most recent book “In Bloom – Creating and Living with Flowers” beautifully portrays the imaginative and surprising ways in which 11 different artists and thinkers around the world weave their love of flowers into their everyday lives.

Emily Dickinson references plants, flowers, nature or her garden in more than one-third of her known poems, with many more references in her extensive correspondences with family and friends. Flowers and nature provided her with both “inspiration and companionship.” In celebration of the poet’s upcoming birthday, this week on Cultivating Place we’re joined by Jane Wald, executive director of the Emily Dickinson Museum, who’s overseeing current research and restoration of the Dickinson’s historic home garden and conservatory. Join us!