Join creator, writer, and host of Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden, Jennifer Jewell, and Native Plant Trust CEO Tim Johnson as they explore an expansive model for engaging with native plants, one that includes numerous access points for people of all interests and needs to see native plants as assets and allies in their lives. Jennifer will also discuss What We Sow and the process of developing a cohosting model for Cultivating Place. The event takes place July 11 from 7 – 8 at The Foundry, 101 Rogers Street in Cambridge. Free, but donations in any amount encouraged. For more information and to register, visit https://www.nativeplanttrust.org/events/jennifer-jewell-and-tim-johnson-a-fireside-chat-class/
Jennifer Jewell, Creator and Host of Cultivating Places, will present a free Grow Native Massachusetts webinar on April 9 at 7 pm as part of Grow Native’s Evenings with Experts series. Gardeners are powerful agents of change; the landscapes we steward can impact climate change, habitat loss, and more. Jennifer Jewell will explore this power through the lens of the ecology, cultural history, and industry surrounding seeds, a story that holds both cautionary tales and guiding lights as we seek to effect positive change. https://grownativemass.org/Our-Programs/calendar
In her American Horticultural Society online presentation on March 11 at 2 pm Eastern, Jennifer Jewell will explore the philosophy of Cultivating Place, her national, public radio program and international podcast, based on the belief that gardens/gardeners are powerful agents and spaces for potentially positive change in our world, helping to address challenges as wide ranging as climate change, habitat loss, cultural polarization, and individual and communal health and being. She will explore how this power of gardens and gardeners can be viewed through a lens of seeds, and the general state of seeds in our gardened lives: how they grow, where they grow, who grows them, who sells and/or controls them, and their care up and down the seedsheds of our world. Jewell will walk us through examples taken from her daily life, her research, and interviews over the past decade with seed keepers as synthesized in her newest book What We Sow, On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (2023). Register at https://ahsgardening.org/lifelong-learning-2/what-we-sow-the-personal-ecological-and-cultural-significance-of-seeds/
Jennifer Jewell is the host of the national award-winning weekly public radio program and podcast Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden. She is the author of The Earth in Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants (Timber Press in 2020), and Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast(Timber Press, May 2021). Her third book, What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds, was published by Timber Press in 2023. Jewell’s greatest passion is elevating the way we think and talk about gardening, the empowerment of gardeners, and the possibility inherent in the intersection between places, environments, cultures, individuals, and the gardens that bring them together beautifully – for the better of all the lives on this generous planet.
The American Horticultural Society will present an online event on November 9 at 2 Eastern. Native plants offer beauty and critical habitat for wildlife while solving landscape problems and promoting regional charm. We’ll explore their benefits and how to use them effectively by understanding garden ecology. Considerations for plant selection, as well as design and stewardship tips using examples from Texas, will fortify you with knowledge to successfully cultivate these plants in traditional or unexpected ways. $30 AHS members, $36 nonmembers. Register at www.ahsgardening.org
Andrea DeLong-Amaya is the Director of Horticulture for the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center’s gardens and nursery programs. With nearly 30 years of experience with native plants in horticulture, ecology, and garden design, she also teaches classes and writes for numerous gardening publications including Taunton’s Fine Gardening, American Public Gardens Association’s Public Garden, and Texas Gardener and Wildflower (the Center’s member magazine). DeLong-Amaya was featured in Jennifer Jewell’s podcast, Cultivating Place, and in her book, The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants.
We’re tidying up our gardens as we await a cool fall breeze. Then, the brilliant colors of changing leaves start to appear. Autumn is a stunning season, but it’s also a messy one with wilted plants, overgrown weeds and fallen leaves. So, what is a gardener to do? Fall clean-up seems like a lot of work, but it’s actually quite manageable. Public gardening expert Karen Daubmann will guide you through a list of to-do’s to keep your garden in peak condition all year-round. The online presentation takes place October 20 from noon – one pm Eastern.
Karen Daubmann is committed to creating effective and longstanding change to public gardens throughout her 25-year career. She joined Massachusetts Horticultural Society (MHS) in March 2022, where she brings her experience in advancing the operational and planning scale of public gardens. In the development and execution of exhibitions that have welcomed hundreds of thousands of visitors, Daubmann focuses her work on encouraging guests to connect and interact with gardens through art, nature and culture. Prior to joining MHS, she worked for 14 years at the New York Botanical Garden, culminating in her position as vice president for exhibitions and audience engagement. She has been featured in Jennifer Jewell’s The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plantsand has contributed essays for Kusama: Cosmic Nature, 2021 and Frida Kahlo’s Garden, 2015. Daubmann lives and gardens with her husband Matt and dog Klaus in coastal Rhode Island.
This event is presented by GBH in partnership with Massachusetts Horticultural Society. Register HERE.
The Garden Futures Summitis a two-day, in-person event that looks to sustain the remarkable passion and interest in gardening today by presenting a selection of the most exciting ideas shaping the future of gardens and society at large. The Summit, on September 29th and 30th, will focus on three essential topics within contemporary gardening: environment, community, and culture.
On the first day of the Summit, to be held at The New York Botanical Garden, more than a dozen influential speakers from across the gardening world will participate in sessions organized around the Summit topics. They will discuss the extraordinary potential of gardens and gardening to improve our physical, cultural, and emotional health and well-being.
On the second day of the Summit, attendees will be treated to exclusive experiences at both private and public gardens throughout New York City and the greater metropolitan area that embody the forward-thinking and transformative potential in gardens today. Tours will be announced later this summer.
The breadth of speakers at the Summit and the combination of talks and tours will be of interest to all gardeners, designers, architects, and students who are passionate about gardens and their enormous potential in society. The Keynote Address will be given by Lady Isabella Tree (pictured below) on The Book of Wilding – A Practical Guide to Rewilding Big and Small. Isabella Tree is an award-winning journalist and author of five books. Her first best-selling book, Wilding, tells the story of the daring wildlife experiment she began in 2000: rewilding her and her husband Charlie Burrell’s 3,500 acres of unprofitable farmland at Knepp Estate in West Sussex, UK. In less than twenty years their degraded land has become a functioning ecosystem again, wildlife has rocketed, and numerous endangered species have made Knepp their home. What has happened at Knepp challenges conventional ideas about nature, wildlife, and how we manage and envisage our land. It reveals the potential for the landscapes of the future. Isabella also writes for The Guardian, National GeographicMagazine, and Granta.
Other speakers include Edwina von Gal, founder of The Perfect Earth Project. Edwina von Galis a leading voice in sustainable gardening and landscape design. She founded the Perfect Earth Project in 2013 to promote nature-based, toxic-free land care for the health of people, their pets, and the planet. As principal of her eponymous landscape design firm since 1984, Edwina creates landscapes with a focus on simplicity and sustainability for private and public clients around the world. Joining her as session speakers will be Horatio Joyce of The Garden Conservancy, Vanessa Keith of StudioTEKA Design, Jeff Lorenz of Refugia Design, and Rebecca McMackin, horticulturist and garden designer.
You will also have the opportunity to hear Jennifer Jewell, Radio Host and Author of Cultivating Place. This year, Jewell was awarded the American Horticultural Society’s Great Gardener Morrison Award for outstanding horticultural communication. Her third book, What We Sow, On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seedswill be published in September. On the topic of Community, session speakers will include Ivi Diamantopoulou, Jaffer Kolb, and Sam Stewart-Halevy of New Affiliates, Adam Greenspan of PWP Landscape Architects, Peter Lefkovits of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, and Nicole Thomas of Urban Health Lab.
In another thread, horticulture and culture are on a collision course—and that’s a good thing. Forgotten garden histories, the challenges of preserving mid-century landscapes, and the growing engagement of the visual arts with the natural environment are the animating topics in a session to be led by Melissa Chiu. She is director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the national museum of modern and contemporary art. Dr. Chiu’s current organizational focus is transforming the Hirshhorn into a 21st-century institution through the revitalization of the museum’s campus, including a new design for the Hirshhorn’s Sculpture Garden by artist and architect Hiroshi Sugimoto. Joining Melissa will be Cindy Brockway of The Trustees of Reservations, David Godshall of Terremoto of LA, Abra Lee, horticulturist and historian, and Brent Leggs of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund.
How A Place-Based Garden Culture of Care Strengthens Places and Their People: This program will explore the philosophy of the Cultivating Place podcast that gardens/gardeners are powerful spaces and agents for potentially positive change in our world, helping to address challenges as wide ranging as climate change, resource use, habitat and biodiversity loss, cultural polarization/marginalization, and individual and communal health and being, as exemplified by the important guests on Jennifer Jewell’s podcasts and the innovative place-based gardens that celebrate specifically western landscapes in the book Under Western Skies. Jennifer Jewell is the host of the national, award-winning weekly public radio program and podcast Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden. She is the author of award-winning The Earth in Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants (Timber Press 2020), and Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press 2021). Her greatest passion is elevating the way we think and talk about gardening, the empowerment of gardeners, and the possibility inherent in the intersections between our places, our cultures, and our gardens.
Lessons in Built Ecology Brooklyn Bridge Park, an 85 acre, organic park in the middle of New York City, was created with ecology in mind. The park’s award-winning piers include top-notch recreation and entertainment — from opera to outdoor films, all of it beautifully designed. But the piers also contain native woodlands, freshwater wetlands, salt marshes, and numerous meadows. These areas echo native ecosystems and are managed with an emphasis on wildlife habitat. This talk will encompass the many ecological strategies employed by the park’s designers, as well as the management techniques park staff have developed to cultivate biodiversity. Topics will include pragmatic strategies for encouraging ecologically beneficial landscapes.
Rebecca McMackin is an ecologically obsessed horticulturist. She is Director of Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park where she oversees 85 acres of diverse parkland. These meadows, forests, salt marshes and freshwater wetlands are managed with the dual purposes of cultivating, beautifying and encouraging biodiversity, all within the largest city in the country. In her imaginary free time, Rebecca lectures, writes, and designs the occasional garden. Her writing has been published in The New York Times, the Landscape Institute, and the Ecological Landscape Alliance.
Sam Hoadley is the Horticultural Research Manager at Mt. Cuba Center. His work includes evaluating native plant species, old and new cultivars, as well as hybrids in Mt. Cuba’s Trial Garden. Using data collected and analyzed over a three-year period, a research report is published outlining top-performing plants for the Mid-Atlantic region. This information is designed to inform consumers and home gardeners as well as professionals in the horticultural and nursery industries about the ecological benefits and attributes of the native plants in our trials. His presentation will focus on knockout native species and cultivars researched at the Mt Cuba Center. Sam received a degree in Sustainable Landscape Horticulture from the University of Vermont.
Pete Grima is a Service Forester with the Massachusetts Department of Conservation & Recreation covering northern Berkshire County, where he helps landowners make informed decisions about their forests. He is also an avid botanist responsible for many new and novel botanical discoveries in the Berkshires, and he is a co-author of the recently published Vascular Flora of Franklin County, Massachusetts. Using a recent landowner interaction from his Service Forestry work as a case study, Pete’s presentation will describe the process of envisioning a future forest to be planted in an old field, with a mind towards carbon storage and climate resilience.
This virtual Author Talk is presented in collaboration with Berkshire Botanical Garden and Timber Press, an imprint of Workman Publishing. All books will be available for purchase through Tower Hill’s Garden Shop. A link to the Zoom webinar will be sent after registration in the confirmation email. This Author Talk will only be available live. It will not be recorded. Tuesday, May 18, 2021 6-7 PM. Webinar only: $10 members, $12 nonmembers. With signed book, $60 members, $62 nonmembers. Register at www.towerhillbg.org
In her presentation, Jennifer Jewell will explore the philosophy of her Cultivating Place podcast that gardeners and gardens are potentially powerful agents and spaces for positive change in our world, helping to address challenges as wide ranging as climate change, habitat loss, cultural polarization and individual and communal health and well-being. She will go on to explore how this power of gardens and gardeners is exemplified in the beautiful and innovative place-based gardens that celebrate western landscapes in the her book, Under Western Skies; Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press, May 11, 2021) – with striking photography by Caitlin Atkinson.
Jennifer Jewell is the host of the national award-winning weekly public radio program and podcast Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden. She is the author of The Earth in Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants (Timber Press in 2020), and Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press, May 2021). Her greatest passion is elevating the way we think and talk about gardening, the empowerment of gardeners and the possibility inherent in the intersection between culture and gardens.
In her new book, Under Western Skies: Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press, April 2021), author Jennifer Jewell takes us on a journey to 36 gardens that celebrate the diverse landscapes of the western United States, each of which reflects the very soul of the land on which they grow.
In this April 1 Garden Conservancy webinar, Jennifer will be joined by Wyllie Roderick, one of the garden designers featured in her book, to discuss these gardens, which underscore the strong relationship between garden and place. Wyllie Roderick is an award-winning landscape architect and founding principal of Surfacedesign, Inc. He brings a comprehensive knowledge of plants and years of experience working on both public and private projects. Leading the office’s residential, estate and vineyard design efforts, Roderick integrates his passion for craft and vast knowledge of material construction to inform all phases of the design process.
Jennifer Jewell is the creator and host of public radio’s award-winning weekly program and podcast, Cultivating Place, Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden.She lives and gardens in interior Northern California; The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants(Timber Press, March 2020) was her first book. Her second, in collaboration with photographer Caitlin Atkinson, Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific, is due out from Timber Press in late April 2021.
Garden Conservancy educational programs are made possible in part by the generous support of the Coleman and Susan Burke Distinguished Lecture Fund, Lenhardt Education Fund, and the Celia Hegyi Matching Grant, with additional support from Ritchie Battle, Mrs. Camille Butrus, Melissa and John Ceriale, and Susan and William McKinley.
Enjoy a Berkshire Botanical Garden online lecture and Q&A sessionon September 11 at 6 pm with author Jennifer Jewell, about her new book The Earthin Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants, available for purchase through BBG’s online shop. Focus in a wholly unique way on how horticulture intersects with our everyday world and on women whose work has enriched and expanded these intersections in the last 25 years. The Earth in Her Hands explores and celebrates how the plant world is improved by greater representation of women and by diversity amongst those women. It chronicles how working in the world of plants is a more viable and creative career path for women than ever before and how the plant-work world is demonstrating greater social and environmental responsibility, in large part due to women’s contributions. These profiles of women from a half a dozen different countries, doing innovative work in all horticultural fields, point to larger issues and shifts in our world. These women’s diverse backgrounds and identities challenge preconceived notions of what horticulturalists and gardeners look like, while their work illustrates how many challenges of our world can be met through cultivating an interdependence with plants.
Jennifer Jewell is the creator and host of Cultivating Place, an award-winning public radio program and podcast on natural history and the human impulse to garden.
