Cultivating Place Jennifer Jewell / Cultivating Place

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.

Happy Women’s History Month!

To kick Women’s History Month off on Cultivating Place, we visit with the woman known as the Queen of Herbs, Jekka McVicar of Jekka’s Herb Farm in the UK this week. Her long and notable career has brought the gardened world the best the herbs of the world have to offer to our gardens, to our environments, to our kitchens, and to our souls.

In recognition of her herbal research, plant breeding, garden designing, and advocacy around the many merits of all manner of herbs to the garden world these past 40 years, Jekka has been awarded the Victoria Medal of Honour in Horticulture by the Royal Horticultural Society and the Gardeners Media Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as 62 RHS Gold Medals.

At Jekka’s Herb Farm and Herbetum in South Gloucestershire, she displays her life’s collection of more than 600 culinary, medicinal, pollinator-supporting, and beautiful herbs. I was honored to profile Jekka in my 2020 book, The Earth In Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants, as one of the women leaders in our horticultural world who have expanded and elevated the way we think and talk about gardening. Jekka’s newest book, 100 Herbs to Grow A Comprehensive Guide to the Best Culinary and Medicinal Herbs publishes from Quadrille Press in march of 2024. Savor!

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.