Cultivating Place

Cultivating Place well so often comes down to sharing the abundance of growing from a place of love and a strong sense of community and home. Susan Greutman is the founder and owner of Sunchoke Farms, an urban homestead-turned-family farm in South Bend, Indiana, growing chemical-free produce on formerly vacant city lots. Susan has been farming since 2018 and also happens to be growing right in Ben Futa and Botany's neighborhood. Their conversation is filled with so many lessons derived from all of this abundance of place, and is the second in Ben’s Cultivating South Bend series, leading up to th...

Amanda Hannah is the Director of Botanical Garden Horticulture at Holden Forests & Gardens in Cleveland, Ohio. Amanda’s path into horticulture has taken her from the agricultural landscapes of Idaho and Utah to studying in Argentina, living in Seattle, and moving through the Longwood Fellows Program. This week, Amanda and Cultivating Place Host, Abra Lee, dive into plants, the role of public gardens, conservation, and how following an unexpected passion can transform the course of a life. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to su...

We are finally at peak daylight and the Summer Solstice–which officially takes place June 21st this year. Summer speaks of garden parties and holidays at the beach, or lake, by rivers, or in the mountains. Summer speaks directly to our connection to the wild places we love and perhaps long for– and which, through our gardens, can be right here at home. SummerHome Garden in Denver, CO, is a playful and powerful twist on the idea that our gardens can be our summer homes. Lisa Negri of SummerHome Garden joins us this week to share more. Listen in! Cultivating Plac...

The conservation of biodiversity writ large is directly tied to the conservation of native bees, crucial pollinators in our cultivated and wildland ecosystems across most regions of the world. This week, we look forward to International Pollinator Week, which always falls in the third week of June, tied to the summer solstice. We’re in conversation with Krystle Hickman, award-winning conservation photographer, author, artist, and National Geographic Explorer. Her passion is native bees wherever she finds them, starting in her home place of California. Known online as BeeSip, Krystle’s newest book, including her extraordinary photography, is The ABCs of Cali...

What makes a place a place, versus just any space? Tyler Kanchazeski is a sustainability advocate and the founder and owner of ReGen South Bend, an incremental development and community catalyst company based in the Near Northwest Neighborhood of South Bend, Indiana. Tyler brings business leadership, logistics, resiliency, and community experience to his work alongside neighbors to transform space into place, in order to cultivate people and their places well. Tyler joins Cultivating Place Host Ben Futa this week to share more. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and...

This week on Cultivating Place, public gardens as living classrooms, the quiet power of trees in city life, and how tending landscapes can cultivate resilience, curiosity, and belonging. Host Abra Lee is in conversation with Brent “Fig” Figlestahler, horticulturist, landscape architect, educator, and devoted steward of public green spaces from the cultivated collections and urban woodlands of Cylburn Arboretum Friends, to classrooms, community gardens, and neighborhoods across the city of Baltimore, Maryland. Fig shows what it means to care deeply for plants — and for the people and places connected to them. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We tha...

This week, we continue plumbing the potential of gardens and gardeners for growing a future we want to cultivate- for the benefit of all. In order to look forward, we look back to the radical plan of a 50-year-old intentionally-designed community and sustainability-oriented housing development, Village Homes, in Davis, California. Central to the intelligent design? You got it, Gardens and Green spaces at every turn, and accessible to all. With the community now celebrating its 50th year, Cultivating Place is joined by Carol Hillhouse, UC Davis Student Farm Associate Director Emeritus, and Robert Thayer, Landscape Architect, both Gardeners by nature...

Kate Brown is an MIT Distinguished Professor in the History of Science. Across her career, her research has sometimes inadvertently documented the impact of urban, often small and under-resourced gardens and gardeners in our world. Her new book, Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, compiles this research and her own lived experience of its truth and potential benefits. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for...

This week on Cultivating Place, we continue with our flower theme as we celebrate May, looking toward the most floral of celebrations, Mother’s Day in the US. We discuss not us as gardeners growing flowers, but rather, how flowers shape our world, our cultures, our economies, our thinking and outlooks. We're in conversation with Christin Geall, author of Cultivated: Elements of Floral Style. Her newest title is Flora Culture: How Flowers Shape our World. It’s a revealing and thought-provoking cultural compendium. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and...

Roses are one of those topics in the garden world: they can be polarizing or energizing. And yet, given that there are roses native to most environments of North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and humans have revered this family and genus and the hundreds of rose species for millennia, they can also be connective tissue for so much–generationally, culturally, environmentally, medicinally, and certainly, aesthetically. So do you love 'em, do you hate ‘em? Do you think they’re fussy, or old-school? Maybe. But in so many ways, they are a real deal OG garden staple. From beautiful flowers, medici...

This week, Cultivating Place host Abra Lee explores diplomacy and gardens. She’s in conversation with John Sonnier, Head Gardener at the British Ambassador's residence in Washington, D.C. There since 2009, John focuses on organic and sustainable methods of care AND he has created one of the United State’s most significant historic orchid collections. Orchids are known for their extraordinary forms, relationships, and resilience and John, a distinguished horticulturalist, artist, and self-taught orchidist, brings us into that world – sharing what it means to grow them, care for them, and stay curious about them over time. We consider how the enviro...

This week, when we think about Cultivating Place well, we get to the seed of the matter in conversation with the team at the Mid-Atlantic Regional Seed Bank, also known as MARSB. We’re in conversation with Ed Toth the Executive Director, and John Price, MARSB’s Associate Director and Native Seed Collection Coordinator. As a collective, MARSB is wisely managing and conserving its region’s wild seed resources, and encouraging the development of the sustainable and ethical Native Plant Material supply chain throughout the region – a gift to private and public landscapes and economies. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a do...

Chris Felhaber is a gardener, a husband, and a father. Now based in the Chicago area, Chris has worked in public horticulture in a variety of capacities and with well-known organizations, including with plantsman Roy Diblik in Wisconsin, at Chanticleer Garden outside of Philadelphia, with the Perennial Plant Association, and as the host of the Native Plant Podcast. After nearly 2 decades working with people and places of great privilege and with people and places who would like more gardens and more garden opportunities, Chris now understands that gardens are critical social infrastructure and that gardeners are public servant leaders whose...

Brenna Estrada is the owner and founder of Three Brothers Blooms, a flower farm located on 2.5 acres of Camano Island in the Pacific Northwest. Brenna is also the author of Pansies, How to Grow, Reimagine, and Create Beauty with Pansies and Violas, published by Timber Press just over a year ago. Brenna makes a compelling case for revisiting our relationship to pansies, and her book was CP Host Ben Futa's own gateway to growing nearly 1,000 plants from seed in 2026. Their conversation this week spans many topics, with pansies as a worthy and common thread. As happens often in this work...

Spring is, of course, perfect for some wild dreams about what we can and will sow in the seasons to come. With plants, and with ourselves. Jen Williams’ vision for her work as the founder of Wild Dreams Farm and Seed on Washington’s Vashon Island is to ensure abundance and biodiversity in our culture, and in our gardens, by growing and breeding open-pollinated vegetable, flower, and herb seeds that nourish our human and more-than-human communities. We revisit this best of conversation this week, just in time for some of our own wild dreaming. Cultivating Place now has a donate butt...

In honor of the Vernal Equinox, and the balance we long for, we are joined this week by humanist, conservationist, Professor, and writer in residence at the Harvard Divinity School, Terry Tempest Williams. From her 1991 classic, Refuge, An Unnatural History of Family & Place, published in 1991, to her newest title out now from Grove Atlantic, The Glorians, Visitations from the Holy Ordinary, and the more than 100 publications in between, Terry’s writing is grounded in her love of the landscapes of the U.S. West. Her love and her writings profoundly expand our love for and understanding of this whole world we c...

Spring is stirring, buds are swelling, and soil is warming. This week, we celebrate the joys of healthy living soil in conversation with Omar Al Shafie, co-founder of Northern California-based Teregen Ag, a purpose-driven, innovative soil and plant nutrient producer and researcher dedicated to advancing our collective transition toward sustainable, regenerative farming. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like...

This week on Cultivating Place, host Ben Futa is in conversation with John Little, an ecological designer and public horticulture advocate living and working in the UK. His firm, the Grass Roof Company, launched in 1998. Ever since, they have been expanding and broadening ideas around public plantings, habitat, and those who care for them. John's not-for-profit, Care, Not Capital, is training the next generation of public gardeners with the skills they need to fully serve, and support the public, in the work they do. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, a...

This week on Cultivating Place, Abra Lee is in conversation with Laverne Brockington and Vance Davis, great nieces of Annie Mae Vann Reid, an historic florist and entrepreneur based in Darlington, South Carolina. From the 1920s to the 1960s, Annie Mae tended a thriving floral business that grew out of her hobby flower garden, and grew her community with her.  For Laverne and Vance, their aunt's legacy is rooted not only in flowers but in faith and a deep commitment to community. Through dedication and vision, she nurtured spaces of learning, pride, and possibility through this groundbreaking work. The stories pa...

As the earliest signs of spring unfurl in the mild climates, think snowdrops, manzanita, the earliest narcissus, wild iris, and Daphne odora – hmmm, the earliest pollinators are paying even more attention than we are. This week, we learn more about some of our earliest and BEST native pollinating bees – the orchard mason bees. We’re in conversation with Thyra McElvie, who loves “these sweet little bees". And it was this love that brought her to gardening in her adulthood. Based in the Pacific Northwest, Thyra works with Rent Mason Bees, an organization that helps bring efficient, native, pollinating solitary bees, includin...

In these dark, cold days of February, when too much rain or snow, and WAY TO MUCH ICE, or not enough rain or snow, might be getting you down, we take this week, just in time for Valentine’s Day, to embrace, lean into, and love, the comforts of tea. We're in conversation with Michael Fritts, founder of Golden Feather Tea in Concow, CA, exploring some of the history and cultivation, the rituals, and the rewards (which are many) of tea. After more than 15 years at it, and despite massive losses to his garden and farm from the Camp Fire of...

Coming up this week on Cultivating Place, host Ben Futa is in conversation with artist & activist Gardener, Tanja Hollander. Tanja works with gardens, social practice, photography, video, and installation to understand how cultural and visual relationships help us make sense of our chaotic world. Very specifically, her Mourning Flowers and Ephemera projects bring awareness, often through flowers and communal acts of gardening, to the ripple effects of trauma and fear that communities sustain after acts of violence, specifically gun violence. In these chaotic and frequently violent times, we can all use some mourning to compost trauma into healthier minds, hearts, co...

It’s been a full year since the devastating fires in Los Angeles, CA. Many lives were lost, and many acres and homes were burned. Many gardens, cultivated spaces, and gardeners were profoundly affected. This week, Cultivating Place checks in with two humans who are cultivating their place with care in the wake of this catastrophe. Leigh Adams and Shawn Maestretti are Studio Petrichor, based in Los Angeles. They join us this week to share so much more. Listen in! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to...

This week, Cultivating Place welcomes Terry Richardson in conversation with Abra Lee. Terry is known to many as The Black Thumb: Orchid Care Made Simple, an intrepid, enthusiastic, and encouraging orchid rescuer, educator, and storyteller. Terry has helped thousands of people rethink what it means to care for plants, specifically orchids! Terry’s journey began not with expertise, but with curiosity and failure. He is a self-proclaimed “black thumb,” as opposed to the more well-known "green thumb". He began rescuing discarded orchids, specifically Phalaenopsis, and gradually learned how patience and consistency could revive even the most neglected plants. It’s a good w...

January is prime seed-dreaming and seed-catalogue season. With that in mind, we’re revisiting a favorite conversation all about generosity, mutual care, good seeds, and seed people. Who doesn’t need more of all those as we continue to lay the foundation for this new year? Ken Greene – who goes by K - is a seed person. He is the co-founder of the Hudson Valley Seed Library, which in 2004 became the first public library-based seed lending library in the US; in 2008, he went on to co-found with his partner Doug Muller, Hudson Valley Seed Company, a seed and art company focuse...

As we continue our new year, we’re once again gaining elevation and new, growing thinking. We’re in conversation with Jim Tolstrup, Executive Director of the High Plains Environmental Center in Loveland, Colorado, where, by development design, they caringly cultivate Suburbitat. Suburbitat is a land ethic, a mindset, and a book that all hold a vision of a built environment where suburbia and native ecosystems exist side by side and intertwined. It is magical in all seasons! And, we can all take notes. Join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the year...

In honor of the new year, fresh-faced and open-hearted in front of us, Abra Lee, Ben Futa, and Jennifer Jewell are together this week for a first-ever CP Host check-in. We’re chatting about what we’re looking back on, what we’re looking forward to, and what we’re looking to grow in 2026! Join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversa...

For our final Cultivating Place episode of 2025, Abra Lee is looking forward by looking back. She’s in conversation with Philip Norman, longtime curator at the Garden Museum in London. From New Zealand to London, Philips' is a life shaped by gardens. Happy Holidays and New Year! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these. The show is available as a po...

In honor of the Winter Solstice happening this coming weekend on December 21st at 10:03 AM Pacific, we celebrate land and place-based cultivation from a foundation of cultural and spiritual care leading the way. We’re joined in this by Dr. Don Hankins, Professor of Geography and Planning at California State University, Chico. Of Miwok ancestry, Don, for decades now, has focused on applied research of indigenous stewardship practices as a “keystone process to aid in conservation and management of resources”, particularly around the cultural use of fire and and conservation of water. Don has been involved in land management and conser...

This week on Cultivating Place we celebrate one woman’s long-standing and loving cultivation of place in rural New Jersey. Janet Mavec is the steward and student of Bird Haven Farm, which after many years of learning from and loving, she now celebrates in word and image in her new place-based memoir: Bird Haven Farm the Story of An Original American Garden, written by Janet and photographed by Ngoc Minh Ngo, out now from Rizzoli Press. This is a conversation about a beautiful, ecological, and intentional human and place collaboration to begin tying up the CP lessons of this season, an...

The Klamath Mountains are a rich site of diversity in Northern California and Southern Oregon, celebrated in Michael Kauffmann and Justin Garwood’s book The Klamath Mountains, a Natural History, from Kauffmann’s Back Country Press.  Kauffmann’s most recent book, co-written with Matt Ritter, is California Trees, was just awarded The National Outdoor Book Award, and in honor of the seeds of that book being planted by all that Back Country Press does in this world, this week we revisit the fertile Klamath Mountains and our last conversation with Michael and Justin Garwood! Enjoy! This week, we take a broader...

This week on Cultivating Place, we look towards the heart of the thankful season in memory of the enormous, fierce, and grateful soul of Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who passed from this world on October 20th, fighting for the beauty of the world right up to the end. In his honor, we revisit our 2021 conversation with him, focusing on the sacred in the everyday and in the seasonal.  Rabbi Waskow was the co-founder of The Shalom Center in Philadelphia, which equips spiritual leaders with the awareness and skills needed to lead a "transformed and transformative Judaism that can help create a worl...

“Ecological restoration is no longer a nicety, it’s a necessity,” proclaims the Blackland Collaborative, a group working to help alter cities so that they are biodiverse and inclusive, and helping heal human communities while restoring vulnerable species. Bridging science and design, the Collaborative brings people and nature home; and they believe in humans’ capacity to improve and protect. John Hart Asher is a co-founder and senior environmental designer with the Blackland Collaborative. And he understands cultivating place well as a process of constantly practicing the art of becoming a cultivator. As we continue this month’s focus on ecological horticultu...

Dr Jared Barnes is a big G gardener – and has been since his earliest expressions of self as a toddler. Now a professor of horticulture at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, Jared is also a writer under the name of Meristem and the host of the Plantastic podcast. He wants everyone’s expression of self to include a love of plants and place. In fact, he wants us to see them, know them, and care for them as neighbors. Dr. Jared’s work, his deep place philosophy, and his home garden is featured in a new book Garden...

This week on Cultivating Place, Host Ben Futa is in conversation with Rebecca McMackin, a dedicated public servant working in the context of ecological horticulture. Rebecca is on a mission to empower more people to grow more plants in more places while cultivating empathy, compassion, and advocacy for the natural world. We last heard from Rebecca here on CP in 2021, and a lot has happened in her growing life since then! Rebecca is an ecologically obsessed horticulturist and garden designer. She lives in the woods of Connecticut, writing, lecturing, and designing gardens. She is a public servant, dedicated to bringing b...

This week we finish up Artober on CP, in conversation with artist, Mary Jackson, a renowned sweetgrass basket weaver known for combining traditional methods with contemporary designs.  Based in the Low Country of South Carolina, Mary is the descendant of generations of Gullah basket weavers. Born in 1945, in 2008, Mary was awarded a MacArthur Foundation fellowship (“Genius Grant”) for "pushing the centuries-old tradition in stunning new directions”.  From the 1970s through to the early 2000s, Mary became something of an accidental Gardener, environmental restorationist, and economic driver, when she recognized the dwindling supply and access to the signature native sweetgrass that her cultur...

This week on CP, host Abra Lee is joined in conversation by Tracy Qiu, a horticulturist, researcher, and advocate who explores how plants, stories, and culture intersect. Tracy holds a masters in Public Horticulture from the University of Delaware, is a Longwood Fellow, and is finishing her doctoral thesis at Concordia University in Montreal. Her work explores the colonial roots of botanical gardens. Tracy and Abra will explore Tracy’s journey from her family’s beginnings on a farm in China to studying ethnobotany and advocating for greater diversity, access, and narrative justice in horticulture. Join us! Cultivating Place now has...

Welcome to our next airing of a CP LIVE* conversation, this time in celebration of Artober in conversation with Sofia Laçin and Hennessy Christophel, of LA-based Studio Tutto. On highway underpasses, school walls, public park welcome centers, and city water towers, the epic hand-crafted murals of Studio Tutto tell visual stories of invisible nature to help people connect and become familiar with what is surrounding us, but we often do not notice. Their “thoughtful site-specific pieces invite and incite softness and meaningful connection between people and place, and in so doing, they are “optimistically shaping the way we see ourse...

In a world that needs a great deal from us right now, we can almost never go wrong by igniting our creativity. This week on CP we dive deeper into ArtTober in conversation with one of our favorite creatives, artists, gardeners, writers, teachers, and flower lovers. We’re speaking once again with writer, photographer, and potter Frances Palmer about her new book Life with Flowers, inspiration and lessons from the garden (2025, Artisan), a sort of Masterclass in growing, arranging with, and loving the art of flowers. A previous guest on the program, one of the 75 women featured in my book Th...

This week on CP, we kick off ARTOBER. Host Ben Futa is talking all things Wild By Design, the Art of Planting. He’s in conversation with Ben O’Brien of Wild By Design, who creates "artfully crafted, richly planted, lovingly tended gardens". Based in Ontario, Ben O’Brien believes that the best gardens captivate, delight, and deeply resonate with people; they respond to, reveal, and amplify the magic of a place; and they are those born from a genuine love of plants. Join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hop...