Let’s pick up where we left off. We continue our conversation with the hosts of Cultivating Place by exploring the creative spirit and how our gardens teach us to live together as neighbors. We are spending more time with founder and host of Cultivating Place, Jennifer Jewell and her co-hosts, Abra Lee and Ben Futa. Jennifer shares about how she decided to create Cultivating Place. Ben shares about creating a plant shop and how it continues to bring his neighbors together. Abra shares what she has learned about coexistence as a form of building resilience.
The Cultivating Place Foundation, created by Jennifer Jewell, hosts podcasts with gardeners around the world. Jennifer, Abra, and Ben host conversations that explore the many interwoven layers of ecology, humanity, and community that can be found in the practice of gardening.
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, and President/CEO of the non-profit Cultivating Place Foundation, whose mission is to expand and elevate the way we as a culture think and talk about gardening.
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), and What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (Timber Press, Sept 2023).
Jewell’s greatest passion 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.
She lives and cultivates her place in interior Northern California with her partner, plantsman, John Whittlesey.
Ben Futa is the Founder and CEO of Botany, a multi-modal, interdisciplinary plant-based business with a mission to empower more people to grow more plants in more places. A life-long gardener, Ben dedicated the first decade of his career to public horticulture, working in leadership positions in public gardens across the Chicagoland region. Ben launched Botany in early 2021 with his partner, Paul Sexton, after moving back home to South Bend, Indiana in late 2020. To date, Botany includes a suite of spaces, services, and experiences, all designed to inspire and empower a botanically infused lifestyle.
Abra Lee is a storyteller and author of the forthcoming book “Conquer The Soil: Black America and the Untold Stories of Our Country’s Gardeners, Farmers, and Growers.” She has spent a whole lotta time in the dirt as a municipal arborist and airport landscape manager. Her work has been featured in media including The New York Times, NPR, USA Today, Fine Gardening, and Veranda Magazine. Lee is a graduate of Auburn University College of Agriculture and an alumna of the Longwood Gardens Society of Fellows, a global network of public horticulture professionals. Her current role is Director of Horticulture at Oakland Cemetery, a revered Victorian garden cemetery and vibrant park located in downtown Atlanta.
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