Jennifer Jewell, host of the national award-winning weekly public radio program and podcast, Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden, will join us this fall to speak about her overarching philosophy that gardens and gardeners are powerful agents and spaces for addressing positive change in our world across climate change, habitat loss, cultural polarization, and individual and communal health and being. Jewell will walk us through how this belief is exemplified in her weekly program, but also very specifically in the subjects of her three books – The Earth in Her Hands (2020), Under Western Skies; Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast (2021) and What We Sow, On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (2023). Together, these stories and inspirations for tending to a culture of care, are blueprints for what we can do for our world.
About Jennifer Jewell
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. Cultivating Place has several times been recognized by Garden Communicators International as Best On-Air Talent and Best Overall Broadcast Media. In 2023, Jewell was honored with the American Horticultural Society’s Great American Gardener B.Y. Morrison award for horticultural communication. In 2021, The Earth in Her Hands was honored by the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries with their Award for Excellence in Biography, and Under Western Skies received a Golden Poppy winner for the Glenn Goldman award from the California Alliance of Independent Booksellers. The members of CALIBA present The Golden Poppy Book Awards to recognize the most distinguished books written by writers and artists who make California their home. Jewell regularly serves as a keynote speaker for horticultural organizations large and small across the country, including The Garden Conservancy, The American Public Gardens Association, The American Horticultural Society, The Thomas Jefferson Foundation/Monticello, The California Native Plant Society, The New York Botanical Garden, Miami University of Ohio, and the Atlanta Botanical Garden. She lives and cultivates her place in interior Northern California with her partner, plantsman, John Whittlesey.
