With a floral designer and a wildlife biologist as parents, is it any wonder that Jennifer Jewell would grow up to be an avid gardener? She’s the creator, executive producer, and primary host of Cultivating Place, an award-winning public radio program and podcast that features weekly conversations with growers, horticulturalists, and other plant obsessives to explore how and why we garden. Jennifer, who lives in Chico, CA, is also a writer and author of three books: most recently What We Sow, described in our review as “a conversational compendium of all things seed-related”; Under Western Skies, which spotlights 36 stunning gardens, all in the American West; and The Earth in Her Hands, a compilation of profiles of women in gardening (including our very own Michelle Slatalla, the founder of Gardenista). 

Jennifer is a thought leader in the gardening space, and we’re excited to share her wisdom here on Quick Takes today—as well as a few peeks of her own garden. 

Photography by Jennifer Jewell, unless otherwise noted.

Your first garden memory:

As a young toddler (2?) playing in the potting soil under a potting bench at Berthoud Greenhouses in winter in Colorado. My mother and the women she worked with were potting seedlings for the spring sales. The scent of the hand-mixed soil, the warm humidity of the greenhouses in a cold, dry, winter, plus the lulling sound of the women’s voices chatting rhythmically as they worked remains vivid for me. I can’t walk into a greenhouse without being transported to that sense of safe, growing happiness.

Garden-related book you return to time and again:

Mirabel Osler’s In the Eye of the Garden.

Instagram account that inspires you:

@emergencemagazine.

Describe in three words your garden aesthetic.

Cottage, comfortable, fragrant.

Plant that makes you swoon:

Because you are asking me in January, Daphne ‘Odora’. Were it late spring: Rosa ‘Gertrude Jekyll’, or any of our California native bulbs especially Triteleia laxa ‘Ithurial’s Spear’. I swoon differently with each microseason…

Plant that makes you want to run the other way:

Not a huge fan of large-leaved variegated shrubs—they look like they need more love to me…

Favorite go-to plant:

Rose, rose, rose—native, non-native, shrub, climber, cutter, but never not-fragrant. Because, well, why?

Hardest gardening lesson you’ve learned:

You cannot do it all or have them all—enjoy the ones you have now, and do what you can now.

Unpopular gardening opinion:

Not sure if it’s really unpopular, but I stand by the age old adage: The best time to do it is when you have time to do it, and if you don’t have time to do it, it’s okay to leave it undone. The plants know what they’re doing, even if you don’t.

Gardening or design trend that needs to go:

It’s had to go for a while, so I can’t believe we are still fighting this: anything (plant, planting, or design composition) that “requires” a chemical treatment should not be in your garden.

Favorite gardening hack:

[As the saying goes] the shadow of the gardener is the best fertilizer. If paying attention, your presence in the garden conserves water, it does not over- or under-weed, it sees and enjoys what is germinating, what is growing, what is blooming, what is seeding. In short, it reminds you why you’re out there, clears your head and heart, and is what will keep you rooted out there as your best self.

Favorite way to bring the outdoors in.

Snip a bit of anything anytime and put in water to be by kitchen sink, by bathroom sink, and on bedside table. Every day you can.

Every garden needs a…

At least one human to learn and grow with it and all its other lives.

Favorite hardscaping material:

Local stone, recycled broken-up concrete that’s starting to take on life of its own.

Tool you can’t live without:

Hand-held hula hoe, or my Felcos.

Go-to gardening outfit:

Whatever I have on….starting with my nightclothes, and progressing through the day back into my nightclothes.

Favorite nursery, plant shop, or seed company:

Plant Barn Nursery in Chico, CA.

On your wishlist:

A white flowering quince, a thriving native styrax, and native fragrant rhododendron….all behind my wishlist deer-proof enclosed garden wall/fence….2025!

Not-to-be-missed public garden/park/botanical garden:

Denver Botanic Gardens.

The REAL reason you garden:

Makes me so much nicer of a human.