Quick Takes With Jennifer Jewell

Bio/Background

I am the creator, executive producer, and primary host of Cultivating Place, a weekly, award-winning, public radio-based program and podcast. Syndicated on stations across the country, Cultivating Place recently became the national not-for-profit The Cultivating Place Foundation: Our mission
Elevating and expanding the way our world thinks and talks about gardens and gardeners.
Our vision
A world where gardens/growers and gardeners/cultivated places are valued as powerful intersectional agents and spaces of positive growth and change in our world.
Our principles
1. Engage, encourage, educate, and empower gardeners/cultivators of place.
2. Focus on the great diversity of gardeners and their gardens/cultivated places as critical links to better communities, environments, and economies.
3. Advocate for valued and recognized gardeners – unpaid and professional.
4. Promote the importance of cultivating all of our places intentionally and well.
5. Support sustainable, transformative, and diverse gardening/gardeners as an essential cultural literacy across time, space, background, and culture.
Who we are
Cultivating Place engages with gardeners and growers wherever they are all over the world through internationally recognized podcast and radio interviews, public speaking events, books, and documentary film. Cultivating Place raises collective understanding about the importance of gardens, gardeners, and gardening practices to be part of the solutions to some of our world’s largest concerns: from restoring food safety and integrity, restoring biodiversity, planning for climate resilience, ameliorating the effects of climate change, activing robust local economies through improved gardening/growing endeavors, and improving the beauty, health, and well-being of all people through greater recognition of the value of gardens and carefully cultivated spaces everywhere. With greater recognition and support, gardens, gardeners, and best gardening practices – both private and public – improve life for all – human and more-than-human.

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 on 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:

Emergence Magazine

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 ok 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, or planting, or design composition) that “requires” a chemical treatment, should not be in your garden.

Old wives’ tale gardening trick that actually works:

The Shadow of the Gardener is the best fertilizer.

Favorite gardening hack:

The shadow of the gardener….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 Gifts – Chico, CA.

On your wishlist:

A white flowering quince, a thriving native styrax and native fragrant rhododendron….all together behind my also wishlist deer proof enclosed back 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.

Anything else you’d like us to know? Future projects? How you use Gardenista? Please use this space to share more with us.

Cultivating Place is currently working on a multi-part documentary series to be rolled out in 2026. We filmed the first 6 parts in 2024 and have 6 more to go in 2025. CP Live: Dialogues to Grow by highlighting the many ways we often overlook that good gardeners grow our world better: socially, environmentally, economically, and spiritually.