October 24: Jennifer Jewell

What We Sow: The Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds

Gardens and gardeners are powerful agents for positive change in the world, helping to address challenges as wide ranging as climate change, habitat loss, cultural polarization, and individual and communal health and well-being. Jennifer Jewell, host of the national public-radio program and international podcast Cultivating Place, will explore that power through the lens of SEEDS: how they grow, where they grow, who grows them, who sells and/or controls them, and their care up and down the seed-sheds of our world. 

Jennifer will share fascinating stories of seeds and seed-keepers from her newest book, What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (2023). These stories are both cautionary tales and guiding lights in ways we can all sow, seed, and grow our world more beautiful, more delicious, more biodiverse, and more brave.

Speaker Bio

Jennifer Jewell is the host of the award-winning, weekly public radio program and podcast Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden and author of three books: The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants, Under Western Skies: Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast, and What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds. Her 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, Jennifer was honored with the American Horticultural Society’s Great American Gardener B.Y. Morrison award for horticultural communication. She regularly serves as 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.

Jennifer lives and cultivates her place in interior Northern California with her partner, plantsman John Whittlesey. You can find her on Instagram and Facebook and listen to Cultivating Place wherever you get your podcasts.