About this Event
Jennifer Jewell will explore the philosophy of Cultivating Place, her national, award winning-public radio program and international podcast, based on the belief that gardens/gardeners are powerful agents and spaces for potentially positive change in our world, helping to address challenges as wide ranging as climate change, habitat loss, cultural polarization, and individual and communal health and being. She will walk audiences through how this power of gardens and gardeners is exemplified in not only her weekly program, but very specifically in her the subjects of her three books: the horticultural women in leadership roles in the award-wining The Earth in Her Hands (2020); the beautiful and innovative place-based gardens that celebrate western landscapes in Under Western Skies; Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast (2021)-with amazing photography by Caitlin Atkinson; and, finally in What We Sow, On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (2023). All together, these stories, garden and gardener inspirations tending to a culture of care are blue-prints guiding us in ways we can all grow our world better: more beautiful and brave.
About Jennifer Jewell
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.
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). Her third book, What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds, was also published by Timber Press.
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.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Charleston Library Society, 164 King Street, Charleston, United States
USD 25.00 to USD 35.00
