13th Annual Ina & Lewis Heafitz Endowed Lecture Series: Invitations from and to the Garden: Cultivating A Garden Culture of Care

In her presentation, Jennifer Jewell will discuss the philosophy of Cultivating Place, her National Public Radio program and international podcast. Her podcast is a voice for gardeners and nature-lovers and operates from the belief that gardens and gardeners are potentially powerful agents and spaces for 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 wellbeing. In this program, she will explore how the power of gardens and gardeners can be viewed through a lens of invitation—both the invitations we recognize and accept from our gardens in our roles as gardeners and those we extend to the greater world through our gardening practices.

Jewell will walk us through examples of these very invitations using interviews from Cultivating Place and selections from her 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); and What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (2023). Together, these resources, inspirations, and invitations are blueprints guiding us in the ways we can all grow our world better—and beautifully.

The author of The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants (Timber Press, 2020), Under Western Skies: Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press, 2021), and, forthcoming from Timber Press in late 2023, What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds. 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 for the better of all lives on this generous planet. She lives and cultivates her place in interior Northern California with her partner, plantsman John Whittlesey.