Jennifer Jewell Of 'Cultivating Place' To Speak For Horticultural Alliance Of The Hamptons

Garden educator Jennifer Jewell will visit the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons in Bridgehampton on Sunday afternoon to talk about the theme of her public radio program and podcast “Cultivating Place,” which is about why to garden rather than how to garden.

Jewell is a believer that gardeners are powerful agents of change to address climate change, habitat loss, cultural polarization and well-being. She believes that gardens are where people find connections to their best humanity and that sharing the beauty and joy of gardening is the greatest source of engagement with other people.

Living in Butte County in Northern California, Jewell had been a garden writer for newspapers and magazines for a decade when she started the first version of her public radio program in 2007. She aimed to be different than other gardening programs.

“I really felt a strong disconnect and discomfort with the way I felt gardens and gardeners and gardening were being represented in our mainstream media and that my lived experience of being a gardener and the daughter of a gardener and in gardening communities was very different than the way it was being presented on a pretty big and persistent scale,” she recalled during a phone interview Friday.

She said gardening was presented as an activity for wealthy, leisure-class hobbyists who were primarily middle-class white females, while the professional level was primarily the domain of white men.

“This irked me on several levels, but the most important one being that there’s only so much ‘how-to gardening’ that, if you have been gardening for a while, you need or want,” Jewell said.

She clarified that gardeners are learning all the time and there will also be a need for “how-to” but said there was not nearly enough discussion of “how powerful gardening can be in our lives, both individually and collectively.”

It is up to gardeners to share their garden lives with each other, according to Jewell.

“So that was the goal of my first public radio program, and it was very localized in my 10-county area,” she said.

Then she was asked in 2015 if she would be willing to expand to a national reach, and the following year launched “Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden.”

She said the premise remains the same: Gardens and gardeners transcend so much of what polarizes and divides people. “It’s this common ground where people can and do come together for the better, and that could be environmentally, it could be politically, it could be socially, it could be for health and well-being. And I think this premise has reached a lot of very hungry ears because it grew exponentially and has a devoted following. And what’s been great for me is that that thesis — and kind of mission — it has only strengthened over time.”

She noted there is more conflict and divide in general, but in the garden world, she said there is a lot of coming together and positive on-the-ground transformation.

Though “Cultivating Place” is on public radio stations in several states now, the most reliable way to find it is the weekly, hourlong podcast version, which often includes extended versions of guest interviews and always has the addition of breaks in which Jewell talks directly to the listener about the universal messages that are coming out of the conversation with the guest.

Another issue in the garden media world that Jewell pointed to is that it is, in large part, driven by images that are tied to a marketing budget and intended to sell something.

“There’s been this diminishing of what we talk about when we talk about gardens and it is frequently reduced to this two-dimensional very pretty image,” Jewell said.

She added that she loves a beautiful garden, but to talk about gardens superficially “is just an incredible offense to the three dimensions — if not more dimensions — that we experience as gardeners, which is physical and emotional and spiritual and nutritional and exercise.”

There are so many reasons that gardeners stick to gardening throughout their lives, including reasons they can’t put words to, she said. She noted that as of 2022, according to the National Gardening Survey, 100 million households in the United States are now self-reporting as being engaged in gardening, more than double the figure recorded two years earlier.

“It speaks to this recurring truth that there is this inverse correlation between our economy and our urge to garden, that when the economy goes down, people start to garden and when it goes back up again, they sort of move away from gardening,” she said. “And of course, the pandemic gave us multiple reasons why people turn to the garden, not just economic, but also health and outdoor escape and release. But the odd thing is that anybody who gardens knows it’s way more expensive to grow your own food as a single household than it is to buy it at the grocery store or at a farmers market. So it’s not actually economics that sends us to the garden in these moments. It’s something deeper and more psychological, that we don’t even necessarily understand or articulate to ourselves. Because it’s not actually about the economy. It’s about our wanting to believe we can control and be a participant in our own survival.”

Her goal is to get as many of those 50 million households that are new to gardening to stick to it. She wants them to know that, even if they don’t grow the world’s best tomato or a prize-winning dahlia, there is something else they will get out of gardening that is equally or more important than the produce they get from their garden.

In her talk hosted by the Horticultural Alliance, Jewell will also discuss the topics of her books, 2020’s “The Earth in Her Hands,” profiling women in horticulture, and 2021’s “Under Western Skies: Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast,” with photography by Caitlin Atkinson.

Jennifer Jewell will present “Cultivating Place: How a Garden Culture of Care Strengthens Places and Their People” on Sunday, June 12, at 2 p.m. at Bridgehampton Community House, 2367 Montauk Highway at School Street, Bridgehampton. Admission is $10, or free for members of the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons. Masks will be required regardless of vaccination status. Visit hahgarden.org for more details.