The Northwest Flower & Garden Festival is coming up February 18-22 at the Seattle Convention Center and I cannot wait! The show gardens—especially the smaller city living displays—are always a favorite feature, as are the plant vendors, but the show seminars might just be what I'm most excited about this year. There are over 100 of them and they're free with your ticket to the show!
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| Spring Parade is the show's theme this year |
I always enjoy sitting down for a while (walking those cement floors for hours on end is no joke!) and learning from the show's expert speakers. This year I'm thrilled my friend Jennifer Jewell—founder of the podcast Cultivating Place—is returning to the show. Over three days Jennifer will be chatting with garden luminaries Rochelle Greayer, Dan Hinkley, and Doug Tallamy. These conversations (about who they are, what they’ve done and what their work represents in our gardening world) will be recorded for later broadcast as part of of Cultivating Place Live.
I recently had the pleasure of chatting with Jennifer about her return to Seattle, and her work on Cultivating Place—which turns 10 years old on February 6th, that’s 500 episodes! Jennifer caught me up on her latest endeavor, CP Live, and the exciting news that these stories are being made into a docuseries—Cultivating Place: The Power of Gardeners. The series will (hopefully) air on PBS beginning in the spring of 2027, the upcoming Seattle events won’t be filmed for the docuseries, but they will be recorded for a future CP podcast.
Jennifer is a passionate communicator who understands what it means to be a gardener. In our phone conversation she explained why she’s taken to calling gardeners keystone species, which is of course extrapolated from a keystone in architecture (that one thing that holds everything together)...
“… gardeners are a keystone species that hold together all of these lines of care across human cultures. They hold culture, they hold history, they hold the future, they hold the food, they hold the ritual, they hold all of these things and certainly right now they are a key to environmental reparation. If they are doing it well, they also hold down a sane economic future and pathway. One that is not just profit driven but is community based, whether that’s human or non-human. And so, what I set out to do in this series is give a cohort of examples of what I mean when I say gardeners, when they do it well, grow everything around them better. And if we see them and value them and support them, we then help them grow the world better, help us grow the world better.
And so, the language is that we are a keystone species, and the greatest hope there is, is that when we as the gardeners that exist in the world, when we see ourselves that way, we value our work more and we are held accountable more, to what that work is supposed to do and at what level. And so that is the goal of the movie (and has been the mission of CP), to expand and elevate the way we think about gardening and what it accomplishes in this world.”
Pretty heady stuff, right? She went on to identify NWFG Fest as a keystone space in our garden world; “one that disseminates information and community and connection and has for years. This is one of the two big shows that still exist in our world, so it’s important that we ask everything we can out of such a gathering of gardening humans.”
So ya, I’m excited to go to the show! Lots of information on everything about the NWFG Fest here. Check the seminar schedule before you head out (changes happen) but as of now you'll find Jennifer and her guests on stage in the Adams Room at 1:30 pm Thursday thru Sunday. On Thursday she's talking with Rochelle Greayer, Friday it's Dan Hinkley, and Doug Tallamy is Saturday's guest. On Sunday Jennifer will be joined by a panel and they'll be discussing; Soil Stories: Regeneration & Reconnecting.
