Late July, August, and September (with the constellation Sirius high in the night sky) is perhaps the stretch of the year in most climates of the Northern Hemisphere that really show you what your garden and plants are made of (for better or worse) after months of them producing and growing under long hours of sun, high heat, and either humidity or drought. Or smoke.
And it’s the season as well when many of our most durable and prismatic shrubs are showing off to great advantage in rounded forms, seed, fruit, and foliage colors certainly in our wildlands. And possibly in our gardens?
This is where Kevin Philip Williams and Michael Guidi of the Denver Botanic Gardens come in. Kevin is the DBG's Manager of Horticulture; Michael is their Manager of Horticulture Research. Their new book Shrouded in Light: Naturalistic Planting Inspired by Wild Shrublands is all about celebrating the great diversity, incredible beauty, and many gifts and lessons that the wild shrublands of our world have to offer our gardens and cultivated landscapes - environmentally and aesthetically - no matter where you garden.
As we head into the dog days of summer, these two fabulous
horticulturists share with us their powerful enthusiasm for the
adaptability and diversity of the shrubs of our world.
I want to echo Kevin and Michael’s email greeting to me when I invited them to be guests on Cultivating Place: Welcome to the Shrub Club!
Enjoy!
You can follow Kevin and Michael's work on line at https://www.botanicgardens.org/:
and Instagram:
HERE IS THIS WEEK'S TRANSCRIPT by Doulos Transcription Service:
Images courtesy of Kevin Philip Williams and Michael Guidi, photo credits in image file titles. All rights reserved.
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JOIN US again next week, when it’s back to school time and we’re joined by Sean Doherty, Vice President of Education at the Missouri Botanical Garden. From school groups to mindfulness walks, botanical classes to Horticultural Therapy, seed banking to historic herbarium collections, the Missouri Botanical is expanding how they and we think about the phenomenal educational capacity of conserving plants. That's right here, next week.
Cultivating Place is made possible in part by listeners like you and by generous support from
supporting initiatives that empower women and help preserve the planet through the intersection of environmental advocacy, social justice, and creativity.
Thinking out loud this week...
There is a moment in our conversation where Michael notes that much
of their book, Shrouded in Light, is a "reflection of the journeys that we
took.”
Now he is of course talking about all of the journeys he and
Kevin took to find, meet, visit, photograph, get to know and understand
better the shrublands of the U.S. and the world – from the chaparral in
California to the shrub marshes in the southeast and shrubs associated
with the pine barrens in the mid-Atlantic region… but something about
the statement – "a reflection of the journeys we took" called to mind Tim
Johnson speaking last week of the arc and journey of so many of us as
gardeners from first love growing vegetables or flowers to becoming
organic if we didn’t start there, to adding natives for wildlife forage and
habitat if we didn’t start there….and it struck me that just as I noted in
our conversation with Janisse Ray that our gardens are in many ways
their own narratives.
And, I am moved here to note that they (our gardens) too are
reflections of the journeys we have taken. Our gardens are maps of the
journeys we have taken – physically, literally, intellectually and
spiritually. When you look at your garden, which of your own journeys
are most well represented?
Which ones are yet showing up clearly?
It's illuminating to consider this as I look at my own garden….
And my own journey – with that in mind, a little glimpse into the next
journey of Cultivating Place is now live over at the website – a video
introduction to the Cultivating Place Live Project underway….I hope
you check it out – and I hope you love it. I do. I cried when I saw what
Myriam and Khoa at EmEn put together…. CP Live Video Intro
Finally, toward the end of this conversation, I was intrigued by Kevin’s
reference to the “spirit of non-contradiction….and object-oriented
ontology.” Wherein object does not mean a physical thing but rather the
counterpart (and counterweight perhaps) to ourselves as the primary
subject in our thinking and understanding of the world. Wherein we try,
we begin, we practice, we move toward really seeing all else (that
previously unseen) as being their own subjects, with their own value,
agency, and journey in the universe. Beside us. All around us. All the time.
Wherein our gardens, the landscapes of our world, and each plant and
animal, rock, and community of these have their own lives and journeys.
It’s heady stuff to live, learn, and grow in such an animated amazing
world. How do we journey differently with this as our mindset?
This is the kind of thing I like to ponder as I water or weed or rake up the dry
leaves to reduce fire fuel on a hot dry afternoon in my garden
journey.
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