The word garden does not mean just one thing – and there's not one way or right way to get to what they are and how they’re best achieved. Gardens are both more and less obvious versions of our selves, our fingerprints, our signatures, our reflections, our legacies– as individuals and as cultures. 

 

Jewellgarden is the canopy name under which you will find the various botanically-minded creative pursuits of me, Jennifer Jewell. I love gardens, I love nature, I love gardeners and nature lovers. As a corps of passionate, caring and connected people, I think we make a difference for the better in this world. We make a difference to our own mindsets, to our families, to our communities, economies and the environment - all of which need us to show up as our best selves every day. Gardens, gardening and gardeners matter.

 

Founded in 2007, Jewellgarden's mission is to explore and celebrate a deeper connection to the world around us through the cultivation of our gardens.

 

I raise my daughters, work in my own little suburban garden with natives and non-invasive non-natives, visiting weeds and lots of birds and bugs and gophers. I write, photograph, create and co-create natural history exhibits about plants and people.

 

But mostly I work my heart out at my weekly public radio program and podcast: Cultivating Place, on which I have the great pleasure and privilege of speaking with fascinating people involved in the science, art, craft, and culture of plant, garden, and natural history love. My guests and my listeners expand my own understanding of the world every single week.

 

Everything I do is founded on these beliefs:

 

Gardens are some perfect combination of history, culture and nature, of meditation, celebration and prayer. They are produce and they are poetry. Gardens are refuge from the world and, in my life, gardens are among my deepest, best connections to the world.

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Sourced in and contributing to our evolving natural history, gardens hold vast potential. The impulse to cultivate the land for beauty and utility is timeless – the Ancient Egyptians cultivated their places, early Native Americans cultivated theirs, we – whoever we may be - cultivate ours. This primal impulse transcends gender, age, politics, socioeconomics and religion. I am a firm believer that in this impulse to cultivate and garden in the places we live, we find meaning. In this cultivation of place, we can possibly find solutions we have found nowhere else to the problems of the world, which we find everywhere.

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Join me in this on-going conversation and let it make a difference to your gardening practice and life, too.

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The Cultivating Place Garden-Variety World View:

 

Gardening at its best is a long-term, committed, and loving relationship between all living beings great and small (animal, vegetable, mineral - seen and unseen) and our places. 

 

Its first principles include: do no harm and honor all the diverse parts and players in this dynamic, interdependent process -

a process that calls on all our powers of hand, mind, and heart. 

 

To be a Gardener is beautiful, but not always pretty. 

 

To be a Gardener is profoundly satisfying, but it is neither easy nor perfectable. 

 

It is muddy, scratchy, fragrant, flavorful, fun, heartbreaking, and heart-fueling.

 

To be a Gardener asks us to embrace our smallness and to live more lightly, and yet expands us daily and beyond measure. 

 

A Garden/Gardener relationship is symbiotic - to be practiced and shared with respect, humility, and pride.

 

A Garden/Gardener relationship is a full-contact, wholehearted, co-evolving, true love.

 

Our Garden/Gardener relationships, which connect us so deeply to the nature of this world, hold the potential to change everything for the better - 

• ourselves as citizens of this generous planet, our families and what they hold to be true and valuable, 

• our larger human communities - their very social fabric and cultural, environmental, political, and economic priorities, 

• the health and well-being of our surrounding places full of more-than-human air, water, soil, animal and plant-life-all that bridges us here to us over there… and over there…and down there, out there, and up there. 

 

We are all in this together and Gardens and Gardeners make a difference. 

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-   February 2019 

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