Emily Murphy is an ecological gardener, an educator, and an author whose two books focus on gardens of personal and communal purpose. Her 2018 book Grow What You Love, is joined this year by Grow Now: How We Can Save our Health, Communities and Planet One Garden at a Time.
With the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reporting on the impacts, adaptations, and vulnerabilities and dangerous disruption of climate change on our natural systems - disruption affecting billions of people and millions of species - there is an ever greater urgency to act on all levels. Emily Murphy joins us this week to highlight the importance of our gardens as really immediate and direct points of climate activism - contributing to saving our planet one garden at a time.
Grow Now encourages and tutors us as gardeners how to go beyond organic, to rewild, to sequester carbon and to support biodiversity – because we need all of this more than ever.
Photos courtesy of Emily Murphy. All rights reserved.
You can follow Emily's work at www.passthepistil.com or on Instagram at: @passthepistil/
IF YOU LIKE THIS PROGAM,
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Biodiversity Matters: Plantlife International
JOIN US again next week, when we’re joined by medical ethnobotanist and Emory professor, Dr Cassandra Quave who shares with us the very personal story of her quest to develop new ways to fight illness and disease through the healing powers of plants. In today’s world of synthetic pharmaceuticals, Dr Quave belives our connection to the natural and plant world is in fact our greatest opportunity to discover new life-saving medicines needed in the medical challenges of our time – including pandemics and rising anti-biotic resistance. Listen in!
Cultivating Place is made possible in part by listeners like you and by generous support from the California Native Plant Society, on a mission to save California’s native plants and places using both head and heart. CNPS brings together science, education, conservation, and gardening to power the native plant movement. California is a biodiversity hotspot and CNPS is working to save the plants that make it so.
For more information on their programs and membership, please visit https://www.cnps.org/
For more information on SAGING THE WORLD: cnps.org/conservation/white-sage
Thinking out loud this week:
The newest 2022 IPCC report on the impacts and vulnerabilities we and our planet mates face as a result of climate change – in large part caused by human activity – is heartbreaking, sobering, overwhelming even – which is a feeling we cannot get stuck in.
We are gardeners – let's compost our grief and take up our agency where we take most of our sorrows and joys – out into the garden!
With the Vernal Equinox taking place this Sunday the 20th at 8:30 in the morning Pacific Daylight time – and the spring/summer growing season underway in the Northern Hemisphere, now is the time for every one of us to double down on stewarding our gardens into their full potentials as agents of climate activism and in fact of love – for the plants, the places, we live, for one another on this generous planet.
The gardens and gardeners highlighted in the illustrations and models in Grow Now are great lessons in action of gardens for climate activism – as are the gardens, gardeners and gardening techniques highlighted in Under Western Skies, by Caitlin Atkinson and me published by Timber Press last year.
This past week, I had the pleasure of presenting to two garden groups about the lessons of the gardens in Under Western Skies, and I will be sharing more about these gardens and their greater climate purposes at the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show on Saturday April 9th, I’d be thrilled if you could join me.
In these times, these gardeners remind us that our gardens are our greatest strengths – and sources of beauty, respite and POWER – individually and communally.
Happy Equinox gardeners around the world.
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