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Riz Reyes is a horticulturalist whose career has deep roots in the Pacific Northwest. His work, however, taps into international associations, like beneficial mycorrhiza, from being born and raised to the age of seven in the Philippines, to setting in Seattle, Washington, to studying in China.
All of this knowledge experience and expensive sense of community come to bear not only in his career as a horticulturist, garden and floral designer, speaker and teacher but on his new book for children and families with children: The book is entitled Grow: a Family Guide to Plants and How to Grow Them.
From his website, here is more about Riz, as a flower farmer:
Riz's involvement with the University of Washington (UW) Farm started in 2014 when former farm manager, Sarah Guerkink, approached him about growing flowers for the farm. He enthusiastically stepped up and spearheaded the program which is now approaching it's 7th growing season!
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With the support of former interim manager Alice Vanderhaak (now of Lowland Farms in Snohomish, WA) and now full-time manager Perry Acworth, they are slowly building the program to be an educational outlet to teach students and the community about sustainable cut flower growing and processing crops to reach various markets during the growing season.
As a Gardener and Designer for McMenamins:
McMenamins is a prominent name in the city of Portland, Oregon. What started as a local neighborhood pub in the early 1980's has grown into 56 properties (and growing!), in both Oregon and Washington, that range from simple bars and breweries to large hospitality resorts taking old historic landmarks and buildings and bringing them back to life as restaurants, hotels, wineries, concert venues, and would you believe it, gardens!
Riz is the former Gardens Manager for their largest property in Washington State in the city of Bothell called the Anderson School. It was a former junior and alternative high school, but now transformed into a hotel, restaurants, multiple bars, a movie theater, a brewery, a community pool and extensive gardens Riz helped design and install.
And as a Assistant Director of of Heronswood Garden:
The world-renowned botanical garden and former nursery of plantsman, Dan Hinkley in Kingston, WA is now owned and operated by the Port Gamble S'Klallam Tribe.
Riz is the current Assistant Director of Heronswood Garden and started his new role in May 2022. His duties include overseeing garden staff, volunteers, organizing garden events/plant sales, teaching lectures/workshops, and assists in maintaining and redesigning prominent sections of the gardens.
Riz joins us this week from his office as the Assistant Director of Horticulture at the storied Heronswood Garden in Kingston, Washington to share so much more about his horticultural journey, and its many fruits!
You can follow Riz's work on line at: rhrhorticulture.com
and Instagram: @rhrhorticulture
All images courtesy of Riz Reyes. all rights reserved.
HERE IS THIS WEEK'S TRANSCRIPT by Doulos Transcription Service:
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JOIN US again next week, when in these unsettling times we revisit a conversation I am deeply thankful for. A conversation about the kinship of all and our responsibilities to that kinship with leadership voices for our times, Gavin Horn and Infigenous seedkeeper and visionary human, Rowen White. We explore what it means to belong in a world of relations. – that’s next week right here – listen in!
Speaking of Plants & Place sprouting back up soon....
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Thinking out loud this week....
As we enter into this season of gratitude, roughly from November 1 to January 1, a season that encompasses the half way point between the summer solstice and the winter solstice, that holds traditional days of thanks (heavily baggaged and contradictory as they might be), and traditional days of reverence whatever they might mean for you, bound up in the rituals of the winter solstice, of the many winter holidays, celebrating the longest night and welcoming the slow return to the light that begins as well and the turning of the calendar page, celebrating the slow, deep, quiet dormancy of the winter season in the northern hemisphere, I want to take this exact moment in this exact season to give voice to my incredible gratitude for the many of you to listen to this podcast regularly - maybe every week, maybe a few episodes every month - I am not sure, all I know is that tens of thousands of you listen every month, that there are millions of listens each year.
And I am grateful.
I know how many podcasts are out there, I know the choices you have, I know that in choosing to listen to Cultivating Place, even once ,you are voting for a worldview in which we grow the world better together through our voices, through our shared stories, through our common gardening impulse in community.
It’s rare that I have the chance to thank you in more than just word. But I have that chance right now, and I am going to take it. The only way this podcast has grown in the flourishing healthy word-of-mouth way that it has grown, without me hustling for commercial sponsors, without me hustling to take on advertisers- is through you.
It is through the very pedestrian pathways of people sharing episodes with other people, of people commenting or posting on social media about an episode that particularly resonated with them, of people rating the program and writing reviews in places like Apple podcasts, Amazon, and wherever else people rate and write reviews.
So I have an offer I would like to make. I have 5 gift codes to download the audio version of What We Sow. I would like to send them out to 5 of you. For anyone that is called to write a review in any of these places, to make a facebook or Instagram or linked in post about why this program and podcast matter to you and send me a screenshot of that rating and review or post, I will add your name to a hat, and on December 21, the winter solstice itself, I will draw 5 names out of that hat, and I will send those 5 people a gift code to the audio version read by me of What We Sow.
Thank you in advance for considering this generous, mutual flourishing and sharing of things we love.
A second note of thanks I would like to offer out is one of profound thankfulness to the handful of you who financially support this program.
It is an odd funding model I will admit, it is a model I believe in so deeply, based on the time-honored model of public radio everywhere because it helps me to keep this program exactly where I want it: open access, free, and available to any and all on public radio. It is the audio version of a public library or neighborhood tree sharing shade, fruit, beauty, and color. It is there to support and sustain, and enrich anyone who might stumble across it and need to hear these kinds of voices talking about these exact kinds of things in these exact ways. It is for my listening friends out there in the car, in a parking lot, in a drive through for a coffee or a burger, on the treadmill, on a trail, in the kitchen, or in the garden, in the early mornings, in the late afternoons, on a Saturday or Sunday morning with your hot tea or coffee before anyone else is awake and needs you.
My small public radio station struggles to maintain even itself, the tiny stipend it is able to offer me for producing and writing Cultivating Place is welcome and appreciated, but cannot begin to keep the lights on for me dedicating my life to this work.
It is the handful of you that have signed up to be supporters - whether that’s one time a year or that is a little bit every month, it is you who have kept Cultivating Place viable, open, available, and growing. Add to that the two or three generous souls who - unsolicited by me - have offered to support the program in bigger financial ways. Ways that have allowed me to add transcripts, that have allowed me to remain committed to not taking on commercial support, ways that have allowed me to add communication help to our team in growing the program.
To every one of you who gives a little regularly or has ever given, to the Catto Shaw Foundation, The Garden Conservancy, Ground Studio Gives as well as several individuals that have given at larger levels, it is you that makes Cultivating Place possible and I thank you.
This work is not behind any pay wall and it will remain that way. This is a very public labor of love, and I labor over it in community with all of you. For this I am thankful.
If you would like to support the work of Cultivating Place – there is no time like the present to plant that seed: follow the links at the top right hand corner of every page at Cultivating place. Com or scroll to the bottom of every week’s show notes – there are all the ways and means.
WAYS TO SUPPORT CULTIVATING PLACE
Cultivating Place is a co-production of North State Public Radio, a service of Cap Radio, licensed to Chico State Enterprises. Cultivating place is made possible in part listeners just like you through the support button at the top right-hand corner of every page at Cultivating Place.com.
The CP team includes producer and engineer Matt Fidler, with weekly tech and web support from Angel Huracha, and this summer we're joined by communications intern Sheila Stern. We’re based on the traditional and present homelands of the Mechoopda Indian Tribe of the Chico Rancheria. Original theme music is by Ma Muse, accompanied by Joe Craven and Sam Bevan.
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