Last week Cultivating Place put out a listener support challenge– I am humbled and so very grateful for the response. We are on our way to making our 100 new donors by the end of this third quarter and the second half of this challenging and transformative year of 2020.
As the independent creator and producer of Cultivating Place, I’m really proud to have a home on Public Radio – where open access is a foundational part of the ethos. And I’m honored that the podcast has almost 40,000 listens each month! We as gardeners and often equal parts introvert and extrovert – liking our thinking and being time in the garden, and also needing the company of the plants, the creatures, the seasons and one another. I love being part of your community – in your silence and in your social hour – This work in this form relies on your support - the community of listeners who value these dialogues to grow by. Thank you – truly - TO all of you out there who support this program monthly. For those of you who are not yet sustaining listeners, please consider investing - TO make a 1 time gift or sign up as a sustaining monthly donor, follow the SUPPORT BUTTON at the top right-hand corner of every page here at Cultivating Place.com. Any donation amount starting from $5 a month makes a meaningful difference to producing this program every week.
As we move toward celebrating our 5th birthday, we’ve set a goal to add 100 new sustaining members in the second half of 2020. We know you value the depth and breadth, heart, and voice of Cultivating Place- and with your participation – we’ll be cultivating this informed, engaged, caring garden community for many seasons to come. Join us – follow the SUPPORT button link at the top right-hand corner of every page at Cultivating Place.com and together we will keep growing - stronger, better, greener!
Jasna Guy is a gardener, an artist, and a thinker. As a Croatian born, British Columbia-based woman engaged with the natural world around her, she works in combination of media – drawing, photography, relief printing, animations. For many years now, she has focused her work around bees – honeybees, native bees, and other pollinators - and the complexity of their environments.
She creatively explores floral resources, including the habitats, nectar and pollen critical for pollinators, who are in turn critical to the flowers and habitats – and ultimately to us. Taking her inspiration from the beauty, diversity, and complexity of the natural world starting right in her own garden, Jasna's artistry uses the colors of pollen, the myriad forms of bee and floral relationships, and the amazement of our co-evolution on this planet as the seeds for her visionary work.
Her work offers a new set of probing, thoughtful eyes with which we can re-see our world – from pollen grains to biodiversity – and perhaps re-envision our own roles and responsibilities – and joys – while we’re here.
Follow Jasna's amazing artistry and garden life journey at her website: JasnaGuy.com and on Instagram @guyjasna.
All photos and animations courtesy of Jasna Guy, all rights reserved.
Join us again next week when we do some wonderful talking – and growing with the voice and energy force behind the Black in the Garden podcast - Colah B Tawkin is with us next week. Listen in!
RELATED EPISODES INCLUDE:
- STUDIOS WOODLUCKER, ANN WOODLUCKER & NGOC MINH NGO
THINKING OUT LOUD this week..
SO.....
I can see her – can’t you? Jasna at a desk or table hunched over her array of rose petals – carefully and mindfully piercing and tattooing words of love and loss into each individual rose petal – composting and transforming loss and grief into art and beauty and a new memory overlaid onto the previous memory.
As I think of this, and I think of last week’s conversation with Colleen Southwell of The Garden Curator and her deep belief in the importance of the stories our gardens hold and I wonder – isn’t this what we are each doing in our own ways in our gardens? We are piercing and tattooing and narrating our story in plants and flowers and arrangements and seed and soil onto this earth for us to hold, to recognize ourselves ever more clearly. We are our gardens, the physical reality of our gardens and the grandest greatest ideas of them; we are the gardeners AND the seeds of the many gardeners to come. We are writing our life stories each and every day – epic, tragic, humorous, romantic, silly, malleable and also very very durable.
Even when our gardens fade behind us – the shadows of their memories, their ghosts are still there. Written. Did you know that with carbon testing, the lines of shrubberies and pathways, trees and different perennials and cultivated crops can be distinguished in their places many hundreds of years later – from the so-called waffle gardens (being formed in a waffle like pattern in the soil to take advantage of what moisture there is) of Indigenous peoples on the high plains near Abiquiu, NM to the Lost Gardens of Heligan.
Garden stories are written everywhere – all around us.
Finally, if you have listened to this week's podcast, you will know why I write this: We as gardeners are often so hard on ourselves and on this place/process/relationship we love with our gardens.
I have very, very few rules as to what a garden is, or how a garden should be created or cared for other than to please take on this mantle in life with love – and please don’t use poisons. Along with that o sisters and brothers of this garden life – one paramount rule of engagement with your garden or my garden or anyone else's garden is this: There is no being mean to the garden. No being mean to your garden. Not in your own mind, not to visting guests, not in words or deeds. THERE IS NO BEING MEAN to the garden.
Extrapolate this out some to the whole world of all lives in the garden and this one rule improves the odds for us all – on so many life levels.
Please be kind to and about your garden. She is YOU - she is the whole universe.
As always - together we grow....quieter, louder, greener, more creative and better.
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