CP NEW MOON NEWSLETTER - JUNE 2025
- Jennifer Jewell
- 14 hours ago
- 7 min read
Clear wing moth nectaring on Agastache 'Blue Boa' summer 2025 - Canyon Creek Garden #GardenLife
New Moon of June - Wednesday the 25th
(because the new moon is a great time to plant seeds whose energy grows up and out....)
"Beauty matters. Place matters. Keep doing this work.
Our future depends on the gardens of today."
CP listener & supporter, Nicole Tilde May 2025
Happy summer Big-G Gardeners,
Since I last wrote, I have been East and West again. I had the great privilege of seeing my eldest daughter graduate with her Master's degree in Psychology, I had the great pleasure and privilege of speaking at the Longwood Fellows graduation honoring five other families' brilliant daughters as they make their way in this growing world to the benefit of us all.
That's partly why we're here, isn't it? To grow well & to grow good, beautifully. To grow with ever greater intention and passion towards a world that nurtures everyone's plants, place, and children. A nurturing we can't always see in the moment....but is a force of our garden life natures.
Last week, an enthused group of us gathered once again for our CP Communing before the Summer Solstice. Ben Futa, of Botany in South Bend, IN and regular guest host here on CP was our speaker, and he shared insightfully about the importance of Biodiversity - in our world, in our landscapes and gardens, in our businesses and community resources as well. He noted the really important parallel between the greater the biodiversity the greater the abundance multiplying power for all - in plants, in places, in people, in business models.
Our gathering honed in on this abundance multiplier concept brought up for us in regards to our gardens. We had a rousing exchange of creative ideas on diversifying the ways we engage with our gardens and engage with others around and in our gardens. There were thoughts of inviting neighbors to pick flowers from our gardens, to host our own garden art exhibits so others could be introduced to our art and our gardens. Every idea centered amplifying the gifts (physical and metaphysical) of our relationships to plants in our place. We adjourned feeling motivated and seen.
Later that day I received a note from A CP Devotee. They wrote:
"Thank you for the [CP Communing] discussion. It was inspiring and I left intending to think about it throughout the day. But life or the universe had other plans. Just an hour and 15 minutes after I signed out, I witnessed my wife having a stroke. The remainder of the day was focused on getting her help, at the ER and the ICU of our local hospital.
I would not have given another thought to our conversation yesterday, until I happened upon a woman giving the ICU staff a bouquet of roses, saying "I want you to enjoy them; if someone wants to take a flower home, please do so." I remembered our discussion of amplifying our gardens. Hours later, as I left the hospital for the night, I saw that someone had placed the bouquet on a table in the hallway every visitor must pass to enter the unit. I am touched: I am the recipient of amplification, just at the time that I needed a connection to the garden!
I am struck by how quickly the universe gave me a lesson in amplification,
helping me to continue thinking about it. Today, as my wife continues to recover,
I passed the bouquet again, breathing in the solace that a garden provides. Thank you!"
And so, note to selves: keep growing, well, you really can never know who (human and more than human) might need you and your cultivation. Keep reading for growing updates on the CP Podcast, CP Live film, and CP Events, those recent and those to look forward to.
So grateful to be growing here with you - together,
Jennifer & The CP Team
PS: Our next Communing will be Sept 16th at 12 noon PDT/3 pm EDT. Registration will open the first week of September. Make sure your subscribed to our email list to get event announcements.
CP PODCAST:
In this energetic shift from late spring to early summer, the theme on the podcast seemed to dial in on our ever present need and interest in life-long learning. And the transformative value and joy of learning new things, being an active learner, and learning new perspectives - for instance the environmental power of floristry, how we see and understand life after dark, and how best to germinate learners into leaders.
If you have not had a chance to listen in - I think you'll enjoy these four great conversations with Montreal-based wildlife biologist turned floral designer, Marc Sardi, with Joyce Kennedy and Emily KenCairn of Colorado's People & Pollinators Action Network; with nature writer Leigh Ann Henion, author of Night Magic; and finally, with Richard M. Smith, Director, New York Botanical Garden's School of Professional Horticulture.
CP LIVE:
Each CP LIVE experience is testament to the paradigm shifting belief that when we see the full reach of Gardeners, we value and support them more; when we value and support the best of Gardeners and Gardens more, the whole world is grown stronger, smarter, healthier, kinder, more abundant: environmentally, socially, culturally, communally, individually, economically, and spiritually.
Cultivating Place LIVE: Dialogues to Grow By (CP LIVE) is a special project of theCultivating Place Foundation, with major support from the Catto Shaw Foundation. CP LIVE is a curated series of Gardener-supporting CP interviews recorded and filmed live in front of an audience in select locations around the country in 2024 and 2025, exploring some of the most compelling & important lessons learned in the first 10 years of CP about who Big G-Gardeners are and what they are growing in our world.
WHY?
Since 2020, a near-record number of Americans self-identify as engaging in gardening. That’s around 100 MILLION US households. 1.3 billion acres of land in the US is owned privately by individuals. More than 40 million of those acres are non-native, chemically dependent, over-irrigated, turf grass.
When we collectively understand “gardening” beyond toxic lawn “care” and/or superficial decoration, so many beneficial pathways are activated in our world–progress towards solutions to some of the tragedies and horrors that worry us most: biodiversity loss, climate change, chemicals in our soil, water, food, food insecurity, the insect apocalypse, the decline of distinct languages and cultures, a sane economic model, war versus life, loneliness versus community, loss of Faith in something bigger than us.
If even a fraction more of those 1.3 billion acres of privately owned land were tended for healthy food, for native plant habitat, for cultural and community knowledge, for less resource use and greater community-based economic health, think what we might achieve: biodiversity gain, carbon stored, watersheds replenished, cultures strengthened, communities reconnected, scientific and sacred knowledge reintegrated. Into our daily lives.
Cultivating Place, and its special film project, Cultivating Place LIVE, elevate and expand the way we collectively think and talk about Gardening and Gardeners in our world in order to make visible the myriad, often surprising, ways that these cultivating humans (from backyard gardeners to artists to cultural land stewards) and their tended spaces grow our world better: socially, culturally, environmentally, economically, and spiritually.
When we see ALL that the best of Gardens and Gardeners grow, we value them more appropriately: in word, in deed, in pay, and protection for Gardens and Gardeners of all kinds.
In the CP LIVE outtake clip above, it becomes vividly clear that Leslie Bennett of Pine House Edibles Gardens and the Black Sanctuary Gardens project cultivated not just edible and culturally relevant gardens for clients, but also for black women leaders in the Oakland area. Leslie believed that if she did this, she would support these leader women in their work, and therefore support the cultivation of the world she wants to live in, she wants her children to live in. Fredrika, as a Black Sanctuary Garden steward, had increased health, well-being, courage, grounding, clarity and strength in her work as President of the Dr. Huey P. Newton Foundation, "preserving and promulgate the history, ideals and legacy of the Black Panther Party and its founder Dr. Huey P. Newton...to acknowledge and commemorate the powerful contribution of the Black Panther Party to the liberation of all oppressed people." So one big G Gardener cultivates another, who cultivates history, social justice, and liberation for all. That's a serious germination of some serious seeds in our world.
When we value these growing people and spaces more appropriately, they can more intentionally, effectively, and beautifully grow us all.
Join us to listen, see, and grow, yourself. Cultivating Place LIVE
Join us in completing this important film project! Invest in this Garden-based world view:
Images from Fredrika Newton's art and strength filled Black Sanctuary Garden, 2024.
CP EVENTS:
RECENT:
May 11 - 14 CP Live with Maidu Summit Consortium - Northern CA
May 21 - Keynote speaker for GCA regional meeting Summit County, NJ
May 30 - Commencement Speaker for Longwood Fellows Program 2024-2025 Cohort
June 17 - CP Communing Pre-Summer Solstice
UPCOMING:
Sept 12-14 - CP LIVE Cincinnati, OH with Civic Garden Center of Greater Cincinnati
Sept 16 - CP COMMUNING pre-Autumnal Equinox
Sept 22 - 25 - CP LIVE Second Generation Seeds/Gohyang Fields, Sebastapol, CA
Oct 23 - 27 - THE ART OF CP - online art auction to benefit the Cultivating Place Foundation (registration info coming soon.....)
More events here: CP EVENTS
Interested in attending a CP Live?
We're inviting CP Donors to our CP Live in Cincinnati, OH September 12th, 2025. Invest in our work today through the support buttons here or at the top of cultivatingplace.org & look for your invitation to register for the 10 donor spots - coming soon!
CULTIVATING PLACE FOUNDATION
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