CP NEW MOON NEWSLETTER - MAY 2025
- Jennifer Jewell
- May 31
- 7 min read
Updated: Jun 3
Kalmia in full beautiful bloom, Reeves-Read Arboretum Summit, NJ
Happy New Moon (May 26) & Almost June!
"I am all about adaption. When you see that every single aspect of a plant - like how the stamens on this native Kalmia enclose around a visiting bumble bee to ensure pollen transfer - you know that it is adaptation, often learned only through hardship, that leads to survival and thriving."
- Jackie Kondel, Executive Director Reeves-Reed Arboretum Summit, NJ
Happy last day of May and almost June, Cultivating Place community,
We've now reached at least one metric for making it officially Summer: just past Memorial Day here in the U.S.. A holiday which asks us to consider and appreciate in loving memory those who have come before us, who have given of themselves to give us the here and now. For me, I think of the people, plants, and places who have fostered my ability to cultivate the places of my life with care and thought.
Daily, the threats to everything that allows any one of us to "cultivate place well" proliferate, it seems. And it can feel overwhelming. Debilitating. Paralyzing.
How can we cultivate place well when we are unable to rely on secure civil rights? How can we cultivate place well when we are unable to rely on the basic value of the biodiversity of species (humans included) and the caring preservation of their remaining native ecosystems? On collectively prioritized protections for clean air, clean water, and access to opportunity in the form of open spaces, healthcare, and economic possibility?
All of this, as designed, can feel too overwhelming to act or respond thoughtfully. Too overwhelming for a mere "Gardener" to make a difference.
But I beg you to trust me, to lean into my voice and hear my words: even on the days this overwhelm seems the most stubbornly fixed in place - it is still not true.
Week after week, Cultivating Place guests and hosts demonstrate that from every single Garden and Gardener growing and cultivating what they care most about in this world, care, growth, and positive energy radiate out from them to everything and everyone around them. Start there.
Keep cultivating your specific place best you can with the longterm well being of people, plants, and your place in mind. You will nurture a positive difference. A difference you can't always see the full impact of, but which is nonetheless true.
Like the air we breath, like the Divine we have faith in, like the Love we know for others, you might not see the radiating positive impact of your caring cultivation–but it is true and very much true.
I have heard it said that in times of crisis, look for the helpers. And I would say: in times of despair, look for and to the growers - including this CP Community.
Keep supporting with time, talent or treasure the plants people and plant places from which you derive nourishment; call and write to your local, state, and national representatives AGAIN today; show up to demonstrate (in word, deed, or dollar) on behalf of these values you hold dear when you can, as you can. This could just mean letting your local nursery know you do not want to purchase plants treated with neonicitinoids, or signing a petition to keep federal funding for the Xerces Society, among others.
Put your money and your mouth and your gardenlife where your heart and values live. This small actions might not shift everything you want shifted immediately, but - like good seed - regenerated life will germinate.
And when we grow together, we Gardeners grow more, and we grow better.
Such gratitude to be growing here with you,
Jennifer + The CP Team
PS: speaking of together - scroll down to register for our next virtual CP COMMUNING GATHERING taking place on June 17th in preparation for the Summer Solstice–grounding our cultivation, courage, and community for the season ahead.
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CP PODCAST:
Thank you to our podcast listeners around the world, to our home public radio station 91.7 NSPR in Chico, CA, and syndicating stations 91.7 WVXU in Cincinnati, OH, 90.5 KWMR in Point Reyes Station, CA, and Cal Poly Humboldt's KHSU in Humboldt County, CA.
In this month's CP conversations, a thematic thread formed around MOVEMENT - our (and plants' ;) dynamic ability to shift places, positions, perspectives as we experience, learn and grow.
Responsive movement is the essence of adaptation, isn't it?
The moving arc and advocacy of the UK's Juliet Sargeant; the moving motivation for conservation and education around native plants and ethical cultivating at Humble Roots Nursery in Oregon's Columbia River Gorge; the pathway through and with Public Gardens and Public Gardening in Holly Shimizu's leadership journey; and the actual nature and benefit of physical movement in the work of garden-based Occupational Therapist Jill Mays, the raised beds and raising community from Pennsylvania's Guina Hammond, and finally we will round out the month focused on the health and wellbeing benefits of a diversity of movements–from crawling, to weeding, to reaching, climbing, digging, carrying, and raking–all of which our garden practices can offer us.
For this month's CP guest Gardeners, movement–literally and metaphysically–is key to robust growth, learning, and adapting. Evolution and the plants model all of this for us regularly, but sometimes we have to really learn by doing for ourselves. Moving ourselves.
And through moving our bodies, our minds and hearts grow too.
"CP conversations are challenging, comforting, and inspiring in a way that encourages community and fosters stewardship. Keep this good work going!"
- Mary L, CP Listener & Donor 2025
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CP LIVE:
CP LIVE #8 is in the books! We can't wait to start bringing these seminal community-building, Gardener-elevating, filmed in-person conversational experiences together to show you more.
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.
Earlier this month, Myriam and Khoa of EM EN and I were live on site in Northern California to interview and film with Maidu elder Lorena Gorbet and the Board and Staff of the Maidu Summit Consortium. The Consortium is comprised of Maidu cultures and peoples who have been cultivating this place for 1000s of years and generations.
Over the past three decades, Lorena and her co-founders of the Summit have fiercely advocated for land back in their care and tending. As of today, they have regained the care of close to 3,000 acres of their lands in the wider region–including a sacred, rich and varied creek-inscribed high meadow valley, Tásmam Koyóm. Traditional homeland to the Mountain Maidu.
At seventy-nine years old, with 4 children and 14 grandchildren, Lorena remains unflagging in her work on behalf of the Maidu culture and regaining care of their traditional lands. Since 2019, when they won their first parcel of land back, the Consortium members, staff (including their all-Maidu work crew of 15 men in 2025), and volunteers have integrated the Traditional Ecological Knowledge used for millenia on these lands to painstakingly restore mixed-pine and deciduous forests, along with the water-conserving and water-storing habitat of healthy waterways, wetlands, and meadows. They have restored historic and present Maidu burial grounds. They have reintroduced people to the land. They have reintroduced healthy cultural and cleansing fire and generational crafts of utility, beauty, and ritual to the land. They have returned the restorative power of beavers, eradicated by European settlers decades ago, to the land. They have reconnected economic pathways.
And the land has responded abundantly, which has invigorated the people–physically and spiritually. This is a positive feedback loop and trophic cascade of loving cultivation labor and cultural intention.
In the wake of 2021's devastating, human-caused, climate-change exacerbated Dixie Fire, the intensity of which ravaged some of the MSC's reclaimed landscapes, it is even more poignant to witness the effects of the Summit's large scale caring cultivation and the many land, animal, and cultural germinations as a result.
As we begin to weave the CP Live stories into one from many, we are so excited to share more...
We have just made it past the half-way mark to meeting our 2025 Catto-Shaw Grant, supporting CP, CP Live and this Gardener-elevating film project.
Profound gratitude to those of you who have generously invested with donations ranging from $10 to & 1000, some one-time, some recurring monthly.
We know how many urgent requests for support you receive every day, so please know how much we value and appreciate you being here in any way! Each investment aggregates into a healthy ecosystem of support. Gardener by Gardener we will meet this growing goal.
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
UPCOMING:
June 17 - CP Communing Pre-Summer Solstice (start considering your summer Cultivating Placeintentions)
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.
CULTIVATING PLACE FOUNDATION
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