THE ADVENTUROUS ART OF CULTIVATING PLACE, with PEG & AWL
- Jennifer Jewell
- Sep 18
- 6 min read
This week on Cultivating Place, we lean into The Art of CP, exploring how the act of Cultivating Place is artful, and how the creative arts can be among our most beautiful acts of Cultivating Place. How acts of Cultivating Place and acts of making Art both offer us the agency to create new worlds, or new versions of our current world. These humans impulses are simultaneously miraculous and represent the endless variations-on-life modeled to us by this world.
We’re in conversation with the deeply place, curiosity, and art-based duo of Margaux and Walter Kent – visionaries behind the artful life resource known as Peg & Awl. They’re joining us from their home, shop, studios, and five-acre wood in West Chester, PA. As Walter shares: “when I am not making something or making a place to make something I feel lost or confused.” As Margaux writes: “The world is bursting with magic, and for anyone looking it positively pulses!”.
These two truths are among the many gifts given to us through our Cultivating Place and Artful practices.
Margaux and Walter Kent are the founders of Peg & Awl – they are a husband and wife with two boys and a Pearl (their dog) team of life long learners and seekers, makers, and cultivators. They started Peg & Awl in 2010 in their Philadelphia row home "without a vision – just an affection for making things we felt were missing in the world, and a fondness for giving new life to old and abandoned things." They currently cultivate life, art, curiosity and place, with their five acre wood, garden, and pond.
Margaux and Walter are artists, makers, growers and cultivators of open hearted and thoughtful lives for all of us at all ages…through their work as curious and creative individuals, as home and land stewards, as parents, and as creators.
Both Walter and Margaux are with me this week from their five-acre wood full of magic and wonder to share more about the curious art and adventure that is their cultivation of place.
After having the incredible fun of visiting their studio, home and woods, we talk more more about their unplantings, plantings, ponds and paths in progress.
So pleased to share them with the CP community!
Follow Peg & Awl, Margaux, and Walter online:
and on Instagram:
All photos Courtesy of Peg & Awl, all rights reserved.
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JOIN US again next week, when host Abra Lee officially integrates her passion and
expertise as a scholar of garden history revealing Garden-based stories that complete our collective story. She’s in conversation this week with Rose Vincent, Resource Sharing Librarian at the NYBG, talking about research, archives, and finding proof of the truth. That's right here, next week. Listen in!
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Thinking out loud this week...
Hey hey, it's Jennifer—
How do we make ourselves at home where we live? How do we live not as strangers in our places, but as family in our places? One theme I love from this conversation with Margaux and Walter is the power of your own personal participation through art made in your place – likely with your place: its views, its moments, its plants, its light, its seasons. Gardens are art, and the practice of Cultivating Place well is an ongoing art across our lives….an art of looking, listening, learning and loving…
YES! We are gearing up for Artober kicking off October 1st on Cultivating Place. Every episode this month Abra, Ben and I will be in conversation with an artist of some kind, whose artistry goes hand in hand with their own Cultivating Place practice. Also starting October 1st , the CP team will be introducing you almost daily to one of the 17 artists who have generously donated examples of their artistry to the upcoming Art of CP online art auction running which will be live from Thursday October 23rd through end of day Monday, October 27th. If you know the expansive, serendipitous, and inspiring feeling of an open art studio tour in your community, you are in for the treat of just that sensation generated from the CP community, if you do not have a great open studio tour in your physical community, then welcome to this one – you’re going to be amazed.
This first – we hope annual – Art of CP auction we hope offers a little bit of artistry for everyone. All proceeds from the auction, including several Fund a Need for CP opportunities will go directly to supporting the Cultivating Place Foundation and its awareness raising and engagement efforts – this year really focused on the completion of our documentary film in production. Have you seen the film website now up? Check it out! Let us know what you think, and thank you – thank you – for your support of this work engaging, encouraging, empowering and inspiring the big G gardener in all of us growing the world better environmentally, socially, culturally, economically, and spiritually. We grow better and more beautifully together.
Every act of Cultivating Place is an opportunity to care. We have been cultivating this art auction most of this year and we cannot wait to share it with you. Thank you to every artist who contributed and for all of you other CP artists out there – we’ll be in touch for 2026! Link to register as a bidder HERE
The other theme I am really mulling over from this conversation – especially as I am looking at a big birthday on the horizon – is this: How do we root deeply in our place AND remain open to possibility and opportunity?
I think creativity and artfulness has a lot do with that. Constantly engaging and challenging our own creative instincts to try or learn or both something new – or something we already love in a new way.
The art of life-long learning is a gift we give ourselves as Margaux and Walter tell us – it keeps us both firmly present in our place at any given moment, but also reaching up and out at the same time. The plants show us this every day and every season.
For my 59th birthday, I took up Cello. John and I spent the day at a violin makers in the Bay area choosing my cello and I have been pretty good about practicing if not every day, then 5 times a week when I am home. By my upcoming 60th birthday I might be able to play a recognizable, if a little scratchy, version of Summertime…at the end of Artober on CP, and in honor of my 60th, birthday, I’m starting a CP100 day project – for which Margaux is joining me. I hope you will join us too!?
More information on as we get closer….if you know you want to join in – send me an email: cultivatingplace@gmail.com
Really happy to be here together with you all on this artful learning path that is the practice of Cultivating Place well.
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, weekly communications support by Sheila Stern and Carley Bruckner, transcripts by Doulos Transcription, and regular guest hosting by Abra Lee and Ben Futa. 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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