WILD DREAMS OF SPRING, with JEN WILLIAMS (BEST OF)
- Jennifer Jewell
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
Spring is of course perfect for some wild dreams about what we can and
will sow in the seasons to come. With plants, and with ourselves. Jen William’s vision for her work as Wild Dreams Farm and Seed on Washington’s Vashon Island is to ensure abundance and biodiversity in our culture and in our gardens by growing and breeding open pollinated vegetable, flower, and herb seeds which nourish our human and more than human communities.
I had the great joy of visiting Wild Dreams in the summer of 2024 and I am so pleased to revisit this dreamy conversation this week, just in time for some of our own wild dreaming.
Original Post:
Sometimes our dreams didn’t start out as our dreams. Sometimes, our current dreams were once just seeds germinating in the crucible of time and experience leading up to what is now. For Jen Williams, being a seed farmer situated within a small island community was not always the dream.
The dream to effect meaningful change in the world around her started out for Jen in a realm all too prominent for most of us right now – electoral politics and the largest human structures of power in our world.
But over time, disappointments, reality check disenchantments and more importantly, surprising enchantments, Jen's desire to change the world composted and transformed itself into her current life in the soil, with the plants and their seeds, in community, on the land. Now her wildest dreams effect powerful and beautiful change in the world through her - and our - collective relationships to plants, food, beauty, and place.
I had the great joy of visiting Wild Dreams Farm & Seed this past summer, and I am so pleased to welcome Jen Williams to Cultivating Place this week on the seasonal harvest-to-winter transition, life-and-death-and-life-again-cycle celebration day of All Hallows Eve/Samhain.
Because like the seasons, and the past, present, and future realms, and our gardens - our wildest dreams - are the stuff of transformation.
For the past almost 25 years, Jen Williams has been stewarding her family’s shy 2 acres of land on Washington State’s Vashon Island. The initial form of the farmland under her care included a portion of it being dedicated to lavender grown by a collective of women, alongside Jen’s collective market farm of vegetables sold at restaurants, farmers' markets, and natural food stores. The farm is encircled by fruit trees, native shrubs, and tree hedgerows. Jen describes how the more structural perennial plantings were added over time in a movement toward growing a “synergistic ecosystem”
As founder and owner of Wild Dreams Farm and Seed on Washington State’s Vashon Island, Jen grows, harvests, saves, stores, and packages about 125 different seed varieties – for vegetables, flowers, and medicinal herbs. In a nod toward the communal social movement around seed, Wild Dreams Farm works as a trial and grow-out site for other groups, including the Experimental Farm Network, and the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, but also serves as an educator and educational site for her community around seed and growing work.
The result - across her Island and across our continent is indeed a synergistic ecosystem! Enjoy this conversation, and Happy Halloween!
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All Photos courtesy of Jen Williams Jennifer Jewell/Cultivating Place
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JOIN US again next week, when guest host Ben Futa kicks off April in celebration of spring Flowers. He is in conversation with Brenna Estrada, author of Pansies, How To Grow, Reimagine, and Create With Pansies. They are the perfect flower friend for April's showers bringing more May flowers! That's right here, next week. Listen in!
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Thinking out loud this week...
Hey, it's Jennifer—
A special Spring treat for you in the breaks this week – two poetic excerpts from Maria Popova’s newest endeavor – the book (and audio book) crafted from her seminal, annual, convening of "The Universe In Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder Through Science and Poetry" – out now from Story Press wherever you get your books.
In the book, all 15 curated poems are paired with a more scientific explanation of the poet, the history of the subject, as as is always the way with Maria Popova – so much more.
Both excerpts I’ve chosen are read by Maria – this first Sylvia Plath’s Mushrooms seemed so timely a reminder about the true reality of the world and our place in it on this sacred turning of the seasons/harvest, compost, and seed.
For our second excerpt from The Universe in Verse, curated by The Marginalian’s Maria Popova, I wanted something to remind us that we are more than a collection of our greatest faults, our greatest failures or frustrations even in the height of a highly fraught political season.
As The Universe in Verse the book and audio book notes via its dedication poem by Ursula K. Le Guin: "Science describes accurately from outside, poetry describes accurately from inside. Science explicates, poetry implicates. Both celebrate what they describe."
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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, and regular hosting by Founder, Jennifer Jewell, as well as Abra Lee in Atlanta, Georgia, and Ben Futa in South Bend, Indiana. 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..
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