TALK: What We Sow - The Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds

In her presentation, Jennifer Jewell explored the philosophy of Cultivating Place, the concept surveyed in her eponymous National Public Radio program and international podcast: the belief that gardens and gardeners are powerful agents and spaces for positive change in our world, helping to address challenges as wide-ranging as climate change, habitat loss, cultural polarization, and individual and communal health and wellbeing. She will explore how this power of gardens and gardeners can be viewed through the lens of seeds: how they grow, where they grow, who grows them, who sells and/or controls them, and their care throughout the 'seedsheds' of our world.
Jewell will walk us through examples taken from her daily life, her research, and interviews over the past decade with seed keepers as synthesized in her newest book, What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (Timber Press, 2023). All together, the histories, stories, and overall state of seed wherever we find it and the people who care for it become both cautionary tales and guiding lights towards ways we can all sow, seed, and grow our world more beautiful, more delicious, more biodiverse, and more brave.

Bio:
Jennifer Jewell is the host of the national award-winning weekly public radio program and podcast Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden, and President/CEO of the non-profit Cultivating Place Foundation, whose mission is to expand and elevate the way we as a culture think and talk about gardening. Jewell and the Cultivating Place Foundation are currently at work on a documentary film synthesizing the lessons learned from nearly ten years of gardener interviews, titled Cultivating Place: The Power of Gardeners, release date 2027.

In addition to What We Sow, Jewell is the author of The Earth in Her Hands: 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants (Timber Press in 2020), and Under Western Skies: Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press, May 2021).

Jewell’s greatest passion is the empowerment of gardeners, and the possibilities inherent in the intersection between places, environments, cultures, individuals, and the gardens that bring them together. She lives and cultivates her place in interior Northern California with her partner, plantsman John Whittlesey.

This talk was hosted at Southern Oregon University and Zoom on November 20, 2025.