Show Notes
To welcome October, this week on Cultivating Place, host Ben Futa welcomes Colleen Raney of Washington State’s Songbird Seed Company and Diadem Flower Company.
Colleen founded Songbird Seed Co., a seed company devoted to cultivating and preserving exceptional sweet peas.
What started as a personal fascination with the sweet pea became a deeper study of their history, varieties, cultivation, and extraordinary diversity.
Today, Colleen grows hundreds of sweet pea varieties each year, selecting and sharing seeds that she finds particularly beautiful, unusual, and worthy of being grown again. Her work is grounded in the belief that sweet peas need not be complicated, and there is so much to be discovered in paying attention.
Colleen publishes a bi-annual periodical, The Sweet Pea: A Garden Companion, and she is the founder of the American Sweet Pea Society.
Together, Ben and Colleen explore her early life in acting and singing, and the connection between scent, memory, and our sense of home.
We follow Colleen’s growth from tending a simple garden and growing flowers for pollinators into a full-fledged flower farm, with a particular focus on her success growing sweet peas. They also talk about stepping back, paying attention, and letting the plants tell us what they need.
At the beginning of the season for sowing many spring bloomers, we hope you join us by listening in!
Cultivating Place now has a donate button! We thank you for listening over the years, and we hope you'll continue to support Cultivating Place.
We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow and engage in even more conversations like these.
The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud and iTunes. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.
More from Cultivating Place
Many of the systems that run our world, let alone garden our world, are built-sometimes intentionally and sometimes inadvertently-to discourage and disincentivize regenerative growing and regenerative thinking.
Kai Wright is a gardener, but chances are good you know him as a Peabody Award-winning host, editor, and longtime journalist whose work explores the intersection of history, power, and the evolving American identity.
For the next conversation in our intermittent series on what regenerative cultivation looks like in our world-at many levels, Cultivating Place is speaking this week with Dr. Garrett Liles, cofounder and faculty affiliate of the Center for Regenerative Agriculture and Resilient Systems at California State University, Chico.
Happy Autumn! Cultivating Place is proud to launch an occasional series from Host Abra Lee, delving into our Garden past to better understand and illuminate our Garden present and future. Sometimes we have to look back to grow forward!
To “leave the land better than we found it” should be the ethic of all Gardeners.