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Cultivating Place: Michael Kauffmann, Founder And Editor Of Backcountry Press

In this season of the winter solstice — marked by the beauty and appreciative contemplation that mark the celebrations of winter holidays the world around, I very much wanted this week's Cultivating Place to acknowledge the diversity, value and fragility of our native plants and their communities. 

Credit Photo courtesy of Michael Kauffmann
Michael and one of his hero California native conifers.

No matter where you garden or cultivate place now, or where you might have done so throughout your life, the native plants of any place are what signify, identify and root that place as its own. 

Native plants — ornamental, edible or useful, common, rare or endangered — all cultivation and gardening is based upon the native plants of somewhere. This week, I honor the native plants of my place — the native plants of California, one of the world's biodiveristy hotspots, with more native and endemic plants than certainly anywhere I've lived or gardened before now. 

To help me in this celebration of the plants of our own places, my guest today is Michael Kauffmann, editor-in-chief of Backcountry Press and author of several books exploring the natural history of some signature plants of the western forest, including — so seasonally appropriate — "Conifer Country, Conifers of the Pacific Slope" and "A Field Guide to Manzanitas,” one of our native broadleaved evergreens. 

As of January 2017, Michael is also the editor of Fremontia, the journal of the California Native Plant Society. 

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Jennifer Jewell is the creator and host of the national award-winning, weekly public radio program and podcast, Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History & the Human Impulse to Garden, Jennifer Jewell is a gardener, garden writer, and gardening educator and advocate. Particularly interested in the intersections between gardens, the native plant environments around them, and human culture, she is the daughter of garden and floral designing mother and a wildlife biologist father.