Staff Profile: Jennifer Jewell, Host of Cultivating Place

What do working with a one-ring circus, for an encyclopedia, and as a public radio host have in common?

For Jennifer Jewell, host of NSPR’s Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden, they have all been jobs where every day is different, and in which education is central.

But the last of the three has allowed Jewell the chance to integrate the subject matter that is her true passion: horticulture.

Her half-hour-long show on NSPR, Cultivating Place, is the culmination of Jewell’s lifelong love of plants and their importance, and her drive to expose as wide of an audience as possible to conversations that explore natural history’s role in our culture.

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Jewell is the daughter of a wildlife biologist father, and a florist and garden designer mother.

“I grew up in Colorado out in the field with my mother and father, and we always had to know the names of plants and animals and ecosystems that we were in,” she said.

Her family had moved to Colorado from the northeast so that her father could finish his PhD. They traveled back east often to visit family, and so she grew up with a “strong sense of different places and they way they were different.”

“It was really fun and valuable and interesting to me that, you know, the coastline of Rhode Island did not look like the interior of Massachusetts, or the front range of Colorado or the western slope of Colorado,” she said. “And I think that that subtlety has really been important in shaping who I am.”

She also has always been a writer, gravitating to the humanities over science in her studies. She first attended Barnard College in New York City, but after a year and a half realized she did not like living in a big city. It was at this point that her uncle, who ran a one-ring, European-style circus, convinced her to come work with him. Jewell spent five years traveling the country with the circus, which she said was hard work, really fun, and never dull, but ultimately she decided she wanted to finish her undergraduate degree. She ultimately earned her undergraduate degree in world literature from Harvard University in Boston.

In the mid-1990s, Jewell found herself living in Seattle where her soon-to-be husband matched for his surgical residency. Jewell worked for a Microsoft encyclopedia, editing articles about art and literature and in her free time gardened at their little bungalow in the Ballard neighborhood.

“Working for the encyclopedia was a little bit like a circus,” she said. “And it’s very much like producing a weekly radio program, and like working at an art museum, in that you get to do something different all the time—like designing something new, sharing something new, learning something new—and that is a little bit schizophrenic but also really interesting and energizing to me.”

Throughout all of these journeys, Jewell said, the constants were that she wrote and that she was a happily “obsessive-compulsive gardener.” In Seattle, she had her first “real garden” with flowers, trees and vegetables—natives and non-natives—the whole works. She finally put both of these interests together researching and writing garden articles for a local newspaper.

When her then-husband got a fellowship in England, the family, now including a young daughter, moved there and Jewell decided to test whether writing about gardens was what she wanted to do for a living. From 2000 to 2007, that’s mainly what she did, both in England and Colorado, pitching and writing garden stories for glossy magazines like House and Garden.

“I really liked it in the beginning, and by the end I just really hated it,” she said. “The stories had to be so angled toward looking good and being commercially viable and selling something—it grossed me out.”

She also didn’t like the fact that the stories were “sequestered in these expensive lifestyle magazines” that weren’t available to everyone.

Her husband was recruited to work at Enloe Medical Center in Chico in 2007, and the family, now with two daughters, relocated.

In the first month of living here, Jewell caught an announcement that KCHO was looking for public service announcement (PSA) writers. Her mother had instilled in her a love of public radio, even taking her to see Susan Stamberg speak, which she still describes as a highlight of her life.

She came into the station to apply for the job and ended up meeting with former Program Director Joe Oleksiewicz, who said, “Why would we use you for PSAs when we can get a garden program out of you?”

Very quickly, they developed the program In a North State Garden, which Jewell hosted and produced for eight years from 2008 to 2015. She says that program addressed for her the issue of wanting to produce gardening stories that were accessible to everyone, but that by the end of it, she still wanted to make a program that took a more integrated approach to exploring how different factions of the horticultural world fit together with the world at large.

Her new show, Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden, now in its second year, does just that.

The show features weekly interviews that explore the many different ways people come to and bring to life what garden and gardening mean. They celebrate how gardening encourages a direct relationship with the dynamic processes of the plants, animals, soils, seasons and climatic factors that come to bear on a garden.

“The idea that a conversation about plants and their importance and their being tied to natural processes and being an important part of our cultural literacy is being heard by people in their cars, at their dinner tables, with their kids —to me that is the culmination of everything I have ever wanted to do. I think it sends a message that plants, gardens and natural history are important parts of our everyday. Part of our cultural literacy. Part of what can save the world.”

Cultivating Place can be heard on NSPR on Thursdays at 10 a.m. and 6:30 p.m.