Wild Plant Culture

Welcome to Season Three of the podcast! This episode brings us to sunny Tucson Arizona to speak with Katy Gierlach and Jared R. McKinley of Spadefoot Nursery. We talk native plant nursery shop - about being ecologists not horticulturists, getting people to buy ugly plants and weeds, accepting failure, why tomatoes are patriotic if you're Italian, and dumping chicken manure on people's heads. You'll want to tune in. And yes, that's a picture of them. Hey, if you're digging this podcast, find me on Instagram at @wildplantculture, it's the totality of my social life right now as NJ is snowed in and locked down.

Today we have a dispatch from the front lines of habitat destruction and deer overpopulation -- New Jersey. But don't despair! We're talking with Dr. Jay Kelly about some remarkable rare plant recoveries and prospects for restoration. This podcast is brought to you by Wild Ridge Plants, growers and stewards of native plants. The music at the beginning and end is "The Ship" by my once (and maybe future) band Horse Graveyard. If you like raw, dark, heavy music with a bit of blazing sunshine peering out from the dark clouds... check us out. Thanks for listening!

My conversation is with Dr. Susan Leopold, Ethnobotanist and Executive Director of United Plant Savers. Here are some of the topics we discuss: • Medicinal parasitic plants • Sandalwood • United Plant Savers • Protections for rare plants, lack of in US • Not aligning with other parts of the conservation movement • Underworld smuggling • Trade in white sage • Migrant labor and herb harvests • Gypsy co-ops and ramps • Forest Grown Program • Supporting herbal companies doing right by plants and people • Harvesting ramps in Europe • Federal management of medicinal plant harvest -- in Europe, lacking in United States • Osha and disturbance • Anti-viral herbs and coronavirus. Shutdown in trade of medicinals • Forest service management and medicinal herb conservation. Overgrazing • FairWild plant trade issues due to coronavirus • Growing hemp in Virginia • Spagyric extraction of cannabis • Cannabinoids and Ginsenosides as diffusive herbs • United Plant Savers Goldenseal Sanctuary Find Susan’s herbal products at ParisApothecaryVA.com This podcast is brought to you by Wild Ridge Plants, offering medicinal and edible native plants from locally propagated seed. Shop our mail order native plants.

This episode of the Wild Plant Culture Podcast features woodworker and landscape architect David Hughes. We talk about his use of wild plant materials in crafting rustic furniture, as well as his experience designing functional native plant landscapes.

Hi Everyone, thanks for joining me for another episode of the Wild Plant Culture podcast. This conversation is with Karl Anderson. Karl's an elder in the best sense -- someone who's lived a full life, delved deep, and come up smiling (and sometimes cursing, too). He's always been generous about sharing his wide interests and experience in natural history. Here, I ask Karl about his life story from a city kid to a draftsman to the director of a nature center. We talk about changes in botany and in the plant world, about sharing vs. secrecy when it comes to rare plants, about being an educator, and about some of his many travels to interesting natural places around North America and beyond. This podcast is brought to you by Wild Ridge Plants. We started Wild Ridge to offer a toolkit for the restoration of native plant communities, including a native plant nursery, botanical surveys and stewardship planning, as well as classes, hikes, presentations and publications. Check us out online at wildridgeplants.com Thanks everyone who has sent feedback or joined the Wild Plant Culture Facebook page. I'm looking forward to hearing from more of you sometime soon, so don't be shy! You can reach me at jared@wildridgeplants.com. This conversation is with Karl Anderson. Karl's an elder in the best sense -- someone who's lived a full life, delved deep, and come up smiling (and sometimes cursing, too). He's always been generous about sharing his wide interests and experience in natural history. Here, I ask Karl about his life story from a city kid to a draftsman to the director of a nature center. We talk about changes in botany and in the plant world, about sharing vs. secrecy when it comes to rare plants, about being an educator, and about some of his many travels to interesting natural places around North America and beyond.

Today's conversation is with Julie Martin, primitive skills practitioner. Julie teaches ancestral skills ranging from fire-starting to herbal medicine at Practical Primitive, a school in Great Meadows, NJ run by Julie and her husband Eddie Starnater. It's a fantastic place to go for workshops in a vast array of different skills. I hope you enjoy today's conversation immersing in the forgotten fundamentals of human survival. Julie and I start the conversation by talking about processing acorns for food. We also discuss fire and its elemental place in human life, communicating with plants, building community and nature connection through primitive skills, and a whole lot more. This podcast is brought to you by Wild Ridge Plants. We started Wild Ridge to offer a toolkit for the restoration of native plant communities, including a native plant nursery, botanical surveys and stewardship planning, as well as classes, hikes, presentations and publications. Check us out online at wildridgeplants.com Julie and Eddie have a number of great books and DVDs, including Acorn: Recipes for the Forgotten Food, mentioned in the podcast. Check out PracticalPrimitive.com for books, DVDs, and their workshop offerings. If you're looking for a holiday gift for a kid, take a look at my book The Puddle Garden. It's an illustrated children's story about native plants and wildlife, an early start on the idea of habitat restoration featuring an adorable young bear as well as cardinal flower, hummingbird, and many others. You can find it online at wildridgeplants.com or on thepuddlegarden.com. Thanks for all the feedback, questions, and comments, and for the iTunes ratings too. Please keep it coming, and give me a holler at jared@wildridgeplants.com with comments, suggestions for upcoming guests, and just to chat. Today's theme music was a first sketch of a piece called Fish Hawk. I'll probably take the bones of it and make it into a real song someday, meanwhile it was fun to pull together a few instruments and make a quick recording.

My guest today is Leslie Sauer. Her book The Once and Future Forest inspired me to become an ecological restoration practitioner and continues to inform so much of my work propagating native plants, monitoring natural communities, and repairing degraded habitats. I'm so happy to welcome her as the very first guest on the Wild Plant Culture podcast. Leslie Sauer, a founder emeritus of Andropogon Associates, is a pioneer in the field of restoring and managing native landscapes. Through innovative strategies and techniques, she has directed the reestablishment of natural systems in a wide range of sensitive, degraded, and developed environments. Leslie was a key player in watershed management projects including the Flood Protection Plan for the Passaic River in New Jersey and the Management Plan for the Rockaway River Watershed. Her park projects range from Central Park and Prospect Park in New York City to National Parks. Leslie was on the board of the Society for Ecological Restoration as well as an adjunct associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the landscape architecture Masters program. Her book, The Once and Future Forest (Island Press) is a guidebook for restoring and managing forest systems. In our conversation, Leslie talks about the early days of ecological restoration, forming Andropogon Associates on a shoestring, how doing model projects didn't always have the intended effect, and about compliance vs. performance, engineers, pipelines and much more. She's a true elder in the best sense of the word and has a fiery intellect and spirit. I hope you enjoy this conversation with Leslie Sauer.