Submitted by Griffin Bay Bookstore

Griffin Bay Bookstore, along with the San Juan Island Library, is sponsoring an author talk with the gardener Jennifer Jewell in the main salon of the Library Thursday, Aug. 22 at 7 p.m.

In her presentation, Jennifer Jewell will explore the philosophy of “Cultivating Place,” her national, award winning-public radio program and international podcast, based on the belief that gardens/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 being.

She will walk audiences through how this power of gardens and gardeners is exemplified in not only her weekly program, but very specifically in her three books: the horticultural women in leadership roles in the award-wining The Earth in Her Hands (2020); the beautiful and innovative place-based gardens that celebrate western landscapes in Under Western Skies; Visionary Gardens from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Coast (2021)- with amazing photography by Caitlin Atkinson; and, finally in What We Sow, On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (2023).

All together, these stories, garden and gardener inspirations tending to a culture of care are blue-prints guiding us in ways we can all grow our world better: more beautiful and brave from our own gardens.

Jennifer Jewell’s mission is to explore and celebrate a deeper connection to the world through the cultivation of gardens. She achieves this mission through her writing, photographs, exhibits about and advocacy for gardens & natural history and through her weekly public radio program and podcast Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden, on gardens as integral to our natural and cultural literacy.

Griffin Bay Bookstore will be on hand Library so that Library patrons may purchase copies of Jewell’s books.