Presented by The Botany Shop and the South Bend Public Library
Doors Open 5:30p | Conversations 6-7:30p
St. Joseph County Public Library Community Learning Center | Leighton Auditorium
Plants have superpowers, and the lessons we learn while caring for them transcend the soil. This ethos is at the heart of Jennifer Jewell’s work, the host of the national award-winning weekly public radio program and podcast, Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden.
The Botany Shop is thrilled to partner with the St. Joseph County Public Library and Brain Lair Books as we welcome Jennifer to South Bend for an evening of community and conversation around the power and potential of growing plants. Jennifer will facilitate a 90-minute conversation and presentation with local guests who will share the stage: Susan Greutman, owner of Sunchoke Farms, Andrea Crawford and Megyn Edmonson of the newly-formed South Bend Greenway Conservancy, and Benjamin Futa, Founder & CEO of Botany. We’ll open things up to the audience, too.
Our conversation will be recorded live and eventually posted as a special episode of the Cultivating Place podcast later this year. Jennifer’s visit to South Bend is kicking off a nationwide, two-year tour of Cultivating Place Live: Dialogues to Grow events across the United States. What we learn and share together will have a direct impact for the better on every city going forward. We have a unique opportunity to mark and honor this moment at the very beginning of what will become many conversations in communities like ours across the nation about the power and potential of more people growing more plants in more places. Our dear friends at EM EN Art House are helping us record and share the stories we’ll share.
Our evening concludes with a book sale and signing with Brain Lair Books. We’ll provide some gentle conversation starters, otherwise you’re free to make this part of the evening whatever you need or want it to be: making connections, exploring ideas, meeting new people, taking a selfie: whatever. Our ultimate goal is that you leave feeling inspired, connected, and motivated to grow. Jennifer’s visit is the first in a series of similar events The Botany Shop will be hosting throughout 2024.
Free Admission for the Conversations & Book Signing | RSVP Requested as Seating is Limited
ABOUT THE PANEL
Jennifer Jewell | Cultivating Place
Jennifer is the host of the national award-winning weekly public radio program and podcast, Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden.
The author of The Earth in Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants (Timber Press in 2020), and Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press, May 2021). Her third book, What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds, was published by Timber Press in late 2023.
Jewell’s greatest passion is elevating the way we think and talk about gardening, the empowerment of gardeners, and the possibility inherent in the intersection between places, environments, cultures, individuals, and the gardens that bring them together beautifully – for the better of all the lives on this generous planet. Cultivating Place has several times been recognized by Garden Communicators International as Best On-Air Talent and Best Overall Broadcast Media. In 2023, Jewell was honored with the American Horticultural Society’s Great American Gardener B.Y. Morrison award for horticultural communication.
In 2021, The Earth in Her Hands was honored by the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries with their Award for Excellence in Biography, and Under Western Skies received a Golden Poppy winner for the Glenn Goldman award from the California Alliance of Independent Booksellers. Jewell regularly serves as a keynote speaker for horticultural organizations large and small across the country, including The Garden Conservancy, The American Public Gardens Association, The American Horticultural Society, The Thomas Jefferson Foundation/Monticello, The California Native Plant Society, The New York Botanical Garden, Miami University of Ohio, and the Atlanta Botanical Garden.
She lives and cultivates her place in interior Northern California with her partner, plantsman, John Whittlesey.
Susan Greutman | Sunchoke Farms
Susan is the director of operations, Mom and “boss lady” at Sunchoke Farms, an urban farm in South Bend's Near Northwest Neighborhood. In addition to the day-to-day operations of the farm, Susan also manages the neighborhood farmer's market, Portage Farm Stands, and the local non-profit South Bend Community Food Initiative. When she's not advocating for food sovereignty, Susan is delighted to be homeschooling, cooking and playing with her nine children.
Andrea Crawford and Megyn Edmonson | South Bend Greenway Conservancy
Andrea Crawford is a co-founder of Mrs. Niño’s Garden, a farm-based educational project in partnership with El Campito Child Development Center. She has worked as a journalist, writer, magazine editor, and educator. A native of New Harmony, Ind., she studied journalism and English literature at IU Bloomington before moving to New York City where, in addition to her career in publishing, she earned a certificate in urban agriculture from Farm School NYC. She apprenticed at Snug Harbor Heritage Farm on Staten Island and trained at Hawthorne Valley Farm near Hudson, N.Y. She has been a resident of South Bend’s near westside since 2016.
Megyn Edmonson is the creator of Pearl Park, a half-acre greenspace behind the IUSB Civil Rights Heritage Center. A native of South Bend with a longstanding, multidisciplinary interest in the arts, she studied opera on a performance scholarship at IU Bloomington. After returning to her hometown, she extended her artistic, healing mindset to therapeutic exercise — she has taught dance, yoga, and movement for all ages — and to the natural world. Over the past 15 years she has transformed four vacant lots on W. Jefferson Street into an urban park for her westside neighborhood, planting 62 new trees, nurturing existing mature specimens back to vitality, and adding a curved sidewalk, benches, boulders, and native plants.
Last summer, along with other founding board members, they launched the South Bend Greenway Conservancy, a 501(c)3 organization devoted to creating and maintaining greenspace as vital urban infrastructure. The nonprofit grew from focus groups during the Near Westside Neighborhood’s planning process, with an idea to create a greenway in one of the few city neighborhoods without a park. In its initial project, the Conservancy seeks to work alongside government, nonprofit, and private partners to connect ecologically rich green spaces with unique sites of historic and cultural importance on the west side of South Bend — like a string of pearls. As the project runs through a neighborhood that was once redlined and has seen decades of disinvestment, the metaphor references both Frederick Law Olmsted’s notion of a string of parks as an “Emerald Necklace,” and the process of resilience a living creature makes, given the right conditions, to transform trauma and irritation into beauty.
Benjamin Futa | Botany
Ben is the Founder and CEO of Botany, which launched in April 2021 as a pop-up plant shop in South Bend. Today, Botany includes a robust portfolio of spaces, events, experiences, and learning opportunities to empower more people to grow more plants in more places. A life-long gardener, Ben is passionate for building community and connecting people to plants and one another through green space. Before Botany, Ben worked in public botanical gardens for ten years in a variety of leadership roles.