Seeds: Nature's Artful Engineering
September 5 - December 21, 2024
Seeds: Nature’s Artful Engineering features over 25 detailed photographs of seeds in wild and garden settings, primarily taken by Northern California plantsman and naturalist, John Whittlesey, as well as over 30 seed specimens. The images vividly portray the intriguing seed structures and dispersal mechanisms of native plants as they enter the final stage of their evolutionary biology: ensuring the survival of plant life. The exhibition aims to increase awareness and appreciation of seeds and their incredibly valuable role in California’s ecological systems. Seeds: Nature’s Artful Engineering is curated by Whittlesey and Jennifer Jewell, the creator, producer, and host of Cultivating Place.
What We Sow: The Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds
October 16 from 5:30 PM - 6:30 PM
Tickets $5 at the door
Join us for a special talk presented by Jennifer Jewell. She will explore the philosophy of Cultivating Place, her national, public radio program and international podcast, based on the belief that gardens/gardeners are powerful agents and spaces for potentially 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 explore how this power of gardens and gardeners can be viewed through a lens of seeds, and the general state of seeds in our gardened lives: how they grow, where they grow, who grows them, who sells and/or controls them, and their care up and down the seedsheds of our world.Jewell will walk us through examples taken from her daily life, her research, and interviews over the past decade with seed keepers as synthesized in her newest book What We Sow, On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (2023). All together, the histories, stories, and overall state of seed wherever we find it and the people who care for it become both cautionary tales and guiding lights in ways we can all sow, seed, and grow our world more beautiful, more delicious, more biodiverse, and more brave.
Harvest Party
November 16 from 2:00 PM - 4:00 PM
Save the date!
