Back to school (with plants) - Sean Doherty, VP of Education, Missouri Botanical Garden

Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden

It’s back to school time – you can tell by the ads on television and radio (yes, I was watching the Olympics!) and by the displays at the stores with notebooks, pencils, backpacks, and lunch boxes being on prominent display. As you and I know, one of the best classrooms available to us all is the outdoors – from the wildlands of fields, woods, and waysides around us to more formal state and national parks and monuments, our own gardens, and very specifically, our many public gardens. Being outdoors is a great classroom, and plants are among our best teachers. Joining me this week to explore all of this and more is Sean Doherty, a gardener, a plant lover, a 25-year-career public educator: in the classroom, as a principal, and for six years as a St. Louis School’s district superintendent. Sean is now the Vice President of Education at the Missouri Botanical Garden in downtown St. Louis. From school groups to mindfulness walks, botanical art, and identification classes to therapeutic horticulture, from seed banking to historic herbarium collections, this botanic garden in St. Louis continues to expand how they and we think about the phenomenal educational capacity and imperative of plants and their conservation. Join us! Cultivating Place now has a donate button! Thank you so much for listening over the years, and we hope you'll support Cultivating Place. We can't thank you enough for making it possible for this young program to grow even more of these types of conversations. The show is available as a podcast on SoundCloud, iTunes, and Google Podcast. To read more and for many more photos, please visit www.cultivatingplace.com.