Radio Garden is planting seeds this spring while you are imagining your best garden ever. Take your pick of more than 8,000 diverse radio stations around the world. Radio Garden began growth in 2016. “Our dedicated team is hard at work tending the garden daily. Planting seeds for the future and keeping the weeds at bay from the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision.”
“Jonathan Puckey, our head gardener, leads with a focus on design and development, ensuring Radio Garden blossoms and thrives in every aspect.
By bringing distant voices close, radio connects people and places. From its very beginning, radio signals have crossed borders. Radio makers and listeners have imagined both connecting with distant cultures, as well as re-connecting with people from ‘home’ from thousands of miles away.”
Radio Garden is a metaphor for so much that life and gardening represent—happiness, meaning and variety. (Cass R. Sunstein, the American legal scholar, made this clear on Sam Harris’s recent Making Sense podcast.) I can’t remember my last boring day, though there have been many bad days to be sure. I am often happiest in gardens, but a garden takes work. Raising children takes work, too. Both are meaningful but can diminish happiness when your child is throwing a conniption fit or sapsuckers are poking thousands of holes in your favorite magnolia. Variety adds spice. I enjoy meeting new people, exploring new cultures, and growing (even if sometimes killing) plants I have never grown before.
Radio expanded my small world
I grew up listening to early Cassius Clay prizefights on a tiny transistor radio. Clay was my hometown hero. The Louisville Lip spoke poetically and prophetically. “Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” he boasted. Coincidentally this spring, in the Olmsted-designed Chickasaw Park, near Muhammad Ali’s childhood home, the construction of a Butterfly and Bee pollinator meadow, honoring Ali, is underway.
https://www.olmstedparks.org/celebrating-chickasaw-park-during-black-history-month/
Only in the last four years, since Breonna Taylor was killed, have I begun more often to cross Louisville’s 9th Street—the dividing line between the city’s historically segregated East and West Ends. I was a slow-to-set sail Vasco da Gama in a city I thought I knew. My friend Eugene Donan, who grew up a few blocks from Muhammad Ali, schooled me last fall. We drove through the California, Russell, Parkland Park Duvalle, Shawnee, and Chickasaw neighborhoods in the West End. I was welcomed to the world Eugene knew so well.
There is still much to explore.
Spring beauties
My Kentucky hit parade of blooms began in early March with Lenten roses and marched on with thousands of spring beauties along the Salt River, a hillside of daffodils, precious few toothworts, Virginia bluebells, a red quince, grape hyacinths, pasqueflowers, dogwoods, redbuds, and service berries. I wandered around the Radio Garden globe on my iPhone and heard the Gin Blossoms from WXKU in tiny Austin, Indiana. Boston (the rock band) was playing in Kazakhstan. I’m sure somewhere they are playing the Grateful Dead’s China Cat Sunflower.
“Be all ears for radio stations broadcasting in unique languages. Pick up on Afro-Creole dialects in Suriname, Nigeria’s Pidgin English and more.”
Spring beauties (Claytonia virgininica)
Lenten roses (Helleborus x hybridus)
Pink pasqueflower, Sedum ‘Angelina’ and grape hyacinth
Narcissus ‘Delibes’ and Virginia bluebell
Musical Roots
“Zoom into the places that shaped musical genres. From the birthplace of jazz to gamelan music from Indonesia to Rio de Janeiro’s baile funk.”
Radio Diaspora
“Stations connecting communities and groups living abroad…Listen to Japanese radio from Honolulu… Or the first African radio station in Los Angeles. Sunuker FM is a Wolof language radio station for Senegalese communities living abroad and features African news, talk shows and music. Sunuker means ‘Our Home in Wolof.’”
Take the edge off
Radio Garden coupled with ear buds could be a way to catch tunes from Gambia, Azerbaijan, and Argentina that may drown out the unnerving drone of a once in lifetime double brood of cicadas—billions of them— that will be emerging in portions of the American Midwest and southeast later this spring.
I can’t help you with ticks and chiggers, but I will vouch for WMMT-FM 88.7, THE GREATEST LITTLE RADIO STATION IN THE WHOLE WIDE W-H-I-R-L-E-D, in Whitesburg, Kentucky.
A beautiful post Allen – and thank you for one of those valuable links that might even change our lives. Many years ago the NPR station I listened to at my desk in Southern California had a three hour segment of various artists from all over the world. I bought a lot of CDs with those recommendations, ones I still treasure now. Eyes opened to so many sounds. How cool that this uses the metaphor of the garden to connect us. -MW P.S. My Claytonia are up and joyous and one of the best things about April in this valley.
Thank you, Marianne. This story was a joy to write. Radio, as a little boy, took me places beyond my bedroom. I heard Ray Charles sing Hit the Road Jack on Louisville’s WLOU when I was twelve and I never looked back
I rave to people all the time about this incredible free app. Search for radio stations in particular places or just spin the globe and see where it takes you. When the Ukrainian war started, I listened to the stations there and I felt connected, even though I didn’t understand what they were saying in the newscasts.
Radio Garden is positively revelatory!
Susan, it really is astounding to have more than eight thousand radio stations at your fingertips.
Am always learning something new from you, Allen. I look forward to hearing the music of the garden. Love those spring beauties, too.
Jenny, we’ve had a lovely spring in Mercer County so far. Dodged late freezes and tornadoes and the spring beauties have been long flowering and are seeding nicely all over the place. So are the box elders. Hundreds of little seedlings pop up under big pine trees where the spring beauties grow. We’ll cut the box elders down once they grow 10″ or so.
I am so glad I am signed up for this gathering of entertaining and useful information. Thank you and all that contribute to Garden Rant. I cannot wait to listen to the world while gardening.
Nancy, thanks for tuning in to Garden Rant and Radio Garden.
So grateful for the shout-out to RadioGarden! I’ve been listening to it for years, especially when the news in this country is too much to believe or bear. It’s comforting and enlightening to share earspace with someone in a culture and climate far removed from my own ( though our mighty, and much-loved KMUD, here in the redwoods ,can hold its own against any station in the world). The flowers are great,too.
Jean, I am glad to hear from a long time Radio Garden fan. I’ve only dipped my toes in the water. Yes, the flowers are beautiful here in Kentucky. We live for April and May.
Thanks Allen! I’ve loved listening to radio all my adult life. I will check out Radio Garden. Our old WVXU Roots Of Rock clued me into so much older music. (I’m 60 y o now.)
From your neighbor up the road in Cincinnati.
Thanks, Paul. Good to know what your good listening is.
The detailed listing of the diverse West End neighborhoods the author traversed – California, Russell, Parkland Park Duvalle, Shawnee, and Chickasaw – underscores the complex, multifaceted nature of urban communities that can often be overlooked or reduced to simplistic narratives.