Jubilee Gardens is owned and operated by me, River Seidelman (they/them).
In my free time I enjoy social justice organizing, learning to cook different cuisines, dancing, waxing philosophical, laughing hard, writing, and appreciating the quiet of forests and deserts.
My landscaping and gardening experience is varied, from vegetable gardening and running community garden workshops for children; to repairing trails in the Colorado Rockies and constructing artisanal dry-stack stonework; to drafting and installing landscape designs; to aesthetic pruning, tending PNW native plant gardens, and more.
The vast majority of my garden knowledge derives from 7 years working under the tutelage of veteran plant and garden people, namely: Stew Winchester, Andrea Hurd, Greg Shepherd, Magi Treece, and Anne Greenwood. I received several semesters of training in the horticulture departments of Merritt Community College (Oakland CA) and Portland Community College, in classes covering Integrated Pest Management, permaculture design, irrigation, landscape design, plant ID, and other subjects.
Before gardening, I was as a high school humanities teacher in Oakland CA, where I taught Ethnic Studies, US History + US Literature, and Creative Writing. In that work, I often strove to introduce locale-based inquiries, developing curriculum that encouraged my students to more richly understand and engage with the place where we lived. I hold a degree in social justice-focused secondary education from Mills College (Oakland CA), which supported my critical thinking about teaching and education systems.
My path to classroom teaching was through youth arts and cultural education: I was the Technical Director for Oddfellow’s Playhouse/the Children’s Circus of Middletown (CT) for five years, and juggled various Jewish education jobs at various progressive shuls around the Bay Area. I still love youth, and I still love education and pedagogy and all the types of labor and thinking they contain. I can’t help but use elements of this lens in my garden work.
I have an undergraduate degree from Wesleyan University (Middletown CT) in African American Studies, where I first sincerely cultivated my interest in geography and the physical landscape. (My senior thesis was an attempt at critical theory about cartographies of the Underground Railroad.)
Lastly: my identities and upbringing have informed many things about who I’ve become and how I work. I am a queer nonbinary Ashkenazi Jew, also of Irish Catholic decent, and I live with chronic pain/illness. I grew up in a politically purple suburb of New York, and come from a family lineage of Left-wing organizers, educators, laborers, music-lovers, and community-builders. I am thankful for all the things I’ve learned from these experiences!
Jubilee Gardens 