About River

Jubilee Gardens is owned and operated by River Seidelman (they/them).

As far back as I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by place and geography: the history of the land and its people, the ways infrastructure shapes our relations, the character of place, the knowledge and possibilities that have been suppressed and nurtured. I garden as a mode of direct, physical engagement with place.

My landscape and garden experience is wide-ranging in scope and location. In my recent Portland-based years I draft and install landscape designs, prune woody plants, and tend gardens. In the past I’ve run childrens’ community garden workshops in New England, repaired trails in the Colorado Rockies, apprenticed under artisanal dry-stack stoneworkers in the Bay Area, and worked on landscape contractor crews in Portland and the Bay Area.

I’ve spent 7 years developing garden knowledge under the tutelage of veteran plant people, namely: Stew Winchester, Andrea Hurd, Greg Shepherd, Magi Treece, and Anne Greenwood. I’ve also pursued training in the horticulture departments of Merritt Community College (Oakland CA) and Portland Community College, covering Integrated Pest Management, permaculture design, irrigation, landscape design, plant identification, and various plant care subjects.

Gardening is just one way to cultivate deep connection with place. Before gardening, I taught high school Ethnic Studies, US History, US Literature, and Creative Writing in Oakland CA, studied secondary education at Mills College (Oakland CA), and participated in Bay Area community organizing. In teaching and organizing, I recognized the central role of place in people’s lives, and the powerful pedagogy of being directly immersed in a subject of study–by living there, seeing and touching it. So I often developed curriculum around locale-based inquiries, guiding my students to deeply engage with the hyper-local places we lived through history, literature, and activism. I still love youth and education, and I carry some of that lens into my gardening.

I first sincerely cultivated my interest in geography and landscape at Wesleyan University (Middletown CT), where I earned a BA in African American Studies. (My senior thesis was an attempt at critical and literary theory about cartographies of the Underground Railroad.) I stayed on in Middletown through summers and the following years as the Technical Director for Oddfellow’s Playhouse/the Children’s Circus of Middletown (CT).

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. 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 and lineages.

I spend my free time organizing for social justice, laughing hard, writing, raising a puppy, living in a collective household, and reveling in the quiet of forests and deserts.