INSIDE AND OUTSIDE: Nature + Pop Culture News with Jessica Murnane · Jessica Murnane

How Gardening Can Help With Grief + My Mom Jayne (the film) with Barri Leiner Grant (Grief Specialist at The Memory Circle)

·1 hr 2 min·4 clips

Continuing bonds can keep a relationship with the dead alive through ritual, memory, and the garden.

1. Inside and Outside: Nature + Pop Culture News with Jessica Murnane focuses this episode on gardening, grief, and the documentary My Mom Jayne. 2. Jessica Murnane is the host, author, horticultural therapy practitioner, and founder of Basker, and Barry Leiner Grant is the guest, a grief specialist and founder of The Memory Circle. 3. The episode asks how nature, memory, and family stories can help people live with loss. 4. Jessica starts with a reason she loves to grow: plants create “new friends and deepened friendships” through seeds, tips, and shared plant projects. 5. Barry describes growing up in a New Jersey high-rise, then moving to a first house with a large lawn, a sprinkler system, and tomatoes her father grew. 6. She also remembers a duck pond in New Jersey, feeding ducks with her dad, and woods behind the house that felt secret and beautiful. 7. Barry says she now grounds herself by feeling the grass under her feet in the morning at her small backyard in Westchester, New York. 8. Jessica brings in Avril Tynan’s article “Growing Grief, Cultivating Life After Death in the Garden,” which links gardens to continuing bonds and grief. 9. Barry says the garden is a place to keep a relationship with loved ones who died through memory, ritual, and ongoing reflection. 10. She explains that grief support often starts with accepting that someone is not coming back, not with forcing a continuing bond immediately. 11. Barry says people often need ritual early on because they do not want to forget the person they lost. 12. She describes grief as something that affects the whole body and says it can surface “sideways” if it is not tended to. 13. Barry says her work is grief tending, and she helps people choose what feels safe: community, therapy, groups, retreats, journaling, or the outdoors. 14. She notes that bereavement leave is often only three days, which she says is not enough time for the nervous system to catch up with a loss. 15. Barry says she often meets grieving people in everyday places and calls herself a “hope dealer” who tries to make loss easier for others. 16. She says her mother died in 1993, and that experience led her to create what she did not have: affordable grief support with sliding scale options and scholarships. 17. The interview style is conversational and personal, with Jessica sharing her own work in horticultural therapy and grief-adjacent care. 18. The tone stays reflective and practical, moving between Chicago memories, nature stories, and specific grief frameworks. 19. Listeners interested in grief, gardening, and family memory will get the most from this episode. 20. Listeners looking for a fast, light culture chat without grief discussion may skip it.

As heard by us

A grounded conversation where gardening becomes a language for grief and connection.

The episode ties gardening and grief together with a steady hand, showing how close those two things can sit. Jessica connects tending plants with loss, ritual, and the work of noticing the grieving person, which gives the piece its emotional core.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Press play if you want a grief-and-gardening conversation that stays tender, grounded, and human.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from INSIDE AND OUTSIDE: Nature + Pop Culture News with Jessica Murnane