Jennifer Jewell was born and raised at 8,000 feet in Colorado. She is the daughter of a professional gardener/florist mother, Sheila Balding Jewell and wildlife biologist father, Samuel Rea Jewell, sister to Sabrina Jewell and Flora Jewell-Stern.​  She graduated from Harvard University with her undergraduate degree in World Literature in 1993.  Jewell’s greatest passion is elevating the way we think and talk about gardening, the empowerment of gardeners, and the possibility inherent in the intersection between places, environments, cultures, individuals, and the gardens that bring them together beautifully – for the better of all the lives on this generous planet. From 1996 to 2000, Jewell worked as an editor for the Microsoft Corporation’s Encarta Encyclopedia, before becoming a garden writer from 1999. Her work was featured in Gardens Illustrated, House & Garden, Martha Stewart Living, Colorado Homes & Lifestyles, and Old House Gardens.  In 2008, Jewell created and became the host of the locally-focused public radio program In A North State Garden airing on North State Public Radio in Northern California from 2008 to 2015.  In 2016, that program grew up into the national award-winning weekly public radio program and podcast Cultivating Place: Conversations on Natural History and the Human Impulse to Garden, a one-hour interview-based program, co-produced by North State Public Radio, focusing on the culture of gardening around the world. Cultivating Place is syndicated on NPR affiliate radio stations across California and in Ohio and available as individual episodes to public radio stations on Public Radio Exchange (PRX). Jewell is also the author of The Earth in Her Hands, 75 Extraordinary Women Working in the World of Plants (Timber Press, 2020), and with photographer Caitlin Atkinson of Under Western Skies, Visionary Gardens from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast (Timber Press, 2021), and, What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seed (Timber Press, 2023). Cultivating Place has several times been recognized by Garden Communicators International as Best On-Air Talent (2017 and 2018) and Best Overall Broadcast Media (2017). In 2023, Jewell was honored with the American Horticultural Society’s Great American Gardener B.Y. Morrison award for outstanding horticultural communication.  In 2021, The Earth in Her Hands was honored by the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries with their Award for Excellence in Biography, and Under Western Skies received a Golden Poppy winner for the Glenn Goldman award from the California Alliance of Independent Booksellers. The members of CALIBA present The Golden Poppy Book Awards to recognize the most distinguished books written by writers and artists who make California their home. Jewell regularly serves as a keynote speaker for horticultural organizations large and small across the country, including The Garden Conservancy, The American Public Gardens Association, The American Horticultural Society, The Thomas Jefferson Foundation/Monticello, The California Native Plant Society, The New York Botanical Garden, Miami University of Ohio, the Atlanta Botanical Garden, and the Missouri Botanical Garden. ​ Jewell lives and cultivates her place in interior Northern California in the company of her partner, plantsman, John Whittlesey.