Maybe it’s to grow fresh fruits and veggies that taste better than what you can buy at the grocery store. Maybe it’s for the satisfaction of seeing seeds you plant grow into something magnificent over months or even years of care. Maybe it’s to lay out a verdant and beautiful welcome mat to your neighbors.
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Drive from New York to Washington, D.C., and it might be hard to imagine that there was once anything there other than cities and suburbs. Today a vast landscape of brick and asphalt, concrete and lawn stretches up along the I-95 corridor, broken only occasionally by marsh, farmland or forest. You might wonder what grew
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In 1970, the City of Philadelphia closed off the East Park Reservoir at the edge of the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood. A gate blocked the ramp up from Fairmount Park. “I grew up in Strawberry Mansion, and the reservoir was used by the community as a recreational space,” explains Tonnetta Graham, president of the Strawberry Mansion Community
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On July 16, a female ruby-throated hummingbird drank from a coral honeysuckle flower at the edge of Tacony Creek Park. We know this because an iNaturalist user with the handle “digitalmirage” took a picture of the bird in the moment before it hummed away. “Recently I’ve been obsessed with hummingbirds,” explains Savannah McHale (a.k.a. digitalmirage), who
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Abrood of fledgling kestrels—America’s smallest falcons that are adorable even as adults—peer through the front of their cage, which sits at the top of shelves filled with animals on the mend. “These are ones we raised from fallen nestlings,” explains Michele Wellard, assistant director of the Philadelphia Metro Wildlife Center. Wellard is careful to make
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There are two letters from readers sitting on my desk, each one tugging at me, competing for my mood and mindset. I may be an optimist, but I’ll start with the more negative of the two. It comes from a reader in Oreland, a response to editor’s notes I had written about the ill-conceived idea
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Someday the row of young elm trees will transform this sunbaked stretch of Delaware Avenue, but first they have to survive the next couple years. To the west is the Northeast Water Pollution Control Plant. To the east is a Sanitation Convenience Center (where you can drop off hard-to-dispose-of items like tires and mattresses) and
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An entomological research project might bring to mind expeditions through far-away jungles or at least meadows out in the countryside. It probably doesn’t conjure up an Old City chocolate factory rooftop. But to reach this field site we walked into Shane Confectionery. From there we hiked up the stairs through one of the most delicious-smelling
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Racks of tanks with plastic tubes feeding in and out stand against the thick stone walls of the Fairmount Water Works. Together with the microscopes and other lab equipment, it looks like a mad scientist’s underground workshop—that is, until you start reading the cheerful interpretive panels about freshwater mussel restoration. “We’re demonstrating why we care about
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"Mom,” a red-tailed hawk and Philadelphia’s most-watched bird, napped in a small London plane tree next to Sister Cities Park on a gray winter morning. On the sidewalk below, I joined Christian Hunold, associate professor of political science at Drexel University and a nature photographer. We suspected Mom had already filled her crop with rat
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In 2005, Judith Robinson was fed up with the litter and illegal dumping plaguing her North Philadelphia neighborhood. A real estate broker and grandmother of two, Robinson refused to accept the status quo of garbage-filled lots, and she took her concerns to community meetings—as well as into her own hands.First, she noticed groups of teenagers
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