At the Pulaski Zeralda Community Garden in Germantown, the air is thick with the scent of green onions and okra. These vegetables grow from some of the 38 plots, including one dedicated to a local women’s center. This season alone, the garden yielded blackberries, strawberries, tomatoes, okra, peppers, corn and collards. The garden participates in
More
So you want to save the world? Start small: save your backyard. That’s the message University of Delaware professor Doug Tallamy has been trumpeting for decades. His work in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology fuses scientific scholarship with rhetorical flair, packaged into practical advice for everyone who owes their life to an ecosystem
More
Most mornings, Victoria Miles-Chambliss walks down the street from her home in Kingsessing to the Cecil Street Community Garden to drink a cup of coffee. Among the newly-planted native trees and echinacea plants, she sees something that was once a rare sight in her neighborhood: birds. “Our block has really changed since we put in
More
Bekah Carminati spent her childhood making mud pies and inspecting insects in her backyard in Montgomery County. When she grew up, she took up landscaping as a way to channel her love for craft and nature. But there was a problem. The company she worked for insisted on applying black dyed mulch, planting annuals and
More
Across the street from one of the last remaining Catholic girls’ schools in the city, the Hunting Park Community Garden sits unattended behind a padlocked fence. Where nettle and knotweed grow in abundance and raised beds sit empty, the garden waits for the return of its loyal stewards. Michael Wilcox has been involved with the
More
A group of 30 community gardening organizations and allies have issued a letter asking the Philadelphia Land Bank to change how it preserves properties for community gardening. At issue is the land bank’s practice of attaching a 30-year mortgage to properties that it gives to garden organizations. The “self-amortizing” mortgages are for the market rate
More
In the years since Brad Lidge closed out the 2008 World Series for the Phillies, he and his wife, Lindsay, have established themselves in Boulder, Colorado, where Lindsay has become an advocate for the beauty and benefits of wildflowers and native flora. As the owner and grower of Reverie Fields, Lindsay designs bouquets and other
More
Yellow chili peppers grow pointing up from the bushy plant in a raised bed at the Emily South section of the Growing Home Garden in South Philadelphia, looking a bit like a miniature tree decorated with Christmas lights. Leafy green mustard plants sprout from a nearby bed that had apparently been turned over recently for
More
Sandi Vincenti isn’t sure who called CLIP (the Community Life Improvement Program) on her native plant demonstration garden in Fishtown, A Child’s Inspiration Wildlife Discovery Garden. She can think of two possibilities. One is a developer interested in building on the plot. “The other assumption is that we have two neighbors in some of the
More
