In 2024, to celebrate her 75th birthday, Aminata Calhoun took a trip to Spain for some much-needed rest and relaxation. After a few weeks of soaking in the picturesque Spanish scenery, she returned home to a landscape starkly different from the one she had left. Surrounding the lot at Belmont and Wyalusing avenues that she
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Photography By Rachael Warriner Graveyard Shift By Constance Garcia-Barrio If tombs are the clothes of the dead, as one poet said, permanent residents of cradle graves at The Woodlands Cemetery wear vivid garments indeed. Marble headstones, footstones and low sides form these graves while pansies, bleeding hearts, and other flowers bloom atop them and brim
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John Janick was an obsessive gardener packing every square inch outside his family’s Mount Airy twin home with native plants when I first wrote about him in Grid in July 2014. He had filled his backyard and the area around his driveway, and was running out of space in his front yard. I found Janick,
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By Bernard BrownLocal environmental educator builds wildlife oasis in Fishtown.
MoreBy Bernard BrownGardeners who have taken a peek inside the hand-sized yellow flowers on their squash plants have probably witnessed what looks like a bee dance party. On smaller flowers, bees perch themselves and deploy their long tongues to suck up the tiny droplets of nectar inside. By contrast, on winter squash plants (like pumpkins, butternuts
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by Bernard BrownImagine you’re a pipevine swallowtail butterfly flying around the rowhouses of southwest Philadelphia. You look like a swatch of velvet. On top, your wings are black toward the front and an iridescent electric blue towards the back; underneath, they flash an array of bright orange spots as a warning to predators. You hatched at
MorePhoto by Emily Wren Photography Upping the beauty quotient for your big day by Emily Kovach Besides food, there is one other wedding detail that is practically universal, making an appearance at even the most low-key backyard weddings or far-flung-destination nuptials: flowers. Whether in the form of bouquets, garlands, boutonnières, scattered petals or table arrangements,
MorePhoto by Jared Gruenwald by Brittany Barbato Today, the Philadelphia region has more than 30 public gardens within 30 miles of Philadelphia, cultivating roots that ground much of America’s horticultural history. These four lesser-known gardens contain a treasure trove of beautiful, interesting and historically relevant plants waiting for you to discover and explore. The Gardens
MoreGarden Supply Hot Spots by Laura Everard Whenever you talk to gardeners, regardless of who they are, where they live and what kind of garden they have, they always have the garden center that they swear by, and they tend to get very “Sharks and Jets” about the whole situation. I don’t claim to have
MoreMade in the Shade by Laura Everard “I can’t grow anything because my garden is too shady.” If I had a dollar for the number of times people told me this, I would have enough money to buy all of the plants they would need to revamp their shade garden! Just because you aren’t living
MoreTiny Farm to Tiny Table by Grid Staff School cafeterias of old are notorious for mushy veggies and fried mystery meats, but students at Friends’ Central School in Wynnewood hope to promote healthful lunch hours with a new year-round food-growing program. Students from nursery school through fifth grade are taught the significance of healthy eating
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