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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Spotted lanternflies landed on my hat, my face and every other available surface of my body on August 5, at The Woodlands in West Philadelphia. I was there tagging along with a team of Penn State researchers on a mission to collect 3,000 of the bugs that morning. Alongside me were entomologist Osariyekemwen Uyi; Michelle Niedermeier,
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An assortment of bees were hard at work on native flowers at Wyalusing and Belmont avenues in the Belmont neighborhood of West Philadelphia in late July. A colorful row house-sized mural of Ed Bradley, the late award-winning journalist and West Philly native, towered overhead, blending into the bright yellow of the sweet coneflowers, the pink
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Around 200,000 ash trees stand in the city of Philadelphia’s watershed parks. But in the next five to 10 years, most will be gone—killed by the emerald ash borer, an invasive species of beetle that has destroyed tens of millions of American ash trees in the Midwest and Northeast since it arrived in Detroit from
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On May 25, Christian Cooper, birder and member of the New York City Audubon Society’s Board of Directors, was birding in Central Park. He asked Amy Cooper (no relation) to follow the park rules by putting her dog on a leash and then recorded what happened next: Amy, who is white, called 911 to report
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I don’t think i would have noticed that the patch of forest off Livesey Lane had been restored if Steve Jones, president of Wissahickon Restoration Volunteers (WRV), hadn’t told me. I visited the area on a humid morning in late May. The canopy was complete, shading out the sun completely. I heard the usual forest
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Looking back at the start of the pandemic, I’ll remember everything closing in March. Walks around my neighborhood took me past locked storefronts with apologies taped to the doors, and almost every email announced a cancellation. I got an email about the City Nature Challenge the evening of March 12. The City Nature Challenge (CNC)
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I had low expectations for the fungus walk that the Philadelphia Mycology Club hosted last year in April. I showed up as part of the City Nature Challenge, an international urban citizen science event that connects people to nature while documenting urban biodiversity. I sit on the Challenge’s local organizing committee, and while we welcomed
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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 BrownAmerican kestrels have the grit to live and thrive in Philly.
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By Bernard BrownPhilly researchers recruit American eels to fight invasive crayfish.
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