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. In this issue, we explore how we can expand that welcome mat to include our wild neighbors; if you’ve got some soil to grow plants, you can grow plants that fit into our local food webs. They feed the local bugs, which feed other bugs, which feed the local birds, and so on. Not sure where to ..read more

We’ve sung the praises of native plants numerous times in these pages. Because truly, what’s not to love? Native plants — or “regionally-appropriate” plants, as Ryan Drake, McCausland Natural Areas manager at Morris Arboretum, urges us to call them — have abundant ecological benefits. They attract pollinators, sequester carbon, promote biodiversity, prevent erosion and require less inputs to thrive. “Especially in an urban area like Philly, with harsh conditions like heat and stormwater, plants that evolved here are used to functioning here,” Drake notes. “They’re tough plants that are adaptab ..read more

Earthworms can be a gardener’s friend. They can transport nutrients from the soil surface to layers deep underground where roots can access them. Their burrows are passageways for water and air. By aerating soil and mixing nutrients, most species of earthworms support cultivated plants. In forests, however, where lingering leaf litter is critical to forest health, earthworms are disruptive. Plant life in forests in Wissahickon Valley Park, Pennypack Park, Haddington Woods and other woodland in Philadelphia depend on the dead leaves that fall every autumn. Leaf litter replenishes humus and soil ..read more

The rain garden along Kelly Drive looks like any other installed by the Philadelphia Water Department: A mix of wildflowers, grasses, reeds and sedges grow in a shallow basin designed to soak up stormwater. The soil in which the plants sink their roots is what makes this particular garden unique. The two-foot-deep mix of compost and sand is part of a pilot to develop circular soil using recycled glass. The thriving plants suggest the pilot is a success; the question now is how to turn it from promising experiment to industrial-scale solution. Sand, and how we mine it, creates industrial-scale ..read more

Amani Lee, a senior at The U School, hadn’t given gardening much thought until this year. As part of her school’s horticultural program, she’s now researching crops in Ukraine, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. She is learning what the people in these countries grow and eat, and the stories behind their famous dishes. Under the guidance of Anna Herman, a long-time urban agriculture educator, Lee is working alongside classmates to help design a demonstration garden at Fox Chase Farm, home to the School District of Philadelphia’s agricultural program. The demonstration garden will be organ ..read more

In 2018, at 42 years old, I finally became a homeowner. I had landscaped my previous rental properties, only to have contractors destroy the plantings, or I would move, wondering if my plants persist. Now, I had autonomy over my property and could alter the grounds as I saw fit. More accurately, I had the authority to remove or install the plants my wife approved. Our home is in Upper Roxborough. We live in a single house on a tenth of an acre, about one hundred feet from Wissahickon Valley Park, with portions of our front and back yards on steep slopes. The space between our house and our nei ..read more

Gardening was woven into Victor Young’s life at an early age. His mother and aunt introduced him to the concept of growing your own food as he helped them in their gardens as a kid. The West Philly resident tried to carry these lessons into adulthood — but not without hitting some obstacles. “I was going to start growing things in my backyard and I did try, but I had groundhogs that would eat up my vegetables,” Young recalls with a laugh. Around that same time in 2013, Beverly Carter, a high school science teacher and a friend of Young, reached out with the idea to start a community garden to ..read 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 — that is, everyone. The work of Tallamy and his peers has helped inspire a rising tide of devotion to home ecological restoration, which wasn’t as fashionable 20 years ago. Nevertheless, legislators and landscaping companies have been slow to ..read 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 the garden,” she says. “It’s like an oasis in the middle of Southwest Philadelphia.” It’s not the only place in the neighborhood that’s seeing new visitors. In dozens of sites around Kingsessing, birds, bees, butterflies and other pollinators are finding new places t ..read 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 other gardening practices she sees as unharmonious with nature. “I did it for a season and ultimately was kind of repulsed by the whole practice of it,” she says. So one year ago, the 24-year-old struck out on her own. She founded a one-woman landscaping company, Native Nymph Garde ..read more