Author: news
Natural Selections: A fern for this season
January 5, 2022[caption id="attachment_273648" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Christmas fern, one of the few plants still green in a January forest.[/caption]
The New Year is a great time to go for a walk in a natural area near you– the Wissahickon, Andorra Meadow, the Schuylkill Center, anywhere. The walk likely helps you meet one of your resolutions– yes, get those 10,000 steps!– while being outside allows you to sidestep that accursed virus that’s been, sorry, plaguing us unmercifully for two years now. And being outdoors allows you to lower your stress levels, as time in nature is restorative and calming. In 2022, make sure…
December’s Weather: Hot, Hot, Hot
December 27, 2021[caption id="attachment_273548" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Since 1970, temperatures in Philadelphia during The Twelve Days of Christmas (December 25 to January 5) increased over 5 degrees.[/caption]
It’s been a December to remember on the weather front.
Two weeks ago, a series of high-intensity tornadoes tore a 200-mile path from Arkansas and Missouri into Illinois and Kentucky, killing more than 85 people (as of this writing), with many more still missing. But then last week another-- very powerful and equally unusual-- system swept through the Great Plains and Midwest under weirdly warmed skies, spawning hurricane-level winds in Nebraska, Iowa, and Minnesota, killing another…
All We Want for Christmas
December 20, 2021[caption id="attachment_273543" align="aligncenter" width="350"] Santa visited Ridge Avenue two Saturdays ago to spread his Christmas cheer-- but what will he leave under Roxborough trees this year?[/caption]
With Christmas coming at week’s end, I asked a group of Roxborough leaders, community activists, nonprofit executives, and old friends what they wanted Santa to leave under their organization’s Christmas trees. As expected, they gave thoughtful, funny, and even surprising answers. Enjoy!
Michael Devigne, executive director of the Roxborough Development Corporation, told me via email, “This holiday season I would like to see Roxborough residents strolling Ridge Avenue and visiting our many shops and…
The Nature of the Holiday Season
December 13, 2021[caption id="attachment_273523" align="aligncenter" width="350"] Winterberry holly, a native holly whose bright red berries feed many birds throughout the winter, and one of the many symbols of the season.[/caption]
Winter formally arrives at 10:58 a.m. on Tuesday, December 21, that moment we call the winter solstice, both the shortest day and longest night of the year. Our staff-- like thousands of generations of humans before us-- will gather around a fire to mark that exact moment.
Still, for a naturalist like me, one of the pleasures of the holiday season is that we decorate homes and offices with innumerable nods to…
The Winters of Our Discontent
December 6, 2021[caption id="attachment_273514" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Wissahickon Valley Park under a recent winter's thin coating of snow. What will this winter bring?[/caption]
Last winter, Philadelphia received over 22 inches of snow at the airport, just a hair above the long-term 20.5 inch average. But that’s 73 times the amount that dropped during the snowless winter before; if anything, our weather has become erratic and prone to extreme mood swings like this.
So I was intrigued by the Old Farmer’s Almanac prediction that this winter would be a “Season of Shivers.” The new season, they wrote, “will be punctuated by positively bone-chilling, below-average…
LESS IS MORE: A New Exhibition
November 29, 2021[caption id="attachment_273493" align="aligncenter" width="500"] Photo of Makeba Rainey's work is courtesy of Mae Belle Vargars.[/caption]
On Saturday, December 4, our art gallery will be decked out in dazzling portraits of local Black figures, Liberation leaders, and ancestors, created by Philadelphia artist and community organizer Makeba Rainey. Her exhibition, LESS IS MORE: The Nature of Letting Go, will be on display through March 26, and is, as she describes it, “a celebration of a distinctly Black American ingenuity.” Her title refers less to a reverence for minimalism for its own sake than “a call to do the most with the least……
The First Thanksgiving Menu: Venison, Lobster, and… Passenger Pigeons?
November 22, 2021[caption id="attachment_273481" align="aligncenter" width="470"] The versatile and colorful Indian corn, widely used among Native Americans for porridge, bread, and more, was likely consumed during the 1621 Thanksgiving feast. Turkey, however, might not have been.[/caption]
As we gather with family for Thanksgiving feasts this week, it will be especially poignant, as for many families (like my own), this is the first live Thanksgiving dinner in two very long years.
Most likely a turkey will occupy a place of honor in your feast; for me, the reveal of the roasted turkey on a platter is the singular moment of the day. For…
Mindy Maslin and Philadelphia’s Forest
November 15, 2021[caption id="attachment_273419" align="aligncenter" width="255"] The PHS's Mindy Maslin, founder of Tree Tenders, is being honored for helping plant 20,000 trees across the region.[/caption]
Philadelphia has a bold plan for reforesting the city, making sure 30% of our city is blanketed under a canopy of trees, which will go a long way to mitigating heat waves and cooling our city's rapidly changing climate. It’s also an environmental justice plan, as-- no surprise-- economically challenged portions of the city have fewer trees than more advantaged neighborhoods.
Mindy Maslin supports this ambitious goal. As the founder and director of Tree Tenders, an important…
Another Fall in Philadelphia
November 8, 2021[caption id="attachment_273384" align="aligncenter" width="600"] The changing leaves on our trails.[/caption]
I drive into work one Monday morning in October, enjoying the intense green of the trees here at the Schuylkill Center, and am greeted by a shock of yellow leaves covering the sweet birches looming over the driveway. Further down, I notice that the poison ivy winding up the cherries, too, has turned to gold since the previous Friday. A week later, the maples and sumacs turn to impossibly intense shades of scarlet and amber. Firewood reappears at the grocery store, pumpkins materialize in every shop, and I suddenly develop…
The Lenape and the Land
November 1, 2021[caption id="attachment_273318" align="aligncenter" width="650"] A typical Lenape village, with wigwams, the Lenape name for their homes.[/caption]
Pennsylvania school kids are still mistakenly taught that our state’s history begins in 1681 with William Penn and the naming of our state, Penn’s Woods. Of course, the land already had a name, Lenapehoking, and it was hardly new: for some 10,000 years before William Penn, the Lenape inhabited Lenapehoking.
On Thursday evening, November 4 at 7:00 p.m., in celebration of Native American Heritage Month, we will present “The Lenape and the Land,” a free virtual conversation among three members of the Lenape Nation…
