Category: Land Stewardship
Restoring our Forests: A Town Meeting
April 25, 2022[caption id="attachment_275013" align="aligncenter" width="600"] White-tailed deer are just one of many issues compromising the future of our forests.[/caption]
Walk into the Center’s forest-- or any forest in the region-- and you’ll notice a habitat filled with invasive plants. The bright yellow flowers of lesser celandine, while beautiful, carpet the forest floor right now. Devil’s walking stick, every inch of it converted by thorns, are shooting up in massive clusters. Garlic mustard is in full flower, its leaves being munched on by the caterpillars of cabbage white butterflies, an invasive non-native butterfly-- and often the first butterfly we see in the…
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…
Schuylkill Center Intern Redesigns the Entrance Garden
August 23, 2021[caption id="attachment_273125" align="alignnone" width="640"] A masked Schuylkill Center intern Jamel Shockley weeding the front entrance garden with volunteers.[/caption]
“It’s the first thing people see when they walk in the front door. It’s like the first word of a play or the first note of a song-- if it catches your attention and draws you in, you’re already off to a good start.”
Hearing the Schuylkill Center’s intern, Jamel Shockley, talk about redesigning the gardens in front of our main entrance, it is easy to share his enthusiasm. A lifelong Philadelphian and recent Drexel graduate with a degree in environmental science,…
This Independence Day, Plant A Liberty Tea Garden
July 5, 2021[caption id="attachment_272919" align="aligncenter" width="768"] New Jersey tea in full bloom[/caption]
Independence Day is one of the quintessential summer celebrations, replete with good food, (hopefully) enjoyable company, and citywide displays of fireworks.
Here at the Schuylkill Center though, and indeed in many wild corners of our city, a very different kind of fireworks display has been happening for the past few weeks.
Milkweeds burst with pink globes and sprays of orange. Red and lavender beebalm florets arc across the meadow. Yellow sunchoke flowers shoot up and fade into brown seedheads. Fields progress from lush spring green to a crescendo of summer…
Reviving the Prairies of Philadelphia
May 17, 2021Shop online for native plants: tinyurl.com/SCEEnativeplants
There are few better ways to learn plants than by working in a nursery. Assisting with the Schuylkill Center’s annual Native Plant Sale—now in its 17th year—is a truly unique experience for employees and volunteers alike. With over 200 species of native plants being offered to the public annually, even the most experienced botanists and gardeners encounter fascinating plants that they have never seen before. In my work with the sale this year, two plants in particular have caught my eye.
Rattlesnake master and purple coneflower are both wildflowers with wonderful names that are native…
Gardening with Native Plants: Great for You AND the Planet
April 26, 2021Like all forests around us, the Schuylkill Center is in full bloom right now. You really have to see it to believe it.
Virginia bluebells, pink buds opening into bright blue flowers. Shooting stars, white flowers blazing across the forest floor. Trillium, a gorgeous but an oh-so-ephemeral plant, the species over here blooming in white, but the one over there in red. Solomon’s seal, named for the Biblical king, its delicate bell-like flowers dangling from zig-zags of leaves. Jack-in-the-pulpit, poking through the forest floor, Jack dutifully staying inside his lectern. And that’s just a start.
[caption id="attachment_272699" align="aligncenter" width="640"] Solomon's…
Planting Oaks On Earth Day
April 19, 2021On Thursday, April 22, the Schuylkill Center will be joining almost one billion people worldwide commemorating the day. And we’ll be engaged in an incredibly powerful act of environmental stewardship: we’ll be planting seven oaks trees that day, five at our nature center, one at our Wildlife Clinic, and a seventh at the 21st Ward Ballfields.
Why oaks? Because of all the trees in our forest, the oak is essential, a keystone species, offering more ecosystem services than any other tree in our forests.
To start, oaks support more biological diversity than any other local tree. Its leaves are the…
Hopping and Hoping: Toads on the road
April 18, 2021Why did hundreds of toads cross the road on a rainy Wednesday night?
As ever, to get to the other side; migration season is in full swing.
Every year in late March and early April, the amphibians wake from hibernation to mate and lay eggs, and they begin the treacherous journey from Schuylkill Center forests to the Roxborough reservoirs and back. The most treacherous part? Crossing Port Royal Avenue, often during evening rush hour. The toads mostly move in dusk and darkness to avoid animal predators—but that method doesn’t work so well for cars.
[caption id="attachment_272664" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] by Kevin…
