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By Marion McParland, PHS Staff

Stormwater runoff is water -- from rain or melting snow -- that does not quickly soak into the ground. It flows from rooftops, over paved areas and bare soil, through sloped lawns and fields. As it flows, this runoff collects and carries pesticides, fertilizer, soil, pet waste, grease and oil, yard waste, leaves, litter, and other pollutants that end up in local bodies of water.

If it is not maintained properly, stormwater runoff can contribute to pollution, erosion, flooding and many other environmental and health issues. Most storm drains do not carry stormwater to wastewater treatment plants. Instead, pollutants in the stormwater end up in a local creek or pond, and eventually in local rivers and oceans.

Water resource management is the topic of a panel discussion, “Philly’s Innovative Water Systems: Yesterday and Tomorrow,” at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University on Wednesday, May 23, 6:30 to 8 p.m. Register here by May 22 for this free event.

Glen Abrams, Senior Director of Planning and Sustainable Communities for the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, will join Debra McCarty, Commissioner of the Philadelphia Water Department, in a discussion moderated by StateImpact Pa environmental reporter Susan Phillips.  They will talk about innovative programs underway, including Green City, Clean Waters and Rain Check, as well as ideas for the future. PWD historian and GROW magazine Editor in Chief Adam Levine will give an illustrated overview of the many creeks that once flowed through Southeastern Pennsylvania.

"Water is one of our most precious resources but many of us living in the Northeast take it for granted due to its relative abundance in our region," says Abrams. "However, most of our waterways are considered impaired, and the way that we have developed our cities and towns is largely to blame. By incorporating landscapes into our urban environments that mimic nature's natural recycling of water, we can begin to reverse the negative impacts on our rivers and streams and improve water quality."
 

By Tatiana Karakasheva

We are pleased to share posts from The Fire Escape Garden, a blog by Philadelphia gardener, Tatiana Karakasheva. Tatiana writes: I love growing things – outdoors, indoors, horizontally, vertically, in-ground, above-ground – you name it. I am starting this blog to share my experience with gardening in a somewhat unconventional location: my fire escape balcony. My goal here is to fill this limited space with as much green as possible, mostly edible plants, but some purely decorative ones, as well. I will also try to welcome wildlife, in this case birds and pollinators, and take some challenges with not-so-common-balcony-plant choices, like raspberry and potatoes.

Looks like the spring finally decided to settle for good in Philadelphia, so I’m getting ready to set up the garden. For now, though, it is just a fire escape balcony cluttered with some planters, buckets of compost, my worm factory, and piles of sunflower seed peels (evidence of the local squirrels raiding my bird feeder).

By Sally McCabe, PHS Associate Director, Community Education

Fire away! 

I have a horrible infestation of Aegopodium podagraria (Bishop’s Goutweed) on my front bank; it’s beautiful, has a nice smell, grows on a steep slope, and eventually gets covered with white flowers reminiscent of Queen Anne’s lace. With those qualifications, you’d think I would love it.

But it grows so vigorously, with a total mat of underground rhizomes, that it manages to kill everything but the giant-leafed hostas. All my wildflowers have had to jump the sidewalk and grow in the tree lawn and the gutter.  I have tried weeding, digging, covering with plastic, smothering in hay. This year I’m going to add a weed burner torch to my arsenal. If you have experience with such, please give me your advice before I go nuclear!

Learn more about goutweed in this video by the Ontario Invasive Plant Council and Toronto Region Conservation Authority's Gavin Miller.

By Marion McParland, PHS Staff

A visit to Tresco, in the Isles of Scilly off the coast of Cornwall, England, is an adventure filled with subtropical beauty and exotic plants from around the world.

If not for Augustus Smith, who acquired the lease on the Isles of Scilly, including Tresco, in 1834, the island might not be home to a remarkable collection of more than 3,000 species of plants that thrive in this British archipelago warmed by the Gulf Stream.

Smith constructed his house, as well as Abbey Garden, on the island of Tresco. He built a series of walls to protect the garden from the wind and the ocean and expanded the garden across the south-facing hillside on a series of terraces carved from the granite subsoil.

Four generations of the family have added their own contributions over the years, making this sub tropical garden world renowned. Shelterbelts -- lines of trees or shrubs -- were planted to protect the garden from strong winds and erosion.  When Commander Tom Dorrien Smith took over the family garden in 1955, he added to the collection, introducing new plants from New Zealand, Chile, Mexico, California, South Africa, Australia and the Canary Islands. One of his most notable introductions was the wonderful Proteaceae family of plants.

By Jenny Rose Carey, Senior Director, PHS Meadowbrook Farm

Spring is a perfect time to rejuvenate your old flower beds or to create new garden areas. One garden feature that you could add to enhance your spring show is a small rock garden area. You might wonder what is a “Rock Garden”? The simplest definition is a garden in and among rocks. PHS Meadowbrook Farm is known for its rock garden plants and has featured them for many years. We have a small rock garden by the driveway and a rock wall topped with plants in the back courtyard. Both gardens share a couple of common characteristics – they are both in full sun and the soil is very well drained.

The plants that are chosen for these hot and dry gardens are some of the toughest plants in the garden. They are also some of the smallest plants – so you can have a wide variety in a small garden area. Some of the plants that thrive in a rock garden come from mountains, above the tree-line, where the cold wind whistles by and there is little organic matter in the soil. To grow these plants successfully in the Mid-Atlantic area you need to practice tough plant love when you prepare the planting bed. You are going to make a flower bed that has rocky soil and not many nutrients.

By Marion McParland, PHS Staff

Janet Evans, Associate Director, PHS McLean Library, was examining the McLean Library’s rare copy of Thomas Walter’s Flora Caroliniana (1788) when she noticed a few small sheets of handwritten notes with illustrations bound into the book. Evans recognized the writing as an 18th-century hand that looked familiar. Acting on a hunch, she compared the handwriting with a sample known to be written by American naturalist William Bartram. She found enough similarities to prompt her to send photographs to Bartram expert Joel Fry, curator of Bartram’s Garden, who confirmed that the notes were, indeed, written by the famous naturalist. “This is a wonderful discovery,” wrote Fry, “and I’d be fairly confident that most of that writing and the illustrations are by William Bartram.”    

The notes include short instructions for making ink; some extracts from “Thunberg’s Travels” – which is likely a reference to Carl Thunberg’s Travels in Europe, Africa, and Asia (1793-5); and a few sketches, including one of an insect.  With his father John, William Bartram roamed America in search of plants to offer to an international group of plant connoisseurs eager to grow exotic American flora. He and his family ran Bartram's Garden, now the oldest surviving botanical garden in North America. His travel narrative, Bartram’s Travels, first published in 1791, is an American literature classic that was highly praised and hugely impactful both in the U.S. and abroad.

By Emily McKain, PHS Staff

Composting is beneficial in so many ways. You can help the environment and nourish your own garden at the same time. Instead of contributing to landfills that take up space and release methane, a potent greenhouse gas, start composting. Food scraps and yard waste make up 20 to 30 percent of what we throw away. Re-purpose these organic materials and keep them out of landfills.

High-quality compost is filled with life and full of beneficial microorganisms that will help improve your soil life and your plants' vitality. It can also help protect against plant disease.

In celebration of International Compost Awareness Week, Saturday, May 5 to Sunday, May 13, learn about the importance of composting and how you can begin using this sustainable idea at home.
 

Indoor or Outdoor?

If you are unable to create an outdoor compost pile, you can get the same benefits with an indoor bin. These are found at hardware and gardening supply stores. Remember to tend your pile and keep track of what you throw in. A properly managed compost bin will not attract pests or rodents and will not smell bad. Your compost should be ready in two to five weeks.

If you have the space outside, select a dry, shady spot near a water source for your compost pile or bin. Add brown and green materials as they are collected, making sure larger pieces are chopped or shredded. Moisten dry materials as they are added. Once established, mix grass clippings and green waste into the pile and bury fruit and vegetable waste under 10 inches of compost material.

You can cover your compost with a tarp to retain moisture. When the material at the bottom is dark and rich in color, your compost is ready to use. 

By Marion McParland, PHS Staff

With a history and dedication to cleaning and greening vacant lots throughout Philadelphia dating back to the late 1990s, PHS has cultivated the LandCare program into a nationally recognized model of landscape treatment and urban revitalization. It’s no surprise that with this talent for turning abandoned land into a neighborhood asset, PHS was the first on the Pop Up Garden scene in Philadelphia in the spring of 2011.

“Pop Up Gardens and our LandCare program help people re-imagine vacant or underutilized spaces from Center City to the far reaches of Germantown and West Philadelphia,” says Amber Knee, Program Manager of PHS LandCare. “Cleaning and greening a vacant lot provides a blank slate on which people can create something new and makes space for community to come together. Our Pop Up Gardens not only help us reach new audiences, but share the spirit of LandCare, bringing new energy and activity to formerly under-used spaces.”

PHS set the stage in 2011, inspiring a region-wide wave of installations that turned vacant spaces into green gathering places. Since that time, PHS has transformed empty lots into vibrant, urban gathering places. Today, pop up gardens are more and more common, but the PHS Pop Up Gardens continue to lead the way in urban landscape design, sustainability, and horticultural workshops.

This year is no exception as the gates open at both the flagship PHS Pop Up Garden at South Street, near 15th and South Streets, and the PHS Pop Up Garden at uCity Square, 36th and Filbert Streets. In addition to inspired food and drink venues, the Pop Up Gardens are so much more. “The Pop Up Gardens -- and PHS work like Philadelphia LandCare -- are emblematic of the positive change we can effect in the world when community and horticulture intersect,” says Matt Rader, PHS President.   

By Marion McParland, PHS Staff

This Sunday, April 22, is Earth Day, a day that celebrates the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970. The idea for this national day of focus on the environment came to Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, then a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, after witnessing the massive oil spill in Santa Barbara, California in 1969.  Inspired by the student anti-war movement, Nelson wanted to harness that energy to create a public consciousness about air and water pollution. April 22 -- between Spring Break and Final Exams -- was selected as the date. On April 22,1970, 20 million Americans participated in the first Earth Day to draw attention to the need for a healthy, sustainable environment.

Today, Earth Day is the largest secular observance in the world, celebrated by more than a billion people. It is a day of action that changes human behavior and provokes policy changes. In observance of Earth Day, PHS invites volunteers to help plant nearly 750 trees, April 20 through 22, in Philadelphia and southeastern Pennsylvania.

Find out where you can help plant trees! Check out this map and listing of plantings in your area. Click on a map marker to get the location and contact information.

By Marion McParland, PHS Staff

April is the perfect time to plant a tree in our region. Temperatures are above freezing and rainfall during the month is beneficial. Planting in April gives your young tree time to establish its roots before the heat of summer sets in. With so many types of trees to choose from, we’ve asked PHS experts about their favorite trees.

Hackberry

Native to this area, the hackberry tree (Celtis occidentalis) is also known as the nettletree, sugarberry, beaverwood, northern hackberry and the American hackberry. “It has really interesting bark and is great for wildlife,” says Dana Dentice, Urban Forestry Program Manager, PHS. The hackberry is known by tree experts as “one tough tree.” Found on a wide range of soils east of the Rockies from southern Canada to Florida, these trees thrive in a broad span of temperatures and on sites that vary from 14 to 60 inches of annual rainfall. They can even stand up to strong winds and tolerate air pollution. All of this hardiness adds up to a good landscape choice, particularly if you’re looking for an energy-conserving shade tree that is resistant to drought.

Crabapple

The crabapple (Malus spp.) is constantly hybridizing, producing many interesting mixes to choose from. These hardy beauties provide food for wildlife in the area. “They bloom in mid to late April with extremely fragrant white or pink blossoms,” says Dentice. After flowering, a sweet-sour apple forms, making it a wonderful snack for wildlife. Many crabapple trees will hold their small fruits all winter, providing food for white-tail deer and birds, including pheasants, mockingbirds, white-throated sparrow, northern flickers and finches. Check the J. Frank Schmidt & Son Co. Crabapple Information Chart to make sure the crabapple you are considering is a disease and pest resistant cultivar.

By Marion McParland, PHS Staff

Keep a watchful eye out for signs of the Spotted Lanternfly (Lycorma delicatula). This exotic pest is native to China, India, and Vietnam and has been on the most wanted list in Korea since 2004. Spotted Lanternfly was first found in Berks County, Pennsylvania in 2014. The Spotted Lanternfly feeds on more than 70 plants, including grapes, cherries, maples, stone fruits and Tree of Heaven, and has the potential of weakening or killing plants in orchards, vineyards and elsewhere. 

"Our region is the epicenter of this new pest invasion," says Barley Van Clief, Tree Tenders Program Manager, Pennsylvania Horticultural Society. "The Spotted Lanternfly -- first found in Berks County --  has spread rapidly to surrounding counties which are now under quarantine. To ward against possible spread across the country, with related economic and ecological damage, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture is asking each resident to be aware and react if they see evidence of this pest," says Van Clief.

Egg masses are laid during the fall and early winter.They appear as 1- to 2- inch-long gray mud smears with 30 to 50 brown eggs underneath. This time of year, the egg masses turn dark brown and appear cracked and scaly. Young nymphs hatch in May and feed on various plants. As they grow, they develop a red color and spotting. By July, adults appear and seek out Tree of Heaven and other trees with sap. During the late summer, large groups can be found feeding on trees.

 

By Emily McKain, PHS Staff

The importance that trees hold to our Earth is no secret. From impacting human health to sheltering wildlife, to helping prevent climate change, trees are on the job 24/7. In celebration of all they do, the world observes several days throughout the year to recognize them, including Tu b’Shevat (the Jewish New Year for trees); International Day of Forests on March 21; Earth Day on April 22; and Arbor Day on April 27.

Hug a Tree:

One of the best ways to relieve stress is by simply going outside and enjoying the world for its natural beauty. In fact, the benefit of trees in nature has been studied and documented. One medical study found that women recently diagnosed with breast cancer were better able to focus their attention if they spent two hours a week in natural environments. Trees support this natural environment and can instantly connect you with the Earth and put your mind at ease. The more trees planted, the better you’ll feel! The Arbor Day Foundation lists the many benefits of trees here.

Breathing Easy:

One of the most important qualities trees bring this Earth is the ability to improve the air quality. Due to the process of photosynthesis, the trees leaves reduce the amount of carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide in the air we breathe. Not only does it improve the air with this function, but it also releases oxygen in the process that we need to breathe. Trees also help stop climate change by removing carbon dioxide from the air, storing carbon in their wood and soil, and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere