Wandering

Woodland Cemetery is still my favorite place in my neighborhood to go walking.

I've lived in West Philadelphia for 17 years now, and walked there nearly as long, and there are still new things to discover -- looming angels, beautiful trees, something flowering that I haven't noticed before.

Recently, the cemetery hooked up with the horticultural society and organized volunteers to tend some of the "cradle" graves in the cemetery.  (These aren't infant graves, just cradle or bathtub shaped planters in front of the headstone).  They were meant to be planted, but since most of the stones are 19th century, there is no longer anyone tending the graves and they were all overgrown.

The grave gardener volunteers sign up to tend one grave.  The only rule is that the plants have to be historically accurate to the Victorian time period, but I think that makes it more fun.

According to the organizer, who is interviewed here, she got more than double the volunteers she needed and had to turn people away.  I wasn't sure I'd have enough time to devote, so I'm glad she got more volunteers than she needed; however, being in there as often as I am and seeing all the flowers blooming makes me want to apply next year and find the time.

Spring?

Maybe?

Finally?

These weren't blooming a week ago, but apparently Mother Nature has decided she's tired of endless March and has gone straight to July.  It's 90 today, and 2 days ago, it was 40.  Go figure.

One part of my landscaping that might not have survived all the weather-induced drama is my young street tree.  You'll note the leafless shadow on the sidewalk.  It had begun to bud and we got one last, hard frost and all the leaf buds turned black and fell off.  Now it just looks sad.

Maybe it'll come back.  And one thing I've learned in all my years of gardening is that there's no point in crying over a dead plant (or tree).  It's just an opportunity to try planting something new.

Happy spring, everyone.  Hopefully you haven't gone from shivering to sweating in the space of a few days.

Grove of Giants

I've posted many times before about Woodlands Cemetery, my local Victorian-era cemetery, walking destination and general happy place.

I went there this morning after a trip to the post office, both because it was spring (again, for what, maybe the third time in three weeks?) and because I knew there had been some changes.

A few weeks ago on Facebook, the cemetery announced that the Grove of Giants, which was a group of enormous English elm trees toward the back of the cemetery (and the actual last standing grove of English elms in the U.S.) had become infected with Dutch Elm disease.  They had attempted to treat the trees, but the infection had spread and the trees were becoming hazardous.

The sad decision was that the trees had to be cut down.  The second part of the decision (which I liked) was that they would leave as much of the trunk as would be safe, both as a haven for wildlife - of which the cemetery has much - and as a tribute to the massive presence those trees had on the grounds.

The remaining trunks have to be at least ten to fifteen feet high.  If you don't look straight up, you can almost pretend the trees are still there, except that the shade is gone.

Seeing the trunks scattered among the gravestones, they seem almost more monument than the man-made ones beneath.

Snow Day

I'm not sure how much exercise I would ever get if this place wasn't in my neighborhood.

Editorial comments

Anticipation is building.  No it's not.

So, not sewing or craft or even me (personally) related, but I saw this on the street in Philly last week and it made me smile.  Mario and I were in town on Monday night to see a friend perform in a one-woman show, The Yellow Wallpaper, and we ended up walking the 40 blocks home.  Not intentionally - at first, we just wanted to stretch our legs after sitting for a while.  Then we ran into one bit of street work after another, all of them disrupting the route of the two buses that could take us to West Philadelphia.  By the time the streets cleared and traffic was running smoothly again, we were almost at the Schuylkill River, and I have a rule that I won't take the bus if I can make it across the river first, I'm too close to home by then to waste the money.

See yourself here.  Don't have 5 million dollars, so I can't.

So we walked and talked, rehashed the play we had seen and our mutual work days (not having had time to do that before we went out), and looking at the changes in the city.  I may be working in town right now, but I have a small grid that I see every day, 15th to 17th Streets, JFK Boulevard to Chestnut, and I've missed out on a lot of new construction and shops and general rearrangement.

The photos here are of signs, huge ones, in ornate gold-printed frames, hung in a long row of chain link construction fence on the 1900 block of Walnut Street.  Yet another luxury condo building going up, with prices well out of the fantasy reach of most of us.  (Formerly it was a really great movie theater that burned down years ago, and an empty lot for at least a decade).

The signs are annoying.  "Anticipation is building."  "Comfort is emerging."  "See yourself here."

Comfort is emerging.  Whose? Bankers?

And then I realized that some wonderful Philadelphian took the snarky, sarcastic responses right out of my head and added them to each sign.

Now I know there are people out there who can afford luxury condos.  And who aren't awful people.  But the signs for this place were just so obnoxiously tone-deaf that I have to applaud whoever applied those judicious editorial comments.

A walk through West Philly

I gripe about my neighborhood occasionally -- the students, the corner bars, the closeness of the other houses, the lack of sufficient dirt to play in, the rules against chickens -- but then spring comes and I go outside and I forget all that.

I live in a pretty place.  Quirky, but pretty, especially when everything starts blooming after a long season of gray.