Posted on

Skunk cabbage blooming in the wild in West Fairmount Park, Philadelphia

In a ravine alongside a stream just north of the Horticultural Center, Wednesday February 21st 2024. Oddly mimicking the Skunk Cabbage flower in the picture above is a piece of a crashed and burned automobile which had scorched the other side of the stream, filled with burned seats and melted metal. A typical scene in Fairmount Park and all over Philly I hardly noticed the carnage.
For at least millennia this stream flowed into the Schuylkill River until the mid twentieth century when the Schuylkill Expressway was built over it filling in a vast portion of the ravine and sending the stream into an often blocked up tunnel. Yet the upper portion of the ravine is intact and has many of the long time flora surviving, including this population of skunk cabbage as well as Mayapple, Redbud and Spring beauty to name just a few.
I will call for it again and will continue to make my demand: The Schuylkill Expressway must be dismantled! It is not inevitable that it will last forever.
From an evolutionary point of view, what advantage does the expressway have over the Skunk Cabbage?

Posted on

BLOOMING MAYAPPLES OF WEST FAIRMOUNT PARK

This is THE Mayapple post of 2023! They have been appearing in previous posts and will most likely make an appearance In future posts this year, but this is the banner post for Mayapples. By the time these Spring Ephemerals are blooming, the season of the Spring Ephemerals is just about over. It’s the grande finale of them.

Podophyllum peltatum

Posted on

Our West Philadelphia rowhouse backyard in the Spring

Our tiny West Philadelphia rowhouse backyard garden is about 13 feet wide and 6 feet deep. The other areas of our backyard are concrete drainage areas, steps, and concrete walkways. Much of the concrete infrastructure is to protect the foundation from water infiltration and flooding and subsequent structural damage, very common in poorly maintained urban rowhouses.
We wanted our tiny backyard plot to be a miniature West Fairmount Park foremost and also a miniature version of a Southeastern Pennsylvania woodland. We consulted the book The Vascular Flora of Pennsylvania: Annotated Checklist and Atlas by Rhodes and Klein, to guide us through our plant decisions.

Because of the height of the house and the surrounding buildings, and the small size of the garden plot, we chose Cornus florida, the understory tree Dogwood, also because of the morning sunshine and afternoon shade, which this species prefers. The very well protected garden with masonry walls all around mimic the Lower Susquehanna ravines we love to visit, and even some well protected Schuylkill River Ravines, featuring Trilliums, which thrive in these deep ravines with steep slopes. Our Trillium Grandiflorum and Trillium erectum are thriving in our back yard!

In keeping with creating a miniature West Fairmount Park Spring Woodland, we have Mayapples, Podophyllum peltatum, Christmas Fern, and Solomons Seal.

Another plant that loves very protected environments with some degree of alkaline soils is Maidenhair Fern, which also thrives in our yard! My theory is that all of the brickwork around our yard has contributed to the soil alkalinity, being that the mortar used in making brick walls is composed of the alkaline lime. Check out the pictures below and see all of the plants growing in our yard that we are discussing. I took all of these pictures in the past week! Look forward to our Summer and Fall Philadelphia rowhouse backyard series!