Articles

  • Linking a Landscape
    Northern Woodlands, Winter 2013

    It’s late afternoon, and fine snow is sifting down into Joan and Bill Hildreth’s woods in Montgomery, Vermont. Their property lies within a large expanse of forest on the edge of the northern Green Mountains. Four times a year, the Hildreths and their neighbors walk a three-mile route here, searching for animal tracks, claw marks, rubbed bark, and other signs of wildlife.

  • New Life for Old Camps
    Land & People, Spring/Summer 2011

    The distant shouts of boys and the smell of woodsmoke drift up the steep, wooded slope above Lake Vreeland. This November Saturday is cloudless and unseasonably warm, perfect for a "pioneering" event at Camp Glen Gray in the New Jersey Highlands. Founded in 1917 as a Boy Scout camp, Camp Glen Gray today is preserved as a county park.

  • Gardens of Their Own,
    Land & People, Spring/Summer 2010

    On a sunny afternoon in early October, three girls hesitate in front of the Sherman Avenue Community Garden in the Bronx. Fourth and fifth graders on their way home from school, they peer through the fence into the gap between brick apartment buildings.

  • The Urge to Merge Reconsidered
    Parks & Recreation, June 2010

    There has been a renewed interest in consolidating park systems as a way to reduce expenses and spread costs over a larger tax base.

  • A Place to Play
    Land & People, Fall 2005

    The fifth graders at Community School 66 in the South Bronx have a lot to say about what's wrong with their schoolyard.

  • An Improved Prospect
    Landscape Architecture, July 2003

    Walking into Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is like stepping into a nineteenth-century landscape painting. The sweeping vista of the Long Meadow, interrupted by gracefully arching trees, stretches for nearly a mile along one side of the park.

  • Banking on Seeds to Avert Extinction
    Audubon, January 1988

    On Sutton Mountain in the dry canyonlands of eastern Oregon, above a waterfall that flows only in spring, grows one of a handful of known stands of the arrowleaf thelypody, Thelypodium eucosmum.

  • Poisons in Your Home: A Disposal Dilemma
    Audubon, May 1987

    One fall Sunday several years ago, I was visiting my mother, who lives about eighty miles north of New York City. After tidying up her vegetable garden for the season, I decided to clean the tool shed in the back of her garage. The first thing to go would be the sack of funny-smelling power that had been sitting in one corner for as long as I could remember.