The Urban Pantheist

This Sunday I'll be leading an Urban Nature Walk up Mission Hill. This is a very meaningful event for me, because Mission Hill is the first neighborhood I lived in when I moved to Boston 20 years ago. It's where I became an urban person, and where I first developed an appreciation of urban nature. It was on Mission Hill that I had encounters with leopard slugs and Ailanthus trees that led me to make The Urban Pantheist zine, which eventually became this journal.

Behind the cut is a timeline of the history of Mission Hill, from European settlement to the 20th century. I like how the timeline dovetails with the one I wrote for the Stony Brook Reservation walk. I wish I knew a little more about what happened there before 1630 (how did the Natives use the hill?) and in prehistory (how did the hill come to be? most sources call it a drumlin, but it's a solid rock hill).

( here's the timeline )

By the way, my icon is a picture taken from Mission Hill with the skyline behind me.
It's good to be researching and planning a walk again. Life intrudes too much on my life.

On this day in 365 Urban Species: Beggarticks. (Don't worry, it's a plant--probably one you recognize, too.)

While researching earlier Urban Nature Walks involving the Muddy River, I discovered that Olmsted (the 19th century landscape architect that transformed urban America) was given the task of dealing with Stony Brook, as well as the Muddy. Both are tributaries of the Charles, but while the Muddy is the centerpiece of a major park, the Riverway, that I live next to and visit every day, I realized that I knew nothing about Stony Brook. I knew it was the name of a train stop in Jamaica Plain, but the brook itself didn't even seem to appear on maps. Then we decided to do an Urban Nature Walk at the Stony Brook Reservation, the location of the headwaters of Stony Brook, a Metropolitan Reservation (as opposed to Municipal Park) that straddles the neighborhoods of Roslindale and Hyde Park in Boston. I did some research before our walk, and turned up some interesting history. ( Read more... )

My pictures of the Stony Brook Reservation can be seen here, while cottonmanifesto's pictures are here and here.