(upbeat music) - Here's what's coming up next on, You Oughta Know.

We'll tell you about a program that's bringing trees to city neighborhoods plus gardening on a higher level.

Go with us to Delaware's Mount Cuba Center.

And from fresh veggies to an array of gardens and plants, we explore Rutgers Gardens.

(upbeat music) Hi, I'm Shirley Min, and this show is about the outdoors.

Whether you're a city dweller or suburbanite, greenery is all around us and in places where it's not, it's being created.

Here's a look at two Philly programs that are planting green spaces.

(upbeat music) - 30 years ago, it occurred to me that the citizens of Philadelphia if given the opportunity, if given the educational tools, if given the physical tools, would rise to the occasion of bettering their own neighborhoods.

And when it came to trees, they make us feel better.

They make us feel cooler in the summer.

They're a tool that helps kids with asthma or the elderly that have heart conditions.

They are a tool that helps to reduce the effects of urban heat islands.

Then our summers are only getting hotter.

So we started the tree tender program because we wanted to empower people to do what they could do to help increase tree copper.

We're able to now provide trees for free in the city and concrete pets to physically improve the neighborhood.

(upbeat music) - We work with dozens of groups all over the Philadelphia area.

They're local in their own neighborhoods in Philadelphia or in their municipalities, and we provide trees for them.

We provide training.

We have over 6,000 trained tree tenders around the region and each spring and fall we work with them to plant hundreds of trees in their own neighborhoods.

This week we're doing 1,550 trees planted in the ground in about five or six days time.

So all of the trees get delivered to a warehouse in the Navy Yard where a huge team of volunteers sorts them out and puts them in piles for each of the neighborhood groups that's gonna plant them.

Then those groups come, they pick up their trees bring them back to their neighborhoods and get them in the ground using local volunteers.

Today we're in Stinger Park in Gray's Ferry and our Gray's Ferry Tree Tender Group has found sites for I think about 30 or 40 trees all around the neighborhood including six here in the park.

(upbeat music) - My tree is happy.

- Our Gray's Ferry Tree Tenders Group and our East Passyunk Crossing Tree Tender Group have been doing remarkable work.

East Passyunk Crossing actually became an arboretum.

That's something that's available to other communities if you plant the right trees, if you have diversity of trees and provide programming.

- East Passion Crossing Tree Tenders is located in South Philly.

A couple years ago we were at the Navy Yard which is a level one arboretum through Arb Net, which is an international association.

We learned that we could apply and become an arboretum.

So we did that in 2020.

We started with a list of 25 trees.

We came up with an arboretum plan.

Our civic association which is a 501C3, is our parent and we became designated as a level one arboretum.

What it basically did for us is it made us more focused.

We've been planting trees here since 2010 but we haven't done a lot of follow up.

Now that we're in arboretum, we're actually paying attention to the trees.

We're going back, we're surveying the trees.

We've started a pruning club, so twice a year we're going out with arborists to help with training to actually take care of the young trees we're planting.

The city has a very low tree canopy.

In some neighborhoods like ours, it's 5% cover for trees, in places like Mount Airy could be 20%.

So neighborhoods like us are basically heat sinks.

The lack of trees creates more heat, more pollution and problems with water drainage.

So the trees are very important in providing us with a safe, clean, comfortable, fresh air community.

Any neighborhood in the city can organize, it can be through a church, it can be through a civic association like ours, it can be through a nonprofit or it can just be a couple of people that get together and do it on their own.

- Planting and caring for trees are one of the most important thing individuals can do to improve and transform their community.

People who live around trees are happier and they're healthier and they live longer.

This is something that volunteers can do.

They can come together with their neighbors to plant those trees and care for them and make sure they're thriving.

(upbeat music) - Germantown Avenue is our commercial corridor here in Mount Airy.

It cuts right through our community and is is our gathering spot.

It's our place where we go and eat.

It's our place where we shop and do business.

It's a place where Mount Airy residents gather.

When we established the Mt.

Airy bid 15 plus years ago, we had a strong commercial corridor but we had a lot of blight, a lot of vacancies.

(upbeat music) - One of our board members had developed a Rose Garden at the corner of Carpenter Lane and Germantown Avenue.

Someone at the at the board meeting said, "We have that rose garden there.

What about that park that's a lot bigger?

That's right next to the Septa turnaround.

Would somebody be willing to volunteer to do something with that park?"

And I raised my hand and said "I would volunteer if I could get some help with the digging."

- [Host] SEPTA allowed us to use their property to establish our first park, and it really set the tone for the remaining five parks to happen.

Yvonne was our first volunteer who adopted this trolley car park and made it happen.

She gathered local folks who wanted to get their hands dirty, literally and weed and plant and they made this park wonderful.

(upbeat music) Each of our parks has a unique personality.

Starting on the southernmost part of Germantown Avenue, we have Freedom Park, which is located near Germantown and Washington Lane, next to the Johnson House which was a stop on the Underground Railroad.

(upbeat music) It's a wonderful round park where people like to visit and spend time.

(upbeat music) At Carpenter Lane, we have Carpenter Park.

(upbeat music) We have Sedgwick Park.

(upbeat music) Pelham Park, sits next to Melani Cafe and I know a lot of their customers will enjoy coffee or tea, sitting on the wall of that park.

And finally, we have what we call Friendship Park near the corner of Germantown and Mount Pleasant.

As we like to say, Mt Airy sits between freedom and friendship.

(upbeat music) - We're leaving the city now for the rolling hills of Hockessin, Delaware.

It's there where fans of native plants and local wildlife fall in love with nature over and over again.

- Welcome to Mount Cuba Center.

(upbeat music) Mount Cuba is a botanical garden focused on native plants and healthy ecosystems.

Mount Cuba Center was founded by Lamont and Pamela Copeland.

They were branch of the DuPont family.

They built their house here in the hillside just west of Wilmington, in the 1930s and they began gardening right away.

(upbeat music) Mount Cuba Center has over 50 acres of gardens that we curate but then we also have a thousand acres of natural lands.

There's a large swath of undeveloped land and just beautiful landscapes here as you can see, it's a lot like an Andrew Wyeth painting just these rolling meadows and forests.

(upbeat music) Knowing that people want to get outside but also want to have plenty of space.

We took advantage of that to open two miles of trails through our natural areas where we're standing right now.

(upbeat music) Now people can come and enjoy the beauty of the gardens and also the beauty of nature.

(soft music) (water flowing) Our gardens are spectacular.

It's kind of like nature on steroids.

We've compressed all the best beautiful things from the Eastern United States and we've kind of put them all in a beautiful cultivated arrangement.

Out here it's gonna be much more natural.

(soft music) We want to make Mount Cuba Center more available and more accessible to more people in our region so that we can share the beauty and the legacy that the Copelands gave us.

(upbeat music) But also we want them to leave understanding that healthy habitats are made up of diverse organisms from the plants that grow to the insects that feed the plants to the birds that feed on the insects.

(birds chirping) (upbeat music) It all is connected.

And so we need native plants in our landscapes and in our yards in order to fulfill that circle of life.

So if we plant more native plants, we will have more butterflies, more birds and more wildlife.

Botanical gardens across the country, probably across the world, are seeing increases in attendance as everybody just wants to get out of their house.

Something that we had been doing less and less of, until the pandemic kind of locked us all up and made us more aware of the beauty that's all around us outside.

If we just go out the door.

(upbeat music) - And everybody that you give them to, they can ask, can I have an extra one for my friend that has cancer?

I'd like to give one to the Meals on Wheels lady.

They always ask so they can pay it forward and give it to someone else.

- More on that story coming up a little later.

If you're a fan of farmer's markets and well, who isn't?

There's one in New Jersey that's surrounded by a beautiful garden and farm that's more than 100-years-old and it's run by Rutgers students.

(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Rutgers Gardens.

You're standing on a piece of land that's been part of the Rutgers University since 1916 and all told it's about 180 acres in size.

(soft music) (birds chirping) On this piece of property, Peach industry got resurrected in the late-1800s.

There was a San Jose scale, it decimated all the peach farms.

So a gentleman named Professor Blake and Professor Connors did a breeding work here to develop a peach, which was high yielding so that they could reduce the size of the farms and there's still a Blake Peach out in production but that was developed here on this site.

The Rutgers tomato was developed back in the early-thirties.

It was developed in combination with the Campbell Soup Company, but it also had a great taste to it.

And so that tomato, but a lot of people got to know Rutgers by it.

(upbeat music) Where we're standing right now was dedicated to perennials and to woody shrubs.

The thought behind this was that they expected a housing boom to happen in New Jersey.

This is the late-1800s There were not enough nurseries in New Jersey to support a housing boom.

So they thought, well, why don't we start planting some stuff that would be of interest in another 10 or 15 years?

(upbeat music) Starting in 1965, the gardens were open to the community.

Around 1990, it became really open to the public 365 days of the year.

(soft music) - I actually come here often to walk around the gardens and visit the wonderful farmer's market here.

- I think it's beautiful.

I really love it here.

(upbeat music) - We live locally, so we do come often.

It's a decent place to bring small children if you enjoy the outdoors and hiking 'cause they have a few trails in the woods that are pretty short and easy to get through.

We usually bring a backpack with some snacks and some water.

So we hang out for a few hours.

(upbeat music) - [Farmer] It actually has several missions, one of which obviously since we're affiliated with Rutgers University, is educating students.

A lot of classes come here.

We have between 12 and 16 student interns who work here.

They learn general horticulture but they also learn the value of a public arts.

The farm market and the student farm have several missions.

The first one was just to say, okay, here we are, we're here.

The market originally started out as eat local, which it still is, it's all local vendors.

But then it sort of taken on the added thing of what can we do today to sort of reduce our impact on the world?

(upbeat music) - We're at the Student Farm at Rutgers Gardens.

We're trying to create an outdoor classroom not just for Rutgers students, but also for the local community to be able to see and be exposed to alternative growing methods.

This year we partnered with the Rutgers Student Food Pantry so we're donating a third of what we're growing to those students who are food insecure.

Many people may not realize but there are many college students around the country that do not necessarily know where the next meal is coming from.

At Rutgers, it's about one third of all all students graduate, undergraduate.

A lot of folks don't necessarily know where their food comes from or how it has grown and what goes into the whole process.

We feel like if we're able to educate folks and to show 'em what it takes to actually produce food they're gonna be a lot more conscientious in the stores and the farmer's markets.

(upbeat music) - The farmer's market there are so many wonderful, tasty things there.

- I do tell people to come here.

We share 'em with everybody.

(soft music) - [Resident] The one takeaway that I would love people to have and get a little touch of nature in counties such as Middlesex, which is very densely populated to have this little oasis of green, I think is very important for the community.

- Producer Karen Smiles takes us on a walking tour of the Delaware Canal Towpath which received high honors last year as Pennsylvania's Trail of the Year.

(upbeat music) - The Delaware Canal Towpath is part of the larger DNL Trail.

- It's a great honor to have been named PA's 2022 Trail of the Year for the Delaware Canal Towpath.

It's one of the last remaining canals that's cable being fully watered over its entire length.

It has several of its original structures intact.

That's the one we're standing on which is the Thompson Neely Camelback Bridge.

It's one of the six remaining bridges of its type left.

(upbeat music) - The DNL Trail is currently over 140 miles.

A primary goal of the Delaware and Lehigh National Heritage Corridor is to protect the history and we want to protect that so people can see it and experience it and read about it through signs on the trail.

- It's a great place to go hiking.

It's a great place to come and walk your dog.

You can bicycle the entire length of the canal.

There are also points of access where you can put in a canoe or kayak and kayak along the canal.

As you can see from our surroundings, it's a beautiful setting here.

It definitely does have an historic significance.

- The Delaware Canal came about in the late 1820s, 1827, 1828 was the start of construction completed in 1832.

It was built as a water highway to bring coal from the anthracite region of Pennsylvania, up around Easton all the way south down to Bristol and then to the port of Philadelphia.

(upbeat music) The canal was built by local farmers and local people all along the way who hand dug the canal under direction from the canal engineers.

So we're at Lock 11 and they're 23 locks, and they traverse the 165 feet of elevation from Easton to Bristol.

And each lock was occupied by a lock tender.

(birds chirping) - I have some interesting things inside my lock tender's house.

Would you like to come on in and see?

Come on in.

Our canal dates back from 1832.

Back in those days, you needed someone to physically open and close the gates.

You needed a locktender, very important job.

You got the gig, you got the home to live in.

So this is the home for the locktender for Lock number 11.

The locktender would live here year round and the barge could come almost at any time.

But the official work day was four in the morning till 10 at night, six days a week.

Everyone had Sunday off and the winter months and this is a conch shell.

This was the state-of-the-art canal horn.

So the guys on the barge as they were approaching the lock tender's house maybe a quarter mile out someone would blow into a shell like this.

(shell roaring) The way the barge was designed, it's very narrow, 10 and a half feet across, but very long, 87 and a half feet long.

So it wasn't much strain for the mules to be pooling the barges full of coal.

- There are some wonderful stories of boatman that were recorded in part of an oral history and they were largely locals that worked for a long time on the canal.

- Some would drive their mules fairly fast, others would take it little on the easy side, some in between.

The faster they moved, the more money they made.

- I always watered my mules at good places and fed 'em and put the basket on.

They put it on them, they didn't eat, well take it off.

Some of 'em go.

(bell ringing) - The bells we put on the mules at night and that way you could tell the mules were going up the canal or down the canal.

And when they walked the bells ring.

(bell ringing) - They would travel about 20 miles a day and they would travel at the speed about three miles per hour.

It would be a team of two mules and they would walk right out there on the path that we know as the Towpath.

(soft music) Come on down this way, let's take a look.

- Great.

- A lock is called a lock because it physically locks in the water.

And can you see the gates under the pedestrian bridge?

They go like that.

Our locktender would close those gates first.

Once the chamber was locked our locktender would start filling in the chamber with water.

And when water in the chamber was as high as the water on the other side of the gate, the locktender would drop that gate and the barge could be pulled over into the chamber.

Because the water was the same level, our barge was in the locked chamber, and our locktender very slowly would start draining the water in the chamber to bring the water level down to match the water level on the other side of the gates.

Our locktender would open up those gates and the barge would continue on its way.

(soft music) We're the very last Towpath canal left in the entire United States so it's really a very special place.

(upbeat music) - The National Canal Museum is located in Humour Park in Easton.

It's a great spot for family to come with kids and learn about the canals like the Delaware and Lehigh Canals, how they used to function, as well as a little bit about the railroads that helped in the industrial revolution.

We have two mules, Hank and George that pull a canal boat so you can actually experience what it was like on the canal back in the day.

There are kayaks and different boats as well as bike rentals to enjoy the trail there as well.

- It's very beautiful and peaceful.

It's just a very nice area to come and take a walk and to just relax and kind of get your thoughts together.

- We're really excited to be celebrating the award this year for Pennsylvania Trail of the Year, for the Delaware Canal State Park Towpath.

I encourage everybody to come out and partake of it.

(upbeat music) (birds chirping) - This next story brings the beauty of nature inside, Operation Flower Project is brightening the day for many people.

(upbeat music) - I began the Flower Project in May of 2013.

My mother had been sick and I went to stay with her, one of my daughters suggested that we ask grocery stores if they had day old flowers.

And we found a couple of stores that said yes.

And so we found something fun to do every day we would go from Chalfont to Philadelphia, pick up at least 100 flowers a day and then just random act, the flowers all over Philadelphia.

I never have a plan of where I'm going to take the flowers.

I think it's kind of like divine guidance.

I'll pass the nursing home and I think, oh, I'm not gonna go there.

But then someone says, no, turn around and go back there.

The first nursing home that I went to and I walked in and I said, "Hi, I'm Patricia Gallagher.

I was wondering if you have any people that would like flowers?"

And they said, "What organization are you with?"

I said, "The Happy Flower Day Project."

It just came out and they said "Are you the executive director?"

And I said, "Oh yes, I'm the director."

So now I'm in.

And they took me into a large room where all these people in wheelchairs were just kind of sitting down with their heads like that.

And my mother just started singing, Happy Flower Day to you to the tune of Happy Birthday.

♪ Happy Flower Day to you ♪ and then they were all singing it.

And then she added.

♪ May the good Lord bless you ♪ And all of a sudden these people seemed to awaken and they were all holding these beautiful flowers.

So we were hooked.

Once we did it that way, that was almost like our signature song and signature way of doing something thing.

When the tent city was down by the Art Museum that was one of my favorite places to go once a week, I would just pull up to the curb and we would just take them from tent to tent.

And everybody that you give them to, they ask, can I have an extra one for my friend that has cancer?

I'd like to give one to the Meals on Wheels lady.

They always asked so they can pay it forward and give it to someone else.

But even on the days that maybe we didn't feel like going it was raining, it was snowing or something, we went because we knew that when we got there and picked up the flowers, we would feel so happy.

(upbeat music) - Flowers are so special that the writers make many poems about 'em and there's something special about flowers.

- It makes me feel very happy and it makes you feel good that someone else is thinking about you.

- You give a smile, you get a smile, you give a hug, you get a hug.

You can never have a bad day, when you're the flower lady.

(upbeat music) - Thanks for watching everyone.

I hope the show motivates you to get outdoors.

Enjoy it everyone.

Bye.

(upbeat music)