April is the month when many folks start visiting local garden centers to buy plants for their gardens. Many plant sales are also held in April or early May. Due to the COVID-19 crisis, all physical plant sales have been cancelled and garden centers have been closed unless they’re a part of a larger store, like Lowe’s. So what can you do? Here are a few options where you can order plants and pick them up locally.

Since the annual Spruce Hill May Fair has been cancelled, the University City Garden Club is holding an online plant sale (until 11 a.m. on Monday, April 20). There is a large selection of annuals and perennials, and herb and vegetable plants. Orders will be available for pickup on Saturday, May 2 on Woodland Terrace near the 40th Street Trolley Portal. Go here for more info and to shop.  Continue Reading

A new chapter began last night in the ongoing saga of 400 S. 40th Street, the contentious property on the edge of the University of Pennsylvania’s growing footprint that includes a historic mansion that community members, developers and Penn officials have been quarreling over for a decade.

Developers presented preliminary drawings last night to the Spruce Hill Community Association zoning committee for a graduate housing complex that keeps the original mid-19th Century Italianate mansion, strips away the hideous concrete block additions added when it was a nursing home and adds a detached five-story, L-shaped housing complex aimed at graduate students.

Residents look over a preliminary drawing of a new proposal for 40th and Pine last night at the Spruce Hill Community Association zoning committee meeting.

“We’re hoping to build support for this approach and avoid a couple more years of litigation,” said Jonathan Weiss of Equinox Management and Construction, the developer behind “Azalea Gardens.” “We’re trying to find a way forward.”

The developers and officials from Penn, which bought the property at 40th and Pine streets in 2008,  presented the plan as a compromise to  head off a lawsuit filed by the nearby Woodland Terrace Homeowners Association after the city’s Zoning Board of Adjustment (and the Philadelphia Historical Commission and SHCA) approved a plan last November that would have demolished the mansion to make room for a five-story structure. Penn officials argued that the mansion presented a hardship for any plans to develop the property.

That five-story structure without the mansion was proposed after many residents balked at a previous plan for a seven-story structure that kept the historic mansion intact. That proposal came after a plan to build an 11-story, long-term stay hotel (which was eventually built on the 4100 block of Walnut) was abandoned.  Continue Reading