🌳 Good morning, RVA: Green space, gardens, and big trees

Good morning, RVA! It’s 65 °F, and today looks lovely. You can expect clear skies, highs in the mid 80s for most of the day, and a noticeable lack of oppressive humidity. It’s an excellent summer day, and I’m going to do my best to get out there and enjoy it (by going into the forest on a bike).
 

Water cooler

Samantha Willis at the Virginia Mercury joins the chorus of reporters and columnists pointing out the backward inconsistencies of the City’s plans to build a fire training facility at the Hickory Hill Community Center. To quote a bit: “But the opposition to this particular fire facility isn’t rooted in dislike of or disrespect for fire departments; rather, it’s about holding our leaders accountable for their promises of environmental equity. It’s about defending a part of the city that, historically, has been marginalized, under-resourced and ignored time and time again. Yes, the city’s fire department needs a training facility, but why does it have to be at Hickory Hill? I don’t know the answer to that question because the fire department didn’t respond to my interview requests.” Tap through to read the whole thing, and, if you’d like to support the folks working to preserve this green space, drop your City Council rep, their liaison, and the Mayor an email.
 

I haven’t watched the entirety of this episode of VPM’s Virginia Home Grown, but fully intend to when I get a minute (or 52). Peggy Singlemann (former Director of Park Operations and Horticulture at Maymont), takes a tour of La Milpa’s garden/farm which looks incredible and just like the kind of huge garden I’d put together if I had a massive plot of land and a million hours of free time. They grow tomatoes, tomatillos, cucumber, zucchini, and, of course, peppers, all of which end up in the amazing food at their restaurant. It seems obvious, but growing food you’ll actually use and eat is gardening advice that I’m just now internalizing after many, many years. Anyway, check it out and get some inspiration for your 2024 garden plans!
 

Also from VPM, via WMRA, a story about Virginia Tech’s “Virginia Big Tree” project, a database of the largest specimens of over 300 native, non-native, and naturalized tree species. What an amazing resource! You can search by locality, too, so, say, if you wanted to bike around to all of the City’s biggest trees and make heart-eyes at them, you could totally do that. For example, there’s an 87-foot winged elm in Windsor Farms, a northern catalpa that’s 252 inches in circumference over in Montrose Heights, and a sprawling eastern cottonwood in Riverview Cemetery. I could spend literal hours on this website, but will, instead, move on with the rest of this email.
 

I’m pretty sure I’ve written about this before because I love both strawberries and vertical indoor farming, but Charlotte Matherly at Richmond BizSense reports that Plenty Unlimited has broken ground on their super neat “100,000-square-foot vertical farm that’ll be used to grow Driscoll’s strawberries” right over in Chesterfield County. That means, at some point in the nearish future, strawberries found in our own local supermarkets—in any season—could be grown fresh, just a couple miles down the road. Pretty cool!
 

In more boring, less plant-forward news, Michael Martz at the Richmond Times-Dispatch reports that the Virginia Senate’s budget negotiators will meet tomorrow to “[consider a proposed compromise on the stalled state budget](https://richmond.com/news/state-regional/government-politics/senate-to-meet-on-budget-with-youngkin-waiting-in-wings-for-deal/article_63f29ca8–2fb3–11ee-8919-e35f2f4fdaa1.html).” I didn’t realize it, but this is only the second time in 50 years the General Assembly has failed to pass a revised budget before the end of the state’s fiscal year.
 

Karri Peifer at Axios Richmond launched a new feature this morning called “Best Day Ever,” where she sits down with a Richmonder and hears how they’d spend their very best day in town. In this inaugural edition, Peifer talks to Chef Leah Branch from The Roosevelt who has put together a seriously charming (and delicious) Best Day.
 

This morning’s longread

Ron DeSantis and the State Where History Goes to Die

The New York Times’s Jamelle Bouie digs in to Florida’s new racist curriculum for teaching African American history which mandates students learn that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” As always, Bouie uses his deep knowledge of American history to put these contemporary nü-Confederates right into the bin, alongside their 19th Century and Jim Crow-era brethren.
 

Similar points, yes, but the language isn’t quite the same. In addition to using the term “enslaved” rather than “slave” — a linguistic shift that continues to be a subject of real debate — the language for the A.P. curriculum emphasizes that Black Americans could use these skills only after Emancipation. This is key. Slaves were owned as chattel by other human beings who stole their freedom, labor and bodily autonomy. To say that any more than a fortunate few could “parlay” their skills into anything that might improve their lives is to spin a fiction. Just as important is the fact that a large majority of the Africans enslaved in North America, whether under the British Crown for the better part of two centuries or under the American Constitution for eight decades after the revolution, died in bondage. For them, there was no point after slavery where they could use their skills.
 

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Picture of the Day

Sometimes someone leaves a fish-shaped wine rack in your yard and you have to grow clematis on it.