Gloria Garcia should not have made it this far.She said she was told by her first foster family that construction workers found her as a toddler, eating paint chips off the walls at an abandoned building where her mother had left her.
At 18, when she became pregnant, her final foster family threw her out. She then endured four years of brutality at the hands of a boyfriend whom Ms. Garcia described as a crack addict, before she fled with her daughter, Tatiana.
They spent the next three years hiding from him in a domestic violence shelter. And the first apartment she found after finally leaving the shelter system went up in flames months after she moved in.
But Ms. Garcia, 32, has emerged from all of this remarkably well adjusted, with a soft-spoken manner that masks an iron will. Asked how she managed to avoid the pitfalls of shelter existence — violence, drugs, apathy — she has a theory. “I’m a product of my environment, but I didn’t become my environment,” she said. Read more..
A variety of succulents at Wave Hill in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.
Oh What Pretty Colors Blossom During The Winter In The Bronx
JANUARY is a time for gardeners in the North to take time out: to stand in a tropical world, looking at palm trees soaring toward glass domes, or, as I did the other day, step down into a warm, steamy sunken Victorian fernery, where hundreds of ferns of every imaginable shape and size thrive among rocks and waterfalls.
This sunken glasshouse was built in Philadelphia in 1899 by John Morris, an iron manufacturer. He erected it in the midst of the fern mania that was part of the Victorian plant craze sweeping the Western world as plant explorers returned bearing exotics from Asia, South America, Fiji and other mysterious places.
Morris, who had a degree in engineering, designed a sunken fernery unusual for its time: the curving glass roof was supported by wrought-iron roof braces, not columns, so it appeared to float over the walls of native Wissahickon stone and an otherworldly garden of rocks and ferns carefully arranged by Japanese landscapers.
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