Rachel Park, whose beat is fashion, discovers that cheap is the new chic in this recession. She profiles two stores favored by those looking for bargains and fashion.
Clare Mullaney, whose beat is food, chronicles the success of Hope’s Cookies, a beloved Bryn Mawr institition.
November 12 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Thrift stores are chic in this recession
By Rachel Park
Amid the plethora of flannel and faux fur coats, Emily McDowall found a black military jacket for $25.50. “It seems like a lot of money for this jacket,” she said, but upon further examination, she decided to buy it.
It was Saturday night, and McDowall, 20, was one of many young customers perusing through the second-hand clothing at Buffalo Exchange in Center City. Although many businesses are experiencing difficulty in the economic recession, thrift stores seem to be doing just fine.
In fact, Buffalo Exchange has witnessed a “bigger boom in sales,” said manager Matthew Williams, 25. Through this nation-wide company - 34 stores in 14 states, according to its Website - customers can exchange their clothing for credit. “A larger amount of people are shopping here in general, and a lot more people are trying to sell their clothing,” Williams said.
Valerie Lowry, sales associate at the store, said that she has noticed more college students in particular shopping at thrift stores. It could be because of the recession or the simple thrill of finding a bargain.
“This place is mostly for kids who can’t afford expensive clothes but want to look amazing,” said Lowry, 20.
The ‘cheap chic’ aesthetic
Bought at Buffalo Exchange
Mainstream fashion corporations have picked up on this aesthetic and have even spelled it out for consumers. For example, “Broke is the new black” was printed on an Urban Outfitters tank top. Black clothing has always been fashionable, as exhibited by the “little black dress” a.k.a. “LBD,” but one of the latest trends is distressed jeans.
“Broke is the new black” is a provocative phrase because it implies the irony of the recession: financial turmoil has provided creative fodder for fashion designers. In other words, looking “cheap chic” seems to be desirable.
“Designers are doing lines for Target and Kmart, and becoming more versatile,” said Williams. “They’re making more affordable clothing.”
Williams said that Buffalo Exchange is unique because it makes popular styles accessible to the everyday person. Styles range from “really conservative to funky casual.”
The store itself projects a young, hip vibe. One of the associates wore skinny jeans, a beanie hat, and t-shirt with an image of John Lennon corresponding with the words, “give peace a chance.”
Another thrift store that has mass market appeal is Retrospect, which is located on South Street. Whereas Buffalo Exchange carries some popular brands, such as J. Crew and Urban Outfitters, Retrospect carries primarily vintage clothing and goods.
Owned and operated by Goodwill, the store is like a time warp, selling everything from fanny packs, ’80s prom dresses, and Bill Cosby sweaters to old records of The Supremes, framed tapestries, and gaudy lamps.
Sales associate, Emily Rose Patz, was dressed head-to-toe in Retrospect vintage. “I’ve been shopping at vintage stores since I was 13,” said Patz, 23.
November 12 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
How Hope’s Cookies captivates Bryn Mawr College
By Clare Mullaney
A sophomore at Bryn Mawr College confidently asserts that if a man were to show up at her dorm room with a box of Hope’s Cookies she would marry him.
That’s saying a lot for a Bryn Mawr woman.
Hope’s Cookies on the 1000 block on West Lancaster Avenue is a hot spot for college students. For Bryn Mawr, Hope’s has become an integral part of campus culture.
Not only do Bryn Mawr students make weekend trips to the small shop in Rosemont, but Hope’s Cookies are served and sold in various places on campus.
Tired of processed cookie dough like Toll House and Mrs. Fields, Hope Spivak of Bryn Mawr’s class of 1983 came up with the idea of Hope’s Cookies-a business that would make all natural, high quality cookie dough-during her senior year at Bryn Mawr while having lunch with a friend from Haverford College.
Hope's M&M Special
By 1986, Spivak said goodbye to her initial plans for medical school and opened up Hope’s Cookies in Wayne, which a year and a half later would move to Lancaster Avenue.
Hope’s 23 year-old business is still going strong.
According to a SurveyMonkey survey of Bryn Mawr students done for this story, Bryn Mawr students eat an average of two Hope’s Cookies each week.
Apply that to the entire student body and it means that they’re consuming 104,700 cookies every year and taking in over 3.5 million calories.
Packing on the pounds
This means that each Bryn Mawr student can gain six pounds every year from Hope’s Cookie’s alone.
For most Bryn Mawr students, the extra weight is worth it for that special taste of Hope’s.
Maybe it’s Hope’s Cookies’s use of 100 percent natural ingredients and no added artificial flavors or preservatives.
Or maybe it’s that Hope’s is 35 percent chocolate, unlike most cookie dough whose primary ingredient is flour or sugar.
For Sarah Nelson, a sophomore at Bryn Mawr, chocolate is definitely one of Hope’s Cookies’s distinguishing qualities.
“I like the fact that the chocolate always melts in your mouth or when you’re pulling it apart,” she says.
Lindsey Darvin, a sophomore at Bryn Mawr, says that Hope’s Cookies, by far, are the best cookies she’s ever had. They even beat her grandma’s, “so it’s a pretty big deal,” she says.
For Darvin, the pleasure of Hope’s lies in its freshness. “You feel like you’re eating cookie dough,” she says.
Many Bryn Mawr students, including Darvin, appreciate Hope’s for the wide variety of flavors it offers-anything from the seasonal pumpkin cookie, to chocolate raspberry, to apricot almond.
M&M Delight is Darvin’s favorite. “The M&Ms are gooey inside, really chocolatey. You bite into it and you’ve got the crunch with the goo,” she says.
Sophomore Alliana Propst, Darvin’s roommate and the future fiancé of that as yet undetermined man bearing Hope’s, agrees. “It tickles your taste buds,” she says.
There’s something about the homemade taste of Hope’s Cookies that gives Bryn Mawr students a piece of home away from home.
“I think that even though they’re not homemade, they almost taste like they are,” says Laura Nelson, a junior at Bryn Mawr.
Spivak attributes part of her store’s appeal among college students to its “homegrown” atmosphere. Unlike franchised businesses, “things aren’t streamlined,” she says. “People like the experience.”
Despite the pervading rage for Hope’s Cookies on Bryn Mawr’s campus, some students don’t see how Hope’s are superior to other cookies.
“They’re just cookies and they’re not the best I’ve ever had,” says Susie Kim, a junior at Bryn Mawr.
Bryn Mawr’s dining hall, campus center, and Lusty Cup café, are sent a few hundred cases of cookie dough each year from Hope’s Cookie’s factory in King of Prussia, says Spivak.
A Bryn Mawr tradition
Although the Hope’s cookies served at Bryn Mawr “are better than having no Hope’s,” says Propst, nothing can compare to the purchase of an authentic Hope’s Cookie made at the tiny store on Lancaster.
Despite the consensus that that Hope’s Cookies are best from Hope’s, the majority of Bryn Mawr students “get their Hope’s fix,” as junior Dakota Fisher-Vance calls it, on campus, probably for reasons of convenience.
Does the Bryn Mawr connection play any role in Bryn Mawr’s preference for Hope’s?
“When people realize I went to Bryn Mawr, they’re probably more apt to be loyal to the store,” says Spivak.
Although Spivak didn’t take any business courses in college, she attributes the success of Hope Cookie’s to her education at Bryn Mawr.
“Bryn Mawr opened my eyes to a whole different world,” she says.
So, maybe Spivak always puts a little bit of her Bryn Mawr experience into her cookies, connecting generations of Bryn Mawr students to the same experience, an experience created by a Mawrtyr herself.
“Hope’s Cookies is a college staple,” says Spivak. Alumnae will say, “When I went to Bryn Mawr, I went to Hope’s.”
November 12 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Mara Miller, whose beat is the arts, writes about a new media installation at Haverford College.
Heather Taddonio, who is writing about science, reports on a new exhibition at Bryn Mawr about Charles Darwin.
November 10 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
A new exhibit offers a visual challenge
By Mara Miller
When you walk into the gallery, the first thing you notice is a loud grinding noise, like gears or heavy cogs. The room is dark, but a rotating projector flashes alternating images at four large screens. On one, a child’s birthday party, then more scenes from everyday life. On another, animated lines of text. Turn around, and you see what that sound is-no gears, but an image of a giant manual stamp, like they use at a library checkout, angrily punching out dates.
This sound and video installation, called Guarded, is the first in John Muse and Jeanne C. Finley’s three-part exhibition Imaginative Feats Literally Presented: Three Fables for Video Projection, which opened Friday at Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery. Muse, now an Associate Professor of Fine Arts,was Haverford’s Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow last year. Finley has collaborated with Muse since 1988.
The pieces have each been shown at festivals and galleries across the country since 2003, but this marks the first time they’ve been assembled together.
The new exhibition has already generated chatter around campus for its portrayal of the ways in which Americans participate in and deal with the war on terror and our presence in Iraq through picture, sound, and text. Haverford, with its politically engaged population and pacifist Quaker roots, proves a rich launching point for Muse and Finley’s work.
Stunning…and confusing
At the gallery’s opening, the room and surrounding halls overflowed with people eager to see what the much anticipated exhibit, advertised mysteriously with camouflage-themed posters, was all about. On the next day, about 30 curious viewers returned for a more intimate talk with the artists, moderated by Andrew Suggs, Executive Director of Philadelphia’s Vox Populi art gallery.
This was a valuable chance to make some sense of the stunning, but undoubtedly confusing, set of images and sounds on display.
The text from Guarded was culled from Red Cross pamphlets discussing what citizens should do in a disaster. Muse explained that one of the driving themes of the piece was political manipulation in times of vulnerability. “We look at how people’s ability to be caring can be exploited for political purposes,” he said.
He also pointed out the simple scenes being projected intermittently, like people going to work or getting married, and their relationship to the dates and words. He said, “It’s about the very idea that a calendar can make intelligible the things we’re sensitive to.”
“The viewer is literally in the piece, since the projector’s in the middle, and your shadow is cast on the screen,” he said. “And you can never see both sides at once.”
That idea of a visual blind spot also turns up in the second piece Flat Land, where two video channels are simultaneously cast on one small, two-sided screen hanging. Here, one side illustrates the phenomenon of Flat Stanley, a paper cartoon character whom children create to send around the world, take pictures of him, and track his travels. The other side shows pictures of Flat Daddies, which are oddly and eerily similar cardboard cutouts of enlisted men and women, fighting abroad, that their families create as visual surrogates.
No wing of politics
Muse and Finley said they went to great pains to remove themselves from a political or social critique, and strove to “just put the images there, and get out of the way.” They want audiences to put aside their opinions on the war itself to empathize with the human lives featured in the piece. An image of a boy kissing a cardboard likeness of his military father is touching, not merely “patriotic,” regardless of whether you find that adjective positive or negative, they said.
Said Finley, “Some people think it’s right wing, or left wing, but really it’s not sarcastic or ironic at all. That hands-off attitude aims to deepen the true critical response.”
The exhibition’s third piece, Lost, is tucked in a corner with just one screen. It shows a foggy image of an abandoned military base, while a male voice narrates an army chaplain’s recollection of an Iraqi’s violent death. When the narrator utters the phrase “future sight” in his story, the words FUTURE SITE appear in the image. Otherwise, the picture does not change. “There is something really different and almost jarring about that pairing,” said Suggs.
The three pieces are not divided by walls but coexist in the same gallery space. “They’re separate, but we constructed it so they’d be able to have a conversation with each other,” said Finley.
“All these are usually images and ideas that people look away from,” she said. “But we want people to look at them.”
Suggs saw the exhibition as more of a question mark than a period: “It lets us ask, both physically and conceptually, where do I stand?”
November 10 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
The scholars who were Darwin’s ancestors
By Heather Taddonio
It’s the age-old story of a true adventurer: a man enraptured by the world around him who disobeyed his father’s wishes when he accepted an offer to sail around the world pursuing his hobby in the name of science. His name was Charles Darwin.
Darwin is one of the most famed names in the sciences, but what about the evolution of the theory of evolution? Bryn Mawr College’s Special Collections Department’s exhibit titled Darwin’s Ancestors: Tracing the Origins of the “Origin of Species” profiles some of Darwin’s most influential but often unsung predecessors of natural history.
Housed in Canaday Library’s elegant Rare Book Room, the exhibition features artwork, books, and text incorporating specimens from notable - but unknown — scientists including Joannes Jonstronus, Thomas Burnett, John Gould, Erasmus Darwin, and Charles Lyell. These predecessors “laid the groundwork for our modern understanding of the nature of life on earth,” according to the exhibit.
Charles Darwin
The exhibit, which opened on Oct. 22 and will run through Feb. 2010, was opened with a lecture titled “Disagreements Among Friends: How T.H. Morgan and E. B. Wilson’s Agreeing to Disagree Helped Establish Genetics and the Modern Synthesis” by Swarthmore biology professor Scott Gilbert.
Lost in the science-speak? Gilbert’s lecture hits close to home: Wilson and Morgan were Bryn Mawr’s two first biology professors and were prominent players in the 20th century evolution debates.
Darwin’s ancestors
Darwin’s Ancestors is curated by Director of Library Collections Eric Pumroy, art history graduate student Angelique Wille, and undergraduate medieval studies major Marybeth Matlack. The exhibit coincides with the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of his celebrated book On the Origin of Species.
Special collections chose to show a Darwin exhibit because of Bryn Mawr’s “fairly good collections on the history of natural history to support the show, and because we had recently had some conversations with faculty in the bi-co who are interested in the history of science and were willing to help us think about the topic,” said Pumroy. “And if we were going to do a Darwin-related exhibition, the anniversary seemed like the right time to do it to ensure a wider audience outside of Bryn Mawr.”
But even with the excellent timing, visitor numbers to the exhibit are minimal.
“Generally, the number of walk-in visitors isn’t very large,” said Pumroy, adding that this is actually true of most small museums. “Most of the people who see the exhibit are those who come to special events, like the opening, or classes.”
At least two faculty members plan on bringing their classes to visit the exhibit, with others encouraging their students to come on their own.
On the HMS Beagle
Despite the small number of visitors, the exhibit maintains a fascinating look into the history of natural history and how it has evolved over the centuries since Darwin’s ancestors.
John Gould’s ornate illustrations of hummingbirds demonstrate one of the earliest examples of utilizing detailed illustrations in books about natural history, which were, in his mind, “essential to a book about nature.”
The exhibit, of course, traces each scientist’s connection to Charles Darwin: Gould was a leading ornithologist who was chosen to examine Darwin’s bird specimens from his 1831 voyage on the HMS Beagle. Incidentally, it turned out that Darwin had incorrectly identified many of his bird specimens from his expedition.
Joannes Jonstronus, the 17th Century Polish scholar, was “innovative not in what he wrote, but in what he omitted from his text,” as he only wrote empirical observations in his books rather than including the mythology of the animals, which was a commonplace practice among natural historians of the day.
Books on natural history would often end up with fictional animals alongside real ones. It was not uncommon for exotic creatures, which the writers had only heard about, to end up together on a page in a natural history book.
For example, the exhibit houses a book open to a spread depicting illustrations of similar species: a pelican alongside a gryphon.
November 10 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
The English House Gazette opens the 2009 fall semester with three profiles:
Harper Hubbeling, whose beat is science, profiles Haverford Professor Jennifer Hunt, who is a leading researcher into immunology.
Clare Mullaney offers a piece on English Professor Kate Thomas of Bryn Mawr College, who is engaged in food studies and literature.
Kulia Wooddell, whose beat is about greening and sustainability, writes about Claudia Kent, the innovative grounds manager at Haverford College.
November 05 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
The Haverford professor is on a mission of discovery
By Harper Hubbeling
Jennifer Punt wanted to grow up to be a writer.
“My dream in life was to be a novelist,” said Punt, leaning back in her chair to glance into the lab adjoining her office on the second story of the Koshland Integrated Natural Science Center at Haverford College.
Punt, 48, is no novelist. She is a biology professor and researcher at Haverford. Her lab studies immunology, looking at the development of thymocytes, a type of white blood cell critical to the body’s immune response.
Punt said she was, “very shy,” and, “very nerdy,” as a kid and that she was always, “very bad at following directions and learning a body of something that was already defined.”
“I just wasn’t that interested,” Punt said.
What did interest Punt?
“Since I was very little, I wanted to discover something,” Punt said. She recalls playing piano as a girl, slamming her hands down on the keys with the intense frustration of, “just wanting to discover something,” and not knowing how.
Punt was an undergraduate at Bryn Mawr College from 1979 to 1983. She went on to get a doctoral degree in veterinary medicine her the University of Pennsylvania. In 1996, just 13 years after leaving the Bi-co, she returned, beginning her teaching and research career at Haverford.
Her mission: discovery
At Haverford, Punt’s job description includes, “discovering something.”
“I couldn’t imagine a better job,” she said, “what more could I ask for than to be able to figure things out… I can be very excited by knowing that I know something new.”
And what is Punt is discovering?
Punt studies how the defense mechanisms in our bodies “see” the difference between invaders and self. You and a virus are both made of proteins. But your immune system must be able to distinguish between these proteins, labeling one as “bad” and the other as “good.”
If it cannot, your immune system will destroy itself, eating the body it was assigned to protect.
Autoimmune disorders like Type I diabetes and multiple sclerosis are examples of this problem: the immune system turned against itself.
“How the body defines usefulness and dangerousness is at the root of some interesting questions,” said Punt.
Punt looks at how thymocytes “learn” to distinguish good and evil in the molecular world. Thymocytes develop in a small organ above the heart, called the thymus, where they are shown examples of various proteins and “taught” what to attack - and what to leave alone.
To study this education process, Punt uses mice. Unfortunately, she cannot study a mouse’s thymus while the mouse is alive.
“I should’ve gone into drosophila work,” Punt jokes, referring to the scientific name for fruit flies. She hates killing the mice.
“Yet what I’m fascinated by is the thymus, and drosophila don’t have a thymus and bacteria don’t have a thymus. It’s an odd joke life has played on me,” Punt says.
“What exactly does Punt find so fascinating about the thymus?
“The truth is, I can go down to the nitty-gritty and care about PP2AB’ [a protein] and its isomers [variant forms] very easily,” said Punt.
Science as cooperation
But she said she doesn’t find her main inspiration at this “nitty-gritty” molecular level.
She points to much larger scale interactions - the interpersonal relationships between scientists - as what drives her to come into lab each morning.
I like those moments where people’s personalities intervene with development,” Punt says, adding that science is, “a process,” and that, “the sequence of events that lead to discoveries could be all mish-mashed and changed in ways that would change the sequence of discoveries and I love that.”
Punt enjoys watching these cooperative scientific interactions unfold. In fact, she enjoys them so much that she seeks out collaboration, even when other scientists would shy away.
Science is competitive. Many scientists view their works as a race - a race to that “discovery” that Punt wanted so much as a child. Sharing isn’t the norm in this competitive scientific culture. Sharing slows you down.
Yet last fall, Punt chose to give a huge piece of her data away to a fellow immunologist, Kristin Hogquist, from the University of Minnesota.
“Everybody said don’t, don’t be this generous, don’t do this kind of stuff,” said Punt.
But she doesn’t regret her decision.
“I still don’t understand why this is problematic,” Punt said.
For Punt, sharing her data was just her way of letting her personality intervene and alter the sequence of events that leads to discovery. When she sent her data to Hogquist, she was rewriting the narrative of science.
So perhaps Jenni Punt did grow up to be a writer.
“I love the stories in science,” she says, “I love both the biochemical stories, and the molecular stories, but also the people.”
Looking back on her young dreams of novel writing, Jenni seems relieved that she turned away from her original aspirations, finding a less traditional form of writing - one that suits her well.
“I wrote a lot of stuff,” said Punt, “but I couldn’t get the plot line. In science I could always find my plots.”
November 05 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Professor Kate Thomas on food & literature
By Clare Mullaney
In Bryn Mawr College’s English department, novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley isn’t just a great writer, but a vegetarian.
This is how Kate Thomas, an associate professor of English at Bryn Mawr, describes the 19th century author. She brought her interest in food studies to the college in 2005 with the creation of a class entitled “Eating Culture: Britain and Food 1789-1929,” which explores the role of food in English literature, specifically highlighting food’s effect on power, politics and trade.
Primarily a Victorianist and a critical and cultural theorist, Thomas found her interest in food studies later in her career after graduating from Cornell University Graduate School in 1996.
She later returned to Oxford University, where she had studied as an undergraduate, to get her doctorate in English Literature in 2003. 
Thomas had been doing reading about how food hadn’t received much attention in the academic world and decided to incorporate food into her study of literature.
Food studies is a relative new academic subject, said Thomas, but it encompasses many different disciplines, ranging anywhere from anthropology, to botany, to history, to English.
Nonetheless, food studies tend to focus more on the social sciences than on literature, something that Thomas hopes to change through her own studies and teaching.
Eating Culture
Thomas emphasizes the importance of academic study in assessing cultural issues such as food.
“If we don’t have scholarship, we’re missing a vital piece of how to culturally work together,” she said.
Thomas previously taught at Dartmouth and Oberlin Colleges, but it’s at Bryn Mawr, whose faculty she entered in 2004, that she got the chance to explore food studies with her students.
In addition to her “Eating Culture Class,” which focuses on topics such the potato famine and the relationship between sugar and the slave trade in slave narratives, Thomas is currently co-pioneering a course entitled “Food Revolutions” with one of her colleagues from Swarthmore College.
The class, which has an overwhelming enrollment of 75 students, studies the cultural, political, and philosophical role of food from the industrial revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries to the present day.
What caused a class originally intended for 30 students, to fill Bryn Mawr’s biggest lecture hall?
Thomas attributes students’ interest in food studies to a generational shift.
“People are more aware of environmental concerns than they used to be,” she said. “I think it’s clear to anybody that takes in any kind of media that these are the questions that policy makers are addressing right now.”
Maybe the popularity of her “Food Revolutions” course isn’t just because of the subject, but Thomas herself. One of Bryn Mawr’s most beloved professors, she always finds a way to make her courses move beyond text.
In her “Eating Culture” class, Thomas showed her own passion for cooking by making dishes from a 19th century cookbook. A ginger custard particularly comes to mind, she said.
Kneading dough
Although Thomas doesn’t claim to have a particular specialty in cooking, she does make a lot of breads.
“I think it’s one of these things that people should make time in their day for,” she said.
A couple of weeks ago her “Food Revolutions” course moved outside the classroom and onto a farm in Phoenixville where students got the chance to see the workings of sustainable farming first hand.
Students walk away from Thomas’s classes with a new perception about food. No longer do they mindlessly consume their meals, but recognize the history behind food and ways in which it’s a victim to both time and culture.
“You learn to examine the food on your plate!” Thomas said.
In along with “Food Revolutions,” Thomas is currently working on a book, Victorian Fat and Thin, which studies food, culture, and class in the industrialization of the 19th century.
In 2008, she gave a lecture at Temple University about one of her articles, “Matthew Arnold’s Diet,” in which she discussed the 18th century poet’s use of “tasteful” literary devices while highlighting the connection between cultural and food studies.
She also wrote an essay entitled “Alimentary” which explores the culinary mass market in the 19th century through the relations between two prominent Victorian literary figures.
Thomas’s writings about food aren’t purely academic. She has a blog entitled “Syllabub: Words on Food,” which in addition to analyzing the role of food in different literary works, also discusses her own eating experiences and lists different recipes that she finds enjoyable.
She does, however, sneak a few academic references in her entries. Her latest post discusses how the presence of a prune in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own serves as a symbol for the “withering place of women in education.”
Thomas also gets outside the classroom and volunteers at the White Dog Café Foundation’s Fair Food Stand in the Reading Terminal Market once a week. The farm stand carries produce, meats, and dairy, from sustainable and organic farms throughout southeast Pennsylvania.
Cleary food, an important aspect of both her personal and professional life, is one of Thomas’ greatest passions.
“Food is such an unexamined aspect of culture, and so foundational to who we are,” she said.
November 04 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
The woman who helps make Haverford green
By Kulia Woodell
There is nothing that Claudia Kent likes better than to romp around outdoors and play in the dirt.
A woman who is clearly more comfortable assessing tree health and poking around in the perennial beds than sitting at a desk, Kent is Haverford College’s grounds manager and sustainability officer.
“I do a little bit of everything,” Kent says, laying down a long list of her daily duties. She is in charge of maintaining the athletic fields, mowing the grass, repairing washouts on the Nature Trail, and caring for the on-campus flora.
As the main player in the ‘greening’ of Haverford, she works with students to compost waste from the dining center for use in the student garden on campus.
“This year the garden gave us tomatoes, potatoes, beets, green peppers, and pounds of green beans,” Kent said. “Haverford is historically a farming school. We’ve kind of gotten away from that now, but I’m working on proposals for a big campus farm.”
She finds a new enthusiasm in talking about the Bur Oak next to Magill Library. “It’s 175 years old, and they can live to be 500,” she said. “I just love the trees. I think Haverford has amazing trees.”
Walking through the fall colors, or, as Kent specifies, the reds of the Sugar Maples and the golds of the Honey Locusts, she recalls growing up in rural England. “I was always outside building forts and playing in the fields and river,” Kent said.
Her family moved to Philadelphia when she was 9, and she has lived here for over thirty years. She first got a degree in communications from Temple University, but then realized that gardening was her true passion and went back for a degree in horticulture.
“I’ve always been an outdoor person,” Kent said. “I still am an outdoor person, whether it be for work or for fun.”
One thing that she’s particularly proud of is the meadows she’s started on campus, one by the Duck Pond and the other in the Pinetum. These meadows are planted with wildflowers and left unmowed, which cuts down on the use of greenhouse gas-spewing mowers. Meadows also create a habitat for wildlife and help to reduce soil erosion.
“I love native species,” Kent said, repositioning her baseball cap that’s embroidered with the silhouette of a tree. “I incorporate native species into everything that I’ve done. The college in general aims for 64 percent native, and between 2005 and 2008 we were up to about 84 percent native, which is huge.”
The issue with non-native plant species, Kent explains, is that although some birds will eat them, most insects will not. This creates a break in the food chain, since many animals need these insects as a food source. We also depend on these insects to pollinate our food-producing plants and to keep other insects in check.
Of her hobbies, Kent says that camping, backpacking, and bike riding are first and foremost. “I try to get to a national park every year. I plan to do all of the 58 national parks before I turn 50,” she said. So far, she’s about 25 parks in.
After a long pause, Kent explains her love of nature. “I love its spiritual power,” she said. “Especially in a national park you can feel it because it’s right there. There’s
this constant energy, this hum. I mean, here it gets kind of covered up with concrete but the energy and the connection is still always there.”
Thoughtful and quick to laugh, Kent wants everyone to be assured that plants and nature aren’t her only sources of joy. “I also love the Phillies. I got season tickets this year,” she said.
Eastern Red Cedar, White Pine, Winterberry Holly, Kent names some of the trees and shrubs as we pass them. “The most important thing that I do is try to change people’s perceptions on leading an environmental life. You don’t have to change that much,” she said. “You just have to educate them about balance and diversity in planting, and issues of recycling and what goes to the landfill.”
Her overall reflections on her work: “I love this. When the rest of my life gets rough, I just go and do a little weeding.”
November 04 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments »