We live in an older suburb of Chicago, called Oak Park. Here’s a photo of our side of the street:
Our house has a bench in front, plus some shrubs and several rock gardens. (We’ll tell you more about our rock gardens when the snow melts.)
We have a large American Elm tree in front of house, as do several houses on either side of ours. By counting the tree rings on nearby elms that died, we have figured out that our elm is about 80 years old. There are at least 20 other kinds of trees in our neighborhood, most of them planted by the Village of Oak Park as elms died from Dutch Elm Disease.
We enjoy exploring and playing with all parts of our big front-yard trees, including their leaves, branches, seeds, and bark. Our big trees also bring other sorts of nature to our block, including bugs, birds, mammals, and fungi. We’ll be writing about these trees and other front-yard nature during the next few months. We’ll start introducing you to our back-yard nature over the next few weeks.
Neighborhood Nature 