PHOTOGRAPHY BY KRISTIN REIMER A.K.A. PHOTOMUSE
Is it possible that I, editor in chief of this very magazine, can still be blind to magic?
I found out by accident, really—because when I went up to Philadelphia to hear some music last April, I phoned my longtime friend Mark Berman, whom I’ve known since college, and said it was high time for us to get together and catch up.
What was he doing that Saturday?
He answered, “I’m going to … Be a Beekeeper for a Day.” That’s the name of the workshop he runs at Growing Together Community Garden in South Philly. I knew that Mark had taken up apiculture—beekeeping—over a decade ago, and I knew he’d started a company called Anna Bee’s Honey, named after his daughter. I’d even visited him plenty of times since then and seen some of his hives. But I hadn’t realized just how passionate he was about it, or how knowledgeable.
Mark held a spot for me, and so there I was at Growing Together that spring Saturday, watching him lecture a group of young urban gardeners and tourists who’d read about the workshop in various media. We gathered directly under a roaring commercial train line, in the midst of a church-owned community green space surrounded by industrial gray buildings and lines of rowhouses. In that somewhat alien setting, Mark oversees a flourishing apiary of 18 hives. And it was there that the bees finally dazzled me.
It was like entering another world. After we looked into a microscope at a hairy bee leg, we donned white coveralls and veils, the whole shebang, to watch, transfixed, as Mark dug into the hives. We saw incoming worker honeybees loaded up with nectar and weighted down with loads of golden pollen; we spotted a queen; and finally, we tasted pure, delicious honey straight from the frames. Suddenly I was all about the bees. How had I lived so long without becoming thoroughly enchanted with them? How had I failed to see that they’re yet another way the world is brimming over with everyday enchantments?
In the course of conversation, a visitor marveled that an “urban” city like Philadelphia can host such diverse ecosystems. Mark, who’s a native of the city, was quick to point out that Philly has over 40,000 vacant lots overgrown with wildflowers and that Fairmount Park (the city’s park system) is the largest in the country. Anna Bee’s Honey apiary at Growing Together Community Garden is nestled between the Schuylkill and Delaware rivers, with many additional large parks and community gardens located within a mile, all providing abundant habitat for pollinators. The garden itself hosts 500 garden beds, and a city-wide ordinance prohibits the use of synthetic pesticides on all public land.
Who knew (I didn’t) that within this gritty city are pockets so lush and verdant, so abundant with life? And that a metropolis can provide such a welcoming environment for bees? I’d been to Philly before, but somehow I’d missed the magic on the first (and maybe second and third) go-around. But sometimes that’s how magic operates. When you really need it, it will reveal itself.
After the workshop, Mark and I gathered the beekeeping suits and drove to the apiary of his friend Amelia Mraz, Half Mad Honey, which occupies an abandoned parking lot in Philadelphia’s Navy Yard. Situated on the Delaware River, Half Mad Honey is right off a lane of abandoned houses lined by cherry trees dropping pink petals everywhere. On the day we visited, Amelia and a group of volunteers were busy painting the hives in bright reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, and violets, as well as building a spiral-shaped garden feature designed to help feed pollinators of all kinds.
Mark told me that Amelia is such a guerrilla-type beekeeper that she’s been known to ride city buses with whole hives in her backpack. Part of her mission is to use apiculture to create awareness surrounding mental health and wellness, and to provide a safe and therapeutic space for all people to connect with the natural process of raising honey. I love this idea—and I love too how Amelia and her friends have converted an abandoned lot into something so rich in life and hope.
Philadelphia is, in fact, full of such transformed and transformative spaces—and people who are working tirelessly to remake derelict properties into something useful and beautiful for their communities. Mark himself spent years transforming an abandoned lot in his own South Philly neighborhood into a site now called Manton Street Park and Community Garden. I don’t know that I’ve always appreciated how much work he did, and how magical that work is—to take an abandoned, trash-strewn lot, once a site for illicit activity, and turn it into a lush space where ten families currently grow melons, cucumbers, tomatoes, and other vegetables on individual plots, and where his own daughter, Anna, now college-aged, learned to grow watermelons and lilies and a variety of vegetables from seeds.
What could be more enchanted than everyday people creating everyday magic in the midst of their communities? I felt we absolutely had to document their work for this issue, so I asked photographer Kristin Reimer to visit Mark in Philadelphia to capture some of the magic that I’d (finally) seen.
They visited two other community gardens, which you see in these pages: César Andreu Iglesias Community Garden in Kensington, formed in 2012 on unused land in honor of the Puerto Rican and Latinx community that lives in the neighborhood. It’s home to multiple sculptures by artist and garden member Cesar Viveros, who draws inspiration from Aztec culture, and the community continues to fight developers to maintain control of the land. The second, the Philly Peace Park, was founded the same year in North Philadelphia and is a community-run urban farm where volunteers grow organic fruits and vegetables to share with the neighborhood. It’s also an eco-campus with a focus on sustainability and Black community empowerment.
But these spaces are, Mark emphasizes, only a small fraction of the community green spaces in Philadelphia. Still, it’s a beautiful thing, paying attention to the world as it transforms around you. And there is no greater magic than this.
Visit Anna Bee’s Honey at annabeeshoney.com and Half Mad Honey at halfmadhoney.com. See more of Kristin Reimer’s work at photomuse.com.
