By Chioma Lewis
Growing up in New York City as a “street brat,” as author Walter H. Kehm calls it, he had a nature deficit.
As an urban kid, with few nearby parks to play at, he and his friends had only concrete sidewalks for games like stickball and stoopball.
“I grew up with concrete, I grew up with asphalt,” Kehm said.
While playing stickball, he noticed grass growing out of the expansion joints in the sidewalks, and that phenomenon fascinated him.
“I used to say to myself, “How the heck does grass grow in concrete?” Kehm said.
After going to school for landscape architecture, he decided to bring nature into cities for low- income, racially and ethnically diverse communities like the one he grew up in.