The roof was so seriously dilapidated that there wasn’t much of it left, except for a long decorative piece of metal that ran from gable to gable, capping a swaybacked roofline.

With a razor-thin budget and just two employees, Brian Campbell, director of horticulture, was struggling to mow and maintain the 50 acres that comprise the Knoxville Botanical Garden and Arboretum.

The meadow of the old Standard Knitting Mill, created in the 1990s when the oldest and most beautiful part of the mill was torn down—to make way for a school, never built—stands at a crossroads.

Have you ever found, while sifting through the pea gravel on the playground, a perfectly cylindrical pebble with ridges like a screw, and a hole through the center? If you have, it was probably a fossilized crinoid stem, part of ...

Michael Pollan describes yellow pine as a “harder, less desirable Southern species.” He continues, “Knotty and prone to twisting, yellow pine is difficult to work and notoriously hard on tools. Is Pollan just talking about wood here, or is he ...

In 1919, the Tennessee Senate adopted Joint Resolution 13 allowing Tennessee schoolchildren, true experts in the field, to select the state flower. The children chose, apparently by write-in vote, a flower native to Tennessee: passiflora incarnata, the passionflower.

Earlier this spring a small stenciled image of a bike appeared on the pavement at the intersection of Glenwood Avenue and Luttrell Street. An arrow painted beside the bike pointed to the right. What’s this? I thought.

Maybe more compelling than the satisfaction of “saving” the environment, I like the way a clothesline looks strung across a yard. Clotheslines are alive and dynamic in a way dryers are not. I like the way it makes me feel ...

I saw the tomatoes first, bright red fruit popping out against the tangle of vegetation. Then, everything emerged into focus: the beds of okra and bush beans terraced into the steep hillside, squash and climbing beans with delicate white blossoms ...

Po’ridge, short for “Poor Ridge,” is a skinny neighborhood extending north and south along North 6th Avenue, bound by Hall of Fame Drive to the west, and riding hard against the industrial dead zone of the Standard Knitting Mill to ...

The SmartFIX40 project, which included the widening of Interstate 40 and the creation of Hall of Fame Drive, sharpened the isolation of East Knoxville from the other historic neighborhoods of Fourth and Gill, Old North, and downtown—a divide begun in ...

The nondescript concrete-block building at 1215 Magnolia Ave. still smells a little like the doggie day care it was before becoming home to Groundswell Collective in December. The building includes a living room with comfortable old sofas, a music room, ...

Jonathan Woodroof and Kevin Horn currently head up the Bike Collective, a constantly evolving collection of volunteers dedicated to promoting biking and educating the public to the joy of bike assembly and maintenance.

This space belongs to nobody, and so dog owners walk their dogs there so they don’t have to pick up after them. In our family we call it the Dog Poo Corner. Still, it’s the closest public space, and we ...

There is not much left of Fulton Bellows now—just piles of gravel and immense slabs of concrete towering over Third Creek. The life has been obliterated from the land. The site is a brownfield; the groundwater underneath is contaminated. Despite ...