Outsider art: Our favorite plein-air murals and sculptures

In a self-styled art town like Charlottesville, you don’t have to step into a gallery to have an art encounter. There are lots of places to see murals, sculptures, and even interactive works from your car or the sidewalk, or while strolling through the IX Art Park. Increasing the accessibility, the Charlottesville Mural Project—which has […]

Rent a road trip: Outdoorsy is Airbnb for RVs

If the open road is calling you—or if you’d like to spend a few nights communing with nature without, you know, getting eaten by any part of it—Outdoorsy’s here to help. The online service matches owners willing to rent out their pop-ups, Casitas, trailers, and RVs with road-warrior vacationers. Launched in 2015, the company has […]

Urban wilderness: Creating a native habitat in town

When Devin Floyd and his team at the Center for Urban Habitats design gardens, they don’t just think about which plants will bloom in which season. Their approach is far more complex, encompassing the request that client David Wimberley made when he first hired them in 2014. “He came to us because he wanted to […]

The accidental environmentalist: Author Earl Swift could go on about the ravages of climate change. But really, he’d rather be hiking.

Earl Swift is the author of seven books, including the urgent and poignant Chesapeake Requiem: A Year with the Watermen of Vanishing Tangier Island. It was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, The Washington Post, Outside, Bloomberg, and Smithsonian, among others, and recently won a Reed Environmental Writing Award from the Southern Environmental […]