Three-quarters of local authorities have cut staff, with the loss of skills such as horticulture, landscape design and wildlife management.
These two innocents, with no experience in city planning, politics, finance, engineering, horticulture or design, started with a romantic fascination with the 22 unbroken blocks of elevated tracks: "The rusting Art Deco railings gave it a sense of lost beauty, and the spaces underneath were very dramatic; they had a dark, gritty, industrial quality, and a lofty, church-like quality as well".
After all the time travel into the future, I was glad to restore myself in the bog gardens designed by the regional office of the federal Environmental Protection Agency and a children's garden full of fat tomatoes and pink and blue sweet peas set up by the department of ornamental horticulture and environmental design at Delaware Valley College in Doylestown, Pa.
This new chapter in the plantation's life was masterminded by the historians Lucia Stanton and Dianne Swann-Wright, who have been working for a long time to flesh out the lives of the slave workers who built and ran the plantation while Jefferson carried out his research in horticulture, architecture and design.
He got his certificate in landscape design and horticulture from the New York Botanical Garden.
"The way he synthesized art and horticulture in three-dimensional design is really quite exceptional," said Mirka Benes, a landscape historian who teaches at the University of Texas at Austin.
Also awarded financing was the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx for a display of archival records on the history of horticulture, gardening and landscape design between 1818 and 1990.
I studied science and technology for nature and the environment at Udine University in Italy, then built my career in landscape design and horticulture.
The reserve, now in its 10th year, is a nonprofit organization started by the textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen, who heads a board of trustees populated largely by specialists in horticulture, cultural affairs, creative design and art in every form.
And there is something for everyone, with more than 200 different types of apprenticeships, lasting from one to four years — from nursing and graphic design, to horticulture and electric vehicle engineering.
