Welcome to Growing Wild

Growing Wild is an online publication about the fleeting, extraordinary, breathtaking and heartbreaking details of the wildness surrounding us all the time, and especially right here in the middle of the city, on top of the asphalt where most of us live.

It emerged from a question–"What if the wilderness isn't somewhere else but is always right here, wherever we are?" Growing Wild represents ever-changing ways of asking and answering this question. 

Here you will find expressions of tiny wild moments: A portrait of the Tiburon Mariposa lily. Two crows furiously pecking the top of a bluebird nesting box installed by volunteers. An oak tree that the road was built around. A baby coyote bush growing up through a crack in the concrete. A bouquet of purple owl's clover and poison hemlock tucked proudly into the hiker's shirt pocket. The decline of our local endangered manzanita forest.

Growing Wild is also a place to listen to the voices of people engaged with the natural world right here, where we are: scientists, artists, gardeners, writers, birders, visionaries, and naturalists. 

About the authors

Stephanie Penn is a freelance journalist, photographer and writer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She studied Geology and Studio Art at Cornell College and loves combining her background in visual art and science to communicate stories about California’s nature, plants, and wildlife. She holds a Master of Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on multimedia reporting

Contributing author

Joan Kresich is a former teacher living in Berkeley CA and the small Montana town of Livingston. With the energy untethered in retirement she has worked on climate related efforts including solarizing Livingston. Joan is a writer who loves the way poetry finds the words that are inviolable. She is the author of Picturing Restorative Justice.

Discovering the endless expressions of life as minute as a single green shoot pushing up between the cracks in sidewalk and as musical as the notes of a Bewick’s wren floating through the air is a source of joy she wishes to share with others.