Not everyone has the luxury of gazing out at the beautiful forest while living smack in the middle of the city. We happen to have that luxury and gladly trade a house with enough room for our budding family in order to have a yard big enough for a small zoo. After having survived city life that included potted ficus and African violets, we are thrilled at the greenery that surrounds us. Baltimore has a wonderful park system and, if it doesn't pay enough attention to its historical treasures, it does maintain a good quantity of park land within city limits. All too often we find cities taking big slices out of the green so that new housing or commercial ventures can be erected.
Some cities have famous spaces that are treasured by tourists and locals alike.
London has Kew Gardens and Paris has the Bois de Boulogne. Los Angeles has Griffith Park and San Francisco has Golden Gate Park. But not every city has the resources to map out a public resting place for the quiet green residents that we'd all like to have as neighbors. Cherish what we have. In recent media, David Bellamy, a very cuddly TV natural history person with a cute lisp, made a public statement about the wickedness of development proposals that would remove a small scraggly path of greenery that sits grumpily between Liverpool city and centre, and the renovated-for tourists Albert Dock.