Dozens of neighbors are gearing up to enter the Brooklyn Botanic Garden's annual "Greenest Block in Brooklyn" contest.

City councilmembers in Berkeley, California, are considering law to ban most plants within five feet of houses in wildfire-prone neighborhoods.

No ideological links connect the NEH grantees who lost their funding. The cut was so deep and wide—eliminating 85 percent of all existing grants—that the reasoning seemed to extend beyond the narrower ...