The Franklin Park Coalition (FPC) hosted a virtual kick-off meeting with the Parks and Recreation department on Monday evening, July 14, that was set up to discuss the City’s planned ecological restoration of Franklin Park’s woodlands and natural areas.
More than 50 residents tuned in via Zoom and heard members of the department’s Urban Wilds and Natural Areas Team explain how the 2022 Franklin Park Action Plan will be implemented throughout the 527-acre historic green space.
“Earlier this year, our scope of work was extended quite a bit to include the creation oversight of a Franklin Park natural areas team,” said Urban Wilds director Paul Sutton. “Our area of expertise is really solid land management, ecological restoration, certainly invasive plant management, conservation, horticulture, forestry, and some designing and construction.
Those are the skill sets that we’re kind of bringing together to Franklin Park,” he added, “and although it’s a large site and it’s very challenging, we do this type of work every day.”
Sutton will lead the team, and he has been joined by the urban gardener and environmental scientist Shan Borucke and recent Northeastern grad Jonathan Bacdayan, who earned a master’s degree in the Environmental Science and Policy Program.
Borucke and Bacdayan shared a presentation that explained both the work that has been and the job that lies ahead in Boston’s biggest park. Borucke told attendees that the restoration project is being guided not only by the ‘22 Action Plan but also by a woodland management plan set up in 2015.
In the wake of an analysis of the park and discussions with community members, the team has determined that ecological threats have likely been caused by four underlying factors: deviations from Frederick Law Olmsted’s original layout by a rapidly urbanizing city; past municipal disinvestment and the reliance on community groups and leaders to maintain the park; inequitable green space access investment; and gaps in maintenance capacity to steward the site.
For all that, Borucke believes the park is “a treasure. It still has innate value and a lot of critical value for the future,” she said. “It’s going to be considered a major hub for how, as both an ecological community and a social community, to help combat the very real effects of climate change.”
She added: “We’re hoping to create restoration plans that would help provide more ecological health to sustain us for the future, but also help remedy and help bridge a lot of the kind of decentralized mosaics of the past.”
Bacdayan noted that a large goal laid out in the plan is the elimination of invasive species. “We’re trying to do that in a fashion that is consistent, coordinated, and correct,” he said. “What “correct” means in this instance is using the appropriate method to control each invasive species. Two of the main ones that we’re facing are glossy Buckthorn as well as knotweed. Another thing we want to be doing,” he said, “is enabling the native ecology. The plants that we want to thrive and succeed are present, but they’re simply being out-crowded.”
The native plants are competing with invasive species for light and resources.
Bacdayan explained, “By clearing [the invadors], we’re giving our native champions a chance to get established, to grow, and there’s a positive feedback cycle there, where as they get established, they now crowd out the invasives and slow their growth.”
While the project is a multi-year process that will require significant follow-up care, progress is already being made, especially in the park’s Long Crunch Woods.
“We’ve been working along the edges of Walnut Avenue and Seaver Street,” said Bacdayan. “We’ve been working on the Vistula summit behind the Bear Dens, and we’ve also been working at the Bear Dens and Raccoon Cage themselves. Already, we have logged over 700 work hours between urban wild staff and our lovely volunteers.”
“This work is ongoing, but we can’t be everywhere all at once, and it’s going to take a lot of labor to restore the park to the conditions we know it can reach,” said Bacdayan.
The restoration also includes a good measure of repurposing. Plants aren’t just being removed from the park; some will be transformed for use in the creation of a public art piece in a project that will be led by the artist Carolyn Lewenberg.
“I will be collaborating with community members to transform the plant material that’s being removed into sculpture,” she said. “The name of the project is Restoring the Understory, Weaving Wonder in Franklin Park’s Woodland. It will be a sculptural weaving project.”
Like Lewenberg, the Urban Wilds Team wants the community involved in the work in its early phase.
