Roslindale
residents to celebrate the recent Sherrin Street Woods Urban Wild
expansion. Sherrin Street Woods Urban Wild is the third largest
City-owned urban wild site. The urban wild is between the MBTA commuter
rail tracks and Austin Street, north of West Street.A patch of forest in the middle of Boston is a little bit bigger with the addition of a one-acre space to the Sherrin Woods urban wild.
The expansion expands one of the city’s largest wild green spaces, at the edge of Hyde Park and Roslindale, a natural resource that provides important heat and flooding prevention benefits to the surrounding communities.
It adds a narrow space between the neighboring Weider Park, owned by the state Department of Conservation and Recreation, and the commuter rail track, that the city purchased using eminent domain for $510,000 of Community Preservation Act funds. That acre had previously been privately-owned.
The space is part of a network of urban wilds across the city. Green spaces tended by the city that are primarily aimed at preserving pockets of native New England habitats in Boston, though they may also offer recreational opportunities to community members.
The acquisition expands an already sizable site. According to city data, at just shy of 25 acres, the Sherrin Woods space is now the second largest in the urban wilds network — official rosters of city open spaces count the 58.5 acre Boston Nature Center in Mattapan as an urban wild, though it doesn’t appear on the program’s website.
It clocks in at over three times the size of the average urban wild in the city, and though it has been impacted by discarded trash and a takeover of invasive species, community members still point to it as an important local resource.
“It’s rare to have a site this large and to have an opportunity to grow it even larger,” said Paul Sutton, the city’s manager of urban wilds. “And although it’s got its bumps and bruises, it’s still wooded, and provides already to the goal of tree canopy preservation.”
A space like Sherrin Woods can provide important natural benefits for the community. The city points to the woods, and the expansion to the space, as a boon to the neighbors to keep temperatures down and to reduce flooding from stormwater.
“This is really important for this neighborhood,” Sutton said. “Air quality, cooling and pollution reduction — those are, those are really key.”
And the community of mature trees together can bring additional benefits, said David Meshoulam, executive director at Speak for the Trees, a local nonprofit focused on Boston’s urban tree canopy.
“They’re actually growing in a way where if one is having a hard day or a hard year, another one will sort of support it. That allows them to thrive,” he said, pointing to research that suggests trees in a community can share resources and nutrients with each other.
Trees growing in proximity and in a woodland can also have increased basic physical supports, like reduced impact from high winds and more soil in which to grow.
A space like Sherrin Woods can be also be a prominent resource in reducing flooding during storms, especially as a changing climate brings
more precipitation and in a city like Boston where so much of the
built-up infrastructure is constructed on filled land.
“The
big challenge of stormwater management in urban landscapes is that we
have so much paved area — roads, parking lots, building tops — that
don’t allow the water to naturally absorb into the ground,” said Martin
Pillsbury, environmental director at the Metropolitan Area Planning
Council.
That water
instead goes into stormwater systems that pull it away from streets, but
that can be overwhelmed if the volume of water is too great. That
flooding can then impact nearby properties and basements.
As
a result, green spaces like Sherrin Wood mean a spot where more of that
water can be absorbed into the ground without flowing into that network
of pipes.
“If
we could have more of these green spaces, the more of them we can have,
the more we would be able to mitigate,” Pillsbury said. “I think our
problem is we have too few of them begin with, so every acre helps.”
Recent restorations — the second of two phases that together totaled $800,000
— at the older part of the Sherrin Woods site looked to improve and
care for wetlands ecosystems at the site which are key to stormwater
management. One effort included the maintenance of a stormwater basin
which included the planting of wetlands plants that are better equipped
to handle precipitation.
“This whole area is a low point in the neighborhood, so a lot of stormwater from
the surrounding roads can infiltrate,” Sutton said. “That phase two
project is really to allow stormwater from the street to flow into this
stormwater basin. The basin would fill up and the plants would absorb
the water and let it filter the pollutants.”
It
would also serve as the first line of water collection, holding the
water there so any water contaminated by runoff from streets doesn’t hit
the more pristine wetlands further back.
All
the paved land also impacts heat in cities. Things like asphalt and
other paved surfaces trap and hold heat more than parks and green spaces
and don’t have the cooling effect of transpiration, where trees and
other plants release water from their leaves.
It’s
one of the reasons the city is looking to expand its urban tree canopy
generally. And Meshoulam said the wooded areas in Boston’s urban wilds
network can really bolster that effect.
“To
preserve these spaces, in one fell swoop, you’re preserving dozens and
dozens of trees that can grow in a way natural to them. They can thrive
in a way where they’re not confined to a narrow planting strip,” he
said. “They’re such an important part of the geography of the city.”
The
expansion also allows the city to make sure the bulk of the urban wild
is protected from potential flooding that could have occurred if water
infrastructure and the buried Stony Brook in the new acre of the park
were disturbed during any development on the site.
“This
is a 25-acre woodland that would be at risk of being damaged if we
hadn’t protected the Sherrin Woods addition,” said Patricial Alvarez,
assistant director at the Southwest Boston Community Development
Corporation. “So that’s why it means so much to our whole community.”
And, at the end of the day, supporters said the benefit of just providing green space shouldn’t be underestimated.
“It’s
a treasure for all the [natural benefits], and as a place for people to
go and experience nature,” Alvarez said. “It’s good for people’s
physical health to be in the woods. It’s good for their mental health.
It’s good for children to experience.”
A
network of trails crisscrosses the space and that landscape, and the
host of restoration projects in the space have provided a chance for
community kids to get involved through the Southwest Boston Community
Development Corporation’s Green Team, a youth employment and
environmental stewardship program, which works to restore woodlands and
urban wilds in Hyde Park and has been engaged with past restoration
efforts in the space.
Alvarez,
who manages the Green Team, said work at Sherrin Woods has been an
important opportunity to get kids engaged with caring for green spaces
and being invested in the city’s natural resources — something she said
is key to making sure that climate action continues moving forward.
“Many
youth who have never been in the woods in their lives get to experience
what it’s like to be in the woods,” she said. “Whether it’s creating
swales [plantfilled channels] for water runoff, restoring trails,
learning to identify and remove invasive species, pruning trees, they
feel very proud of the work that they’re doing and how it’s helping keep
the woods healthy so the woods can keep us healthy.”