Friends of the Public Garden: ‘We are a democracy in trees and dirt’
Earlier this month, a fierce spring storm brought down a 65-year-old white willow tree in the Public Garden. It lay in shallow waters in the lagoon where the famous Swan Boats glide, its long branches splayed out like some drowned creature, its trunk splintered above the sodden ground. The public’s reaction was swift and anguished. “Devastated!” and “Heartbroken!” people wrote on social media. “It’s 9:47 a.m.,” one person wrote. “Why am I emotional over a tree?”
Because trees are living repositories of time, health, and beauty, bestowing their gifts with indiscriminate generosity. “There’s a bond of reciprocity with our plant relatives out here,” said Liz Vizza, president of the nonprofit Friends of the Public Garden. “People feel instinctively it’s part of who they are, and when a tree comes down, a little bit of them comes down too.”
Vizza and the Friends are developing a “succession plan” for the roughly 1,700 trees the group oversees in the three parks it stewards: the Public Garden, Boston Common, and the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, from Arlington Street to Kenmore Square. The beloved lagoon willows are especially vulnerable as the climate grows wetter and stormier.
Indeed, the twin imperatives of climate change and environmental justice are what motivate Vizza, who recently announced her retirement after 15 years helping the group evolve from its rather tweedy beginnings into the muscular advocate it is today. The Friends began in 1970, the year Earth
Day was first observed, when a volunteer group of Beacon Hill residents convened to address vandalism and general neglect in the Public Garden and Boston Common. Since then, the nonprofit’s ambit has grown to encompass more jewels in Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace. Its $3.3 million budget is modest but still six times what it was when Vizza began, and the staff has grown to 11 full-time workers. In 2020, Vizza formalized the Friends’ public-private relationship with the city for the first time.
The Friends take care of the parks’ flowers and trees but also the monuments, the lighting, the gates, even the tool shed and temporary public bathrooms, which serve 140,000 people a season. In other words, both the natural and built environments. “What draws people to the park is the living landscape,” Vizza said. “What makes it imageable as a specific place are the structural elements.”
Similarly, both city government and the contributions of private individuals are needed to keep these marquee spaces thriving. Sadly, the 50 years since the Friends’ founding have marked a steady erosion of support for the public realm. Even Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, a self-defined tree hugger and champion of the climate justice that urban parks embody, couldn’t find even 1 percent of the city’s $4.6 billion budget for the parks and recreation department this year. Vizza said that bringing the appropriation up to 1 percent would have meant an additional $11 million for parks “from Beacon Hill to Blue Hill” — money that could have gone to badly deferred maintenance.
The Friends’ political clout was tested in 2017 when developers proposed a 775-foot tower in Winthrop Square that would cast shadow over parts of the Common, in violation of state law. The Friends’ steadfast opposition was a big factor in the city’s negotiating an eventual $56 million fund from the developer for both Boston Common and Franklin Park. The money has helped underwrite a master plan for both parks, and the Friends developed a new shadow study tool Vizza hopes other advocates can use to argue against future encroachments.
Numerous studies show that green spaces in urban settings improve public health, moderate the “heat island effect” of dense cities in a warming world, and bring joy to millions. But in these fractured times they serve a subtler if equally crucial purpose: creating a space where people of all backgrounds can get out of their pixelated bubbles and, simply, be together. People tend to forget that Olmsted was a social reformer as much as a landscape architect and the late 19th century, as today, was a time of rapid technological change and widening economic divides. Olmsted believed that public parks promote “communitiveness” — concern for the common good. Or, as Vizza put it: “We are democracy in trees and dirt.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Vizza received a letter from a 6-year-old girl named, suitably, Willow, who had watched as a tree in the Common was removed. “Down, down, down the tree went,” she wrote, with a solemnity beyond her years. She saved a wood chip to remember it by. “We feel lonely without the trees,” she wrote. “Please plant some new ones.”
Don’t worry, Willow. You’ve got friends.