Greenway plans rile gardeners | Karen Cord Taylor

Up to old tricks. Secretive and arrogant.

That’s what a group of gardeners thinks about certain actions the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy has recently taken.

We’re misunderstood. That’s the message from the Conservancy.

On both sides the situation is characterized by missteps and hard feelings.

I’m paid to offer my two cents on downtown concerns. Based on lengthy conversations with both sides, I have a recommendation. (Full disclosure: I belong to a garden club concerned about this matter.) It is time for Conservancy leaders to swallow their pride, forget the past and offer up mea culpas, whether it is their fault or not.

They need to “reach out,” as they say, to the horticultural community, revealing all their plans and addressing the issue fully, not just at the end of lengthy meetings about other matters. They need to include gardeners in the planning and accept their offers to help. Perhaps they should slow down their plans so “temporary” gardens into which a lot of people put a lot of hard work last long enough to return the favor. If they don’t, they risk losing an important source of Greenway private funding, as well as support for their ongoing efforts.

Here’s what happened. Greenway officials hired award-winning architect Maryann Thompson and top-of-the-line landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh to design structures and gardens for parcels 19, 21 and 22. Parcel 22 is at Dewey Square and features a vent building and a plaza with a farmer’s market. Parcels 19 and 21 lie to the north between Congress and Oliver streets. They plan to install the gardens in 2011.

The problem? Gardens are already there, designed by top-of-the-line landscape architect Halvorson Associates, paid for to the tune of around $800,000 by the cash-strapped Massachusetts Horticulture Society and planted by 300 volunteers only two years ago. Mass Hort, as it is inelegantly called, tapped local garden clubs to raise money for the project.

The new plans surfaced publicly on Emily Rooney’s “Greater Boston” show last November. Neither of the daily newspapers took up this story, fueling the gardeners’ suspicions that the newspapers are in the hip pockets of well-connected Conservancy board members.

The gardens were too expensive to maintain, said Conservancy Executive Director Nancy Brennan in a clip from the show. Now she says they have problems with soil compaction, drainage and irrigation. In addition, the whole Greenway needs storage and electricity that weren’t installed because for so long no one was in charge of what was happening on top of the Big Dig. She said a lot of people don’t like the existing gardens.

The gardeners are fit to be tied about the Conservancy’s plans. They feel their efforts and money have been wasted. They complain that their offers to reduce maintenance costs by helping out have been rebuffed. They believe people like the gardens.

“Our membership went nuts,” said Michele Hanss, chair of the Garden Club of America’s Boston Committee, which provides seed money for projects like the Greenway gardens.

Brennan said these gardens were always supposed to be temporary. The gardeners say they understood that Mass Hort had temporary jurisdiction over the parcels, but that the gardens themselves were never supposed to be temporary.

“We were informed they would be there two years and then there would be a public process to determine how to proceed,” said Diane Valle of Charlestown, chair of fund-raising and volunteers for the Greenway Gardens. She said that hasn’t happened.

Horticulture advocates say, given the Conservancy’s financial constraints, it is reckless to spend money on new gardens when the existing gardens could be fixed. Valle points out that her volunteers offered to help with maintenance.

Horticulture advocates suspect this is payback time to Mass Hort, which everyone admits botched its chance to develop these three parcels in a dramatic way with its Garden Under Glass.

The backlash wasn’t helped when the Greenway Leadership Council met two weeks ago and the elephant in the room was addressed only in generalities for five minutes long after the meeting should have ended.

Brennan said she hasn’t crafted the message properly. She said she wants to speak to horticulturists if they’ll invite her. She says these parcels will remain gardens and will be even better than they are today.

Admittedly the Conservancy is new, with little experience acting with the kind of transparency advocates want from a publicly-funded entity. Mass Hort left these parcels without a plan just as the Big Dig was ending, and there was a scramble to get something into that space. Then there is the Greenway itself—criticized for being a roadway median rather than a park. Conservancy officials are laudably trying to “program” the space, expensive and difficult. Commonwealth Avenue, for example, has never needed a program. The Mall just lies there, and people use it.

Brennan hopes to have data on soil conditions in July and after that she expects to present plans for the new garden.

I’m still hoping someone will resurrect the Gardens under Glass, a dramatic statement the Greenway desperately needs, but that seems unlikely.

This saga continues. The next chapter will play out on February 2 at 9 a.m. at 185 Kneeland Street. The public is invited.

Neal Sanders January 29, 2010 at 9:49 am

Karen, your article is spot on with one huge exception. You write that MassHort ‘left the parcels without a plan just as the Big Dig was ending’. That’s not the case.

The gardens were substantially complete when the Greenway was formally opened in October 2008. MassHort continued to make improvements – 10,000 daffodil bulbs were planted in December of that year together with more than a thousand Hellebores – and a sponsor was found for a dozen ‘winter interest’ planters. Little was done in January 2009 because, well, it was the dead of winter. But MassHort had already moved ahead on establishing a maintenance program for the Gardens, using its own staff and securing the cooperation of the 160-strong members of the Massachusetts Master Gardener Association, whose skills were also much in evidence in the building of the gardens.

Everything came to a screeching halt in early February 2009. At a Greenway Conservancy meeting, formal control of the Greenway passed from the Turnpike Authority to the Greenway Conservancy. That transfer formally terminated all subcontracts and licenses held between the Turnpike Authority and outside organizations, including MassHort. The Greenway Conservancy immediately informed MassHort that its services were no longer needed, and would it please remove those planters on its way out?

So, there was a plan and it was being executed. Anyone who says different hasn’t looked at the record.

I’m not a soil expert, but I know someone who is. I asked him about the compaction issues on the Greenway. He is adamant that whatever drainage and compaction issues are present can be easily and inexpensively remedied. There is no need to tear out the gardens. It is, in his opinion, simply an excuse. And, he says, when you’ve hired your own landscape architect before you’ve evebn taken soil samples, your plan isn’t to re-arrange a few perennials – you’re going to re-build from scratch.

So, what’s really happening? I’ll hazard a guess which may be right or may be way off base. The Greenway Gardens are the one piece of the Greenway over which the Conservancy exercised no oversight. MassHort built them and, against all odds (the financial imposion of the organization included), they succeeded brilliantly. But now there’s a new owner and the new owner wants to ‘redecorate’ as one would a house. Hire a designer and build what you want. It’s human nature.

The problem is that the Greenway Conservancy isn’t the ‘owner’ of the Greenway; it’s the steward of the park for thebenefit of the public. They have no Beacon-Hill-given ‘right’ to tear out gardens that (at least in my opinion) are the best part of the Greenway. The Conservancy is just doing so because the presence of the Greenway Gardens is annoying. Perhaps an appropriate analogy is that of a second marriage in which the new wife must daily pass through a living room decorated by the previous spouse. It may be impeccable, but it’s a constant irritant. And so, to alleviate that irritation, the Greenway Conservancy is fully prepared to tear out $850,000 worth of gardens and spend $1.5 million to replace them, with the taxpayers footing the bill.

Full disclosure: I was one of the volunteers who helped build the Greenway Gardens and I continue to do volunteer work with MassHort. My wife is a Master Gardener.

Neal Sanders

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Neal Sanders January 29, 2010 at 9:49 am

Karen, your article is spot on with one huge exception. You write that MassHort ‘left the parcels without a plan just as the Big Dig was ending’. That’s not the case.

The gardens were substantially complete when the Greenway was formally opened in October 2008. MassHort continued to make improvements – 10,000 daffodil bulbs were planted in December of that year together with more than a thousand Hellebores – and a sponsor was found for a dozen ‘winter interest’ planters. Little was done in January 2009 because, well, it was the dead of winter. But MassHort had already moved ahead on establishing a maintenance program for the Gardens, using its own staff and securing the cooperation of the 160-strong members of the Massachusetts Master Gardener Association, whose skills were also much in evidence in the building of the gardens.

Everything came to a screeching halt in early February 2009. At a Greenway Conservancy meeting, formal control of the Greenway passed from the Turnpike Authority to the Greenway Conservancy. That transfer formally terminated all subcontracts and licenses held between the Turnpike Authority and outside organizations, including MassHort. The Greenway Conservancy immediately informed MassHort that its services were no longer needed, and would it please remove those planters on its way out?

So, there was a plan and it was being executed. Anyone who says different hasn’t looked at the record.

I’m not a soil expert, but I know someone who is. I asked him about the compaction issues on the Greenway. He is adamant that whatever drainage and compaction issues are present can be easily and inexpensively remedied. There is no need to tear out the gardens. It is, in his opinion, simply an excuse. And, he says, when you’ve hired your own landscape architect before you’ve evebn taken soil samples, your plan isn’t to re-arrange a few perennials – you’re going to re-build from scratch.

So, what’s really happening? I’ll hazard a guess which may be right or may be way off base. The Greenway Gardens are the one piece of the Greenway over which the Conservancy exercised no oversight. MassHort built them and, against all odds (the financial imposion of the organization included), they succeeded brilliantly. But now there’s a new owner and the new owner wants to ‘redecorate’ as one would a house. Hire a designer and build what you want. It’s human nature.

The problem is that the Greenway Conservancy isn’t the ‘owner’ of the Greenway; it’s the steward of the park for thebenefit of the public. They have no Beacon-Hill-given ‘right’ to tear out gardens that (at least in my opinion) are the best part of the Greenway. The Conservancy is just doing so because the presence of the Greenway Gardens is annoying. Perhaps an appropriate analogy is that of a second marriage in which the new wife must daily pass through a living room decorated by the previous spouse. It may be impeccable, but it’s a constant irritant. And so, to alleviate that irritation, the Greenway Conservancy is fully prepared to tear out $850,000 worth of gardens and spend $1.5 million to replace them, with the taxpayers footing the bill.

Full disclosure: I was one of the volunteers who helped build the Greenway Gardens and I continue to do volunteer work with MassHort. My wife is a Master Gardener.

Neal Sanders