On October 14, stalwart Belmont Serves volunteers—working with Belmont Conservation Volunteers—took shovels and snips in hand to clear a massive Japanese knotweed infestation on town-owned land abutting the railroad tracks, the site of the future community path Thank you to everyone who pitched in.
By Jeffrey North Victory gardening in Belmont has never been more popular (local food production activity during World War II notwithstanding). One of the largest and oldest continuously active community gardens in the Boston area, Belmont’s Rock Meadow Victory Gardens consists of 132 garden plots of varying sizes, typically ranging from 12 by 12 feet to 50 by 50 feet. The gardens cover about three acres of land at the Rock Meadow Conservation Area along Mill Street, between Trapelo Road on the south and Winter Street on the north. After glaciers retreated 10,000 years ago, Native Americans burned the land [READ MORE]
By Vicki Amalfitano, Lucia Gates, Eva Hoffman, and Adam Howe What makes you feel at ease when you drive down a town street? Would it be as comfortable on a hot summer’s day without shade trees? Tall, beautiful oak, maple, and birch trees; magnificent beech trees, flowering dogwood, magnolia, and cherry trees enrich our streets and yards. They fill our senses with their beauty, and they cool our homes. They take in the carbon dioxide we breathe out, and they release the oxygen we breathe in. We are grateful for the trees’ benefits and their positive impact on the value [READ MORE]
By Jeffrey North and Joseph Hibbard A crew of 18 technicians, crew leaders, designer, and managers gathered on Lone Tree Hill early on the misty morning of March 15. They were there for the third and final day of their work season kick-off with a day of training on Belmont conservation land. The Land Management Committee (LMC) for Lone Tree Hill (LTH) had granted permission to allow the Parterre Ecological Services “Class of 2024” to conduct an invasive species removal training session for field technicians. Their target zone was a section of the southeast corner of the Great Meadow. The [READ MORE]
By Radha Iyengar Belmont’s Lone Tree Hill Conservation area benefited from another year of conservation, restoration, and stewardship, thanks mainly to the efforts of the Land Management Committee for Lone Tree Hill (LMC). Many Belmontonians and visitors enjoy this 119-acre conservation property for walking, biking, viewing wildlife, and being out in nature. The LMC was created through a memorandum of agreement between the town and McLean Hospital in 1999. The agreement outlined the development restrictions for the McLean Hospital campus. It also reserved approximately 119 acres of the campus as publicly accessible open space, including a new municipal cemetery, and [READ MORE]
By Vincent Stanton, Jr. and Pamela Andrews Belmont Conservation Volunteers (BCV) formed earlier this year to work on “restoring our natural spaces for everyone to enjoy.” Volunteer efforts have focused on reining in the extensive and expanding invasive species displacing native plants which support local insects, birds, and mammals. The BCV emerged from pioneering volunteer work by Leonard Katz on Lone Tree Hill. (See “Spare a Thought for Lone Tree Hill”, BCF Newsletter, September 2022.) To expand that work to town-owned land, Katz and Sustainable Belmont leader Dean Hickman obtained permission from both the Select Board and, because many of [READ MORE]
By Elissa Ely Before he became chair of Sustainable Belmont, before the PhD in pharmacogenetics, before moving to the United States, certainly before any awareness of the environmental needs of a Massachusetts town next to Cambridge, Dean Hickman was picking up litter. “Have been picking up trash anywhere I go since I could walk,” his Instagram says. Growing up in farm country west of London, traveling the footpath systems, Dean took the “Keep Britain Tidy” campaign of the 1960s to heart. Many decades later, on a late rainy afternoon when he could have been enjoying a mug of tea, we [READ MORE]
By Heather Pruiksma Spring has sprung, and gardeners everywhere are itching to get their hands into the soil and among the roots. At Grow Native Massachusetts, we encourage including more native plants in your gardens, which can be less work than it might seem — if you’re willing to be a little patient. Native plants are plants that have been growing in a particular habitat and region, typically for thousands of years or much longer. Also called indigenous, they are well adapted to the climate, light, and soil conditions that characterize their ecosystem. Within this system, they have evolved important relationships [READ MORE]
By Meg Muckenhoupt May is the peak of spring migration season in Massachusetts, and thousands of birds are landing in Belmont. (You can even get radar reports on which birds are arriving overnight on birdcast.info.) But what will these birds do when they get here? Will they find the resources they need to survive, raise young, and embark on fall migrations next September? The answer may depend on what’s growing around Belmont—and a lot of what’s growing around Belmont is invasive plants. Plants change birds’ lives North American birds evolved with native plants. Most bird-lovers know that different types of [READ MORE]
By Radha Iyengar The Belmont Citizens Forum (BCF), in conjunction with the Judy Record Conservation Fund, held its ninth annual Lone Tree Hill Volunteer Day on Saturday, April 22, an overcast and cool day. Volunteers included Girl Scouts Troop 82027, employees of Cityside Subaru, M&T Bank,and the Sai Group, and residents of Belmont and the surrounding communities. Many hands made light work. At the Pine Allee, efficient volunteers planted forty white pine saplings. The new plants replaced the Allee’s missing trees and some of the dead saplings from previous volunteer day plantings. At the adjacent meadow the volunteers planted slender [READ MORE]
By Elissa Ely There were woods behind Jean Devine’s house growing up in Manchester, New Hampshire. As a child, she liked pressing leaves and hated wearing socks; her mother would send her outside on ‘safaris’ with apple slices, the family dog trailing behind. She was always late to school. Jean was unafraid of bugs and fascinated by Daddy Longlegs. Woods and spiders did not turn her into the environmental educator, native-plant coach, and landscaper she eventually became, but they were her introduction to nature. Her mother belonged to the Garden Club in an era when plots were visually beautiful, organized [READ MORE]
By Joseph Hibbard and Jeffrey North The Belmont Citizens Forum Newsletter has been printing articles about the perils and poisons of non-native invasive plant species on these pages for years. Readers have learned that garlic mustard changes the chemistry of the soil to gain an advantage over other plant species in forest and edge areas. Our article on black swallowwort described that plant’s deadly toxicity to Monarch butterfly larvae that mistakenly consume it instead of nourishing native milkweed. We have described how Asiatic bittersweet rapidly climbs native trees, blocks the sunlight, and eventually topples the tree while changing our viewsheds. [READ MORE]
By Jeffrey North Tree-of-heaven (Ailanthus altissima), typically called ailanthus, is a rapacious deciduous tree native to China. It was first introduced into the United States when it was imported as an ornamental plant to Philadelphia in 1784 and later to New York in 1820. On the West Coast, immigrants brought the plant from Asia and planted it in California in the 1850s. The tree was initially valued as a fast-growing ornamental shade tree that was tolerant of poor soils and a broad range of site conditions. It tolerates vehicle exhaust and other air pollution quite nicely. It was widely planted [READ MORE]
By Dean Hickman and Leonard Katz Between Pleasant Street and Trapelo Road to the south, Concord Avenue to the north, and Mill Street to the west, Lone Tree Hill wraps around McLean Hospital and sits above Belmont, providing us with a peaceful and secluded mix of woods and meadows where we can escape the hustle and bustle of suburban life down below. It is also Belmont’s gateway to Rock Meadow on the other side of Mill Street as well as to the more secluded trails of the Western Greenway which head west into neighboring Waltham and Lexington. Anyone looking for [READ MORE]
By Jeffrey North New York state has eight very large ones. Oregon has 10. Michigan has more than 20 (required by law for every county). The number of Comprehensive Invasive Species Management Associations (CISMAs) across the country is approaching 400. Massachusetts has one. But that number is likely to increase. With the likely passage of the invasive species bill (H4595), financial and administrative resources will be available for CISMAs and a host of other programs, plans, and projects for controlling invasive plants. The bill would establish an invasive species trust fund. A statewide invasive species coordinator would be appointed, along [READ MORE]
By Jeffrey North Black swallowwort is a killer. Monarch butterflies mistake the plant for native common milkweed, and lay their eggs in the non-native invader, where the larvae die. Besides threatening the population of migrating monarch butterflies, it is toxic to mammals, and by crowding out food for wildlife, worsens wildlife habitat. Vincetoxicum nigrum, also known as Louise’s swallowwort or black dog-strangling vine, is a species of plant native to Europe and found primarily in Italy, France, Portugal, and Spain. Black swallowwort was probably introduced to North America as an ornamental plant in the 1800s. The first sighting of Vincetoxicum [READ MORE]
By Jeffrey North A crew of field horticulture technicians returned to the Lone Tree Hill conservation area for their first visit in 2022 on May 20. Begun in late 2020, the work to enhance the ecological integrity of Belmont’s 80-acre conservation land site addresses the most egregious infestations of biodiversity-erasing invasive plant species. (See Restoration Projects Approved for Lone Tree Hill, BCF Newsletter, May 2021) The mission this time was to cut or pull and spray garlic mustard in bloom. As garlic mustard is one of the first plants to start actively growing in late March, leaves can be sprayed [READ MORE]
By Maya Dutta The first Miyawaki forest in the northeast United States was planted in Cambridge’s Danehy Park last September. Miyawaki forests are dense, biodiverse pocket forests that aim to recreate the symbiotic relationships between diverse life forms that make a natural forest so resilient. By densely planting a diverse array of native species, Miyawaki forests encourage nutrient exchange between the plants and with fungal and microbial life in the soil, resulting in fast-growing forests with high survival rates. Benefits of Miyawaki forests The Miyawaki method offers a vision of not just planting trees to raise their sheer number, but [READ MORE]
By Radha Iyengar On Saturday, April 30, a sunny but cool day, BCF, in conjunction with the Judy Record Conservation Fund, held its eighth annual Lone Tree Hill Volunteer Day. At the Pine Allee, volunteers planted 46 white pine saplings of which 40 saplings were store bought and 6 were transplants from Lone Tree Hill. The new plants replaced some of the Allee’s missing trees as well as some of the dead saplings from the 2017-2019 volunteer day plantings. At the other end of the property, the volunteers collected 11 bags of trash, one box of recyclables and six bags [READ MORE]
By Bruce Aguilar Invasive species are organisms that severely damage local ecosystems. One example is the gypsy moth caterpillar, introduced in 1869 by one Professor E. L. Trouvelot in an attempt to breed a hardy silkworm. Some insects escaped and were soon established in a vacant lot next to his home in Medford, Mass. These caterpillars have defoliated millions of acres of northeast woodlands. Another is the Asian bittersweet vine, introduced as an ornamental plant in 1879. It smothers the understory of forests and climbs mature trees to outcompete them for light, eventually strangling them or becoming heavy enough to [READ MORE]