ENGINEERING THE URBAN WILDS

The Natural Lands team of Philadelphia Parks & Recreation has restored landscapes across the city. Will the next administration keep up the effort?

story by bernard brown

At houston meadow it’s easy to forget the city. Grasses and wildflowers cover the hillside that slopes into the wooded ravine of the Wissahickon Creek below. Bees and butterflies dance across the flowers. Over at Three Springs Hollow in Pennypack Park hikers can walk beneath towering oak and tulip trees while wood thrushes serenade them. It all might look natural and wild, but in the forests, meadows and waterways of the Fairmount Park system, nature needs a hand. Philadelphia Parks & Recreation’s Natural Lands team works to restore and maintain habitats like these for human visitors and wild residents.

Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park system was assembled by the City from the mid–1800s to the early 1900s. Workers mowed lawns and tended shade trees, but up until the end of the 20th century, the forests, meadows, marshes and streams were more or less on their own. Trees sprouted and raced for the sky across thousands of acres. In other areas, what had been meadows maintained by grazing livestock gradually shrank as the forest encroached on their borders.

By the end of the 1900s much of the unmanicured land of the Fairmount Park system wasn’t in great shape. Deer proliferated in green spaces where no one hunted them. They devoured new trees and shrubs before they could find their place in the forest. Exotic plants that deer don’t like to eat, such as Amur honeysuckle, Japanese knotweed and garlic mustard, filled the empty spaces.

Help arrived with a $26 million grant to the City from the William Penn Foundation, celebrating its 50th anniversary in 1995. The money was intended to fund ecological restoration, expanded environmental education programming and volunteer stewardship capacity. Thus was born the Natural Lands Restoration and Environmental Education Program (NLREEP).

“What people would often say to me is, ‘Doesn’t the woods take care of itself?’” says Tom Dougherty, who worked for NLREEP in volunteer stewardship and then ecological restoration before retiring in 2020. “The answer is it may have at a different time, but now in the 21st century urban forest is kind of a contradiction in terms. If we want to have wild woods, we are going to have to maintain it.”

“The purpose of the $26 million to the park was to develop a plan to restore natural areas,” says Nancy Goldenberg, the first director of the program and currently president and CEO of Laurel Hill cemetery. Goldenberg says that when she came on board “there was nothing. We didn’t have an office. ‘Here is $26 million. Figure it out.’ I had to hire staff, do an organizational chart and put a budget together.”

Before they could figure out what to restore, the new unit had to figure out what was growing and living in the parks in the first place. “We hired the Academy of Natural Sciences to do the inventory,” Goldenberg says. “You have to know what’s there before you can restore it. It was a dream team, and the data we got was extraordinary.”

NLREEP initiated pilot projects as well, realizing that they couldn’t wait until the inventory, which took four years instead of the one year that had been planned, was complete to start restoring habitat. “The first thing we did was a hillside in the Wissahickon that was at the Walnut Lane Golf Course, where it comes down to Forbidden

Drive,” Goldenberg says. “The sign is still there. [With] everything we did, we wanted to educate people on what we did and why. We tried to marry education and civic engagement with the actual work.”

The program initially planned to expand existing nature centers and add new ones in FDR Park and in Fairmount Park East in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood. “The only one that got done was the expansion of the Pennypack Environmental Center,” Goldenberg says.

It was clear that the scale of the work dwarfed the resources. “$26 million gets you a lot of leverage, but nowhere near enough,” says Dougherty.

Over the years the restoration strategy evolved to reflect real-world limitations. Joan Blaustein, the park system’s former director of urban forestry and ecosystem management, started in 2006. “From when I was there until 2010 we continued working from the master plan that had been done by William Penn Foundation funding. Then in 2010 we got a little bit of funding to redo the … forest management plan,” Blaustein says. “We took a hard look at what our capabilities were and what our challenges were, which were enormous. We determined we couldn’t restore areas and walk away from them, due to deer and invasive species. That was an exercise in futility. We decided we would change our approach, that we would do largescale restorations only if we could install a deer fence. Otherwise we weren’t going to do it.” Parks & Recreation’s urban forestry initiative launched in 2013, and new projects under the initiative kicked off in 2015.

The philosophy of restoration changed as well, moving away from thinking historically and trying to recreate the past. “That became impossible because you could never recreate it, not with the pressure of insects, deer and climate change,” Blaustein says. “We had to think of what the new structure of forests would be and how we could manage and preserve what we could.”

The organizational landscape was shift-