By Katie Koenig
Arnold Arboretum
The Arnold Arboretum has a slightly different history compared to some of Boston’s best known parks. Instead of the city, Harvard University established it as part of their campus in 1872. Frederick Law Olmsted and Charles Sprague Sargent, the first director of the Arboretum, co-designed and constructed the park over the course of a decade.
Finally, in 1882, it was fully realized and officially incorporated into Boston’s park system. The incorporation was innovative and somewhat strange—Boston gained ownership of the land but immediately leased it back to Harvard for a thousand years, renting it for a single dollar per year.
As a result, the Arboretum staff still has authority over the plant collection and handles visitation services, and the city only manages the roads and police security.
The designers’ goal was to build an international collection of vegetation that also served as an attractive green space for recreational use. Today, almost the entire park is open to the public, and the collection allows for the study of a massive range of plant species.
The Arboretum actually hosts more than 15,000 living plant species, and is one of the largest and best documented collections in the world as a result. To count its photographic archives and herbal collections, that number rises to the millions.
In 1965, the Arboretum was officially listed as a National Historical Landmark, and a year later was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
In the last couple decades, the Arboretum has explicitly focused on plant diversity and the conservation benefits of preserving so many living plant variants. In 2008, Harvard partnered with the Center for Plant Conservation to begin work to update and reorganize the variety of plants living in the Arboretum, specifically related to the endangered species in its collection.
Arborway
Along the edge of the Arboretum, the Arborway snakes from Jamaica Pond around to Franklin Park, connecting these three parks at one end of the Emerald Necklace.
Also designed by Frederick Olmsted in the 1890s, this parkway is similar to Commonwealth Avenue as a meandering route connecting the different parks to each other in the Emerald Necklace. Although they’ve developed to include larger roads, advocacy groups still push for their preservation as green spaces in the city.
One such group, The Arborway Committee for Public Transit, was founded in 1976 as a volunteer organization that pushed for the creation of public transportation from downtown Boston to Jamaica Plain—namely, the E-Line branch of the Green Line. Currently, they are advocating for improvements and extensions to the E-Line branch.
The Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) oversees state parks, including the Arborway. One project that is underway is renovating the roadway design to better balance safety and accessibility for all modes of transport.While it is important to maintain the road portion of the Arborway to keep users safe, conservation advocates have expressed concerns about maintaining its original purpose as a greenway like Commonwealth Avenue to connect a few parks on the inland edge of the Emerald Necklace.