Boston’s Gardens & Green Spaces in the Christian Science Monitor

Hello friends! We’re pleased to share some great publicity news with you.

Boston’s Gardens & Green Spaces by Meg Muckenhoupt received a glowing review in the Christan Science Monitor on Tuesday, March 29th.

Monitor correspondent Judy Lowe interviewed Boston garden writers and enthusiasts to find out their top picks for garden books in 2010. Hilda Morrill, columnist and editor of the website Bostongardens.com (no connection to the book) said:

“One of my favorite books this year was ‘Boston’s Gardens & Green Spaces’ by Meg Muckenhoupt (Union Park Press, $22.95).

It has “great photos, great information and history, and introduction to gardens I had never been aware of,” she explains. “Much to look forward to! Good resource for both visitors and residents alike.”

If you don’t already own a copy of Boston’s Gardens & Green Spaces be sure to join the club in time for spring—you’ll be amazed by the new places waiting to be discovered in your Boston back yard.

The Kennedy Greenway: Less is More of What, Exactly?

Every once in a while some teen-lit writer resurrects the story about the Girl Who Wasn’t There, a pathetic young waif who is so neglected and ignored that she ceases to be visible. While Boston’s Rose Kennedy Greenway is still in view, as far as I know, there are signs that it’s becoming a bit less prominent. Mayor Tom Menino has declared that he would be “happy if there were no further building inside the city’s Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway,” and the Boston Globe reports that abutting property owners are resisting paying new taxes for a Business Improvement District (BID) to support the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy. If we don’t build anything we planned on the Greenway, and we don’t pay for the Greenway, will it go away?

Menino made his remarks as part of his announcement that the city would be conducting a local search instead of a nationwide hunt for the new head of the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA), Boston’s planning and economic development agency. Menino did specify one group outside Boston which could produce viable candidates, according to the Boston Herald, Menino said “It could be a professor from MIT.”

But back to the Greenway! That same Herald article quotes Menino saying about the Greenway: “All the projects they wanted to build there were a dream, but there was nothing behind the dream,” Menino said. “Why do we have to build on it? It’s spectacular the way it is, as open space.”

Nothing behind the dream? Nothing except years of work and planning. There were even videos of what the Greenway was supposed to look like.

As I observed in an earlier blog post, the problem wasn’t a lack of work, but the fact that building on top of eight lanes of traffic turned out to be astonishingly expensive, and no one raised enough money to do it—not even the YMCA, one of the most popular organizations around.

…which leads us back to the Greenway tax plan. According to the Boston Globe, some property owners are objecting. It’s not clear why they’re bothering. None of them were willing to be named in the article, and the same piece goes on to mention that thanks to “a peculiarity” in state law, property owners can opt out of BID taxes. In short, they could just quietly ignore the tax, and it really would go away! Someone must be very, very mad at the Greenway Conservancy to go to the trouble of objecting to it.

Not that there aren’t reasons to object to the Conservancy. I’ve written before about the Greenway Conservancy’s high costs, and various writers have complained about the Conservancy’s lack of accountability and compliance with public records and open meetings laws—including the Massachusetts Department of Transportation.

But frankly, it’s our own fault. The City of Boston, the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority, and the state all agreed to hand the Greenway’s operation over to a Conservancy. Where were the abutting property owners when our public servants were all agreeing to shirk responsibility for maintaining public land? Why didn’t they fund at least one of the pretty buildings in the video?

The Globe ruefully concludes:

“While the parks are a vast improvement over the highway, they are also incomplete and do not have a permanent funding source to help realize a world-class public space that everyone seems to want, yet no one seems willing to pay for.”

Strangely enough, if you don’t pay for a world-class public space, you don’t get one. The Greenway isn’t going to disappear, but it also isn’t going to become a landmark destination without some serious work. But, so far, subsidizing the Greenway Conservancy hasn’t made the Greenway a world-class public space, either. And the park and the Conservancy won’t simply disappear if we ignore them for a while.

The tax-resisting property owners should come up with some ideas and money to actually serve the public interest—not just to provide a pretty front lawn for high-rise condos, but to create the kind of space our city deserves. That we deserve. We’re all in Boston together, after all. Attention must be paid.

What’s New With Ethan Daniels?

Ethan Daniels, author of Under Cape Cod Waters, has surfaced just long enough to send us a sample of his most recent work, from dives in the Dominican Republic. We thought we’d share it with you!

Below are a few images of Atlantic Humpbacks—most of these whales feed at Stellwagen Bank during the summer and fall, so they’ll begin the northward migration soon. You can tell those whales which feed at Stellwagen Bank by the scar on their right chin!

Ethan will be in Micronesia from late March to mid-April. Keep any eye out for pictures when he gets back!

Obscure Paths of Somerville

Open space is what you make of it. Well, really, it’s what hundreds of people have made of it for decades. That’s what you can see in Ron Newman’s Google Map Obscure stairs, ramps, and paths of Somerville, MA. It’s an overview of what overeager planners might call “linear parks”—all the odd little cut-throughs between streets that the folks in the neighborhood use to take their kids to school, get to the convenience store, and perhaps catch a glimpse of Somerville’s endangered population of feral garden gnomes (commonly mistaken for rodents by jaded adults).

None of these paths are particularly glamorous, though several of the bicycle paths are pleasant enough. While the Friends of the Public Garden is celebrating getting umpty-thousand “public-private partnership” dollars to renovate 2.5 acres of the Boston Common by fall 2011,  I haven’t heard of any grand plans to decorate Somerville’s Fremont Street Dirt Path, or restore the Mountain Avenue/Cedar Avenue Steps.

Parks are places people intend to go, where planners create a stage for visitors to experience. In Somerville, where only five percent of land is open space—including cemeteries and schoolyards—the Obscure Paths of Somerville are places where people actually live and experience nature from day to day. The trees and weeds, dirt and distractions in these places are what’s “outside.”

I respect the Friends of the Public Garden’s work to improve the Boston Common. But Newman’s map intrigues me.

Puff Pastry Pizza – Dinner in 20 Minutes

Trader Joe’s offers two incredible products that I like to use as the base for pizza. Firstly, their Flat Ciabatta in the bread section – so delicious and easy, you’ll have dinner on the table in twenty minutes. The other is the Artisan Frozen Puff Pastry. It’s also incredibly easy and can be used for everything from light, flaky appetizers, to unique pizzas, to hassle-free desserts. And as opposed to most frozen puff pastry packets, this one only has two – all the extra layers are already put together for you.

Here’s a pizza I made the other day but really, you can add any toppings – especially when you have a variety of delicious foods sitting around in the fridge at the end of the week.

• Grease cookie sheet and preheat oven to 400°
• Place puff pastry sheet on pan
• Add layer of sauce – Leftover pasta sauce makes things quick and easy (eg. jarred vodka sauce; add sautéed onions, spinach, and baby bellas); spread the sauce so that it’s almost at the edges
• Add layer of shredded cheese – Quattro Formaggio mix; Swiss & Gruyere mix; Fresh Mozzarella, etc.
• Melt butter in a dish—adding garlic and basil to the butter gives the whole dish another dimension of flavor
• Brush the edges of the bottom layer with melted garlic-basil butter
• Add second layer of puff pastry, and if you love cheese, sprinkle another layer of cheese on top
• Brush the top layer with the garlic-basil butter
• Place in the oven… and Voila! It’ll be done once your top layer is golden and bubbling. Bon Appetit!

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Joints around town that make the simple, simply sublime:

Jacky’s Table, Allston/Brighton: 3 Tuna Tartar Tartines on Toasted Baguette (try to say that 5 times fast!)

Mela, South End: Garlic Naan

Myers + Chang, South End: Shitake and Greens Dumplings

Orinoco, Brookline & South End: Guayanesa

Muqueca, Inman Square: Fried Calamari with Passion Fruit Sauce

The Boston Flower and Garden and Stuff Show

It’s spring! Time to huddle indoors under artificial lights and admire the flowers! While the Boston Flower & Garden Show does possess many sterling qualities, a natural setting is not one of them. Held in Boston’s Seaport World Trade Center, the Flower Show sits indoors in artificial heat and light—which is the only environment most of these plants have ever known anyway. They’re just as man-made as the pretzel dips and attractive combination bird bath/sewer vent covers I saw for sale at the show.

The biggest difference I noticed this year from previous years was the layout. The “gardens”—mounds of greenhouse-forced plants on what I hope are *very* water resistant hidden platforms—are all in a long aisle right down the middle of the show. Wander a few feet away from this central line of greenery and you’re transported from the Emerald City to the Wonderful Land of Commerce. More than 180 sales booths take up far more space than all the gardens, flower arranging competitions, and amateur horticulture displays together.

In previous years, there were a few corners where the plant displays were dense enough that you could at least pretend you were in a show about flowers, not consumerism. But in previous years, the Flower Show was run by the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, a group that genuinely cares about gardens and gardeners. Now, the Flower Show is run by the Paragon Group, which also runs truck and golf shows. There seems to have been, shall we say, a reordering of priorities since Paragon took over.

Still, there are some interesting plant exhibits there, as always.

• The sculpture by Fine Garden Art of Lee, NH, did not involve a single living plant—but I did count three skulls and at least a dozen exoskeletons in the piece. It’s a grand tower of natural stuff that the artist Jill Nooney gathered within 20 miles of her house; horseshoe crabs, three colors of wool, grasses, bark, skulls. It’s hard to describe, but I know that I’m putting Nooney’s garden tours on my calendar.
• Harding Botanical’s green wall featuring little purple orchids was just plain cute.
• In lieu of the typical ground-dwelling quail and ducks, this year’s flower show had an owl and raptor exhibit. I suppose these are carnivorous times.
• This year’s show theme was ““A Burst of Color: Celebrating the Container Garden.” The Best of Show exhibit, by an organization whose name I didn’t quite write down legibly, had what could have been the trunk of a baobab tree as a “container.” I don’t have access to eight-foot-diameter tree stumps for garden decoration, but if I did, I’d want those folks to fill it.
• The Amateur Horticultural Competition had a nice assortment of “You mean that’s a PLANT?” exhibits. Odd euphorbias, lithops, and a triffid-like trellised walking onion were especially entertaining.
• And of course there are intriguing lectures (one by Jill Nooney!) and children’s activities.

Most of the constructed landscapes at the show were what an acquaintance called “boulder gardening”: large gray rocks surrounded by tasteful feathery foliage. If you’re going to have a completely artificial environment, why be subtle? They’re not afraid of RED! flowers—or untraditional forms—at Quebec’s Jardins De Metis International Garden Festival. But that exhibit was outdoors.  Perhaps the gray winter weather has affected us all more than we care to admit.

Cruising For Art: Plein Air On The Islands

Calling all Artists, Painters and Photographers for a harbor cruise! Let nature be your muse!

Join the Boston Harbor Island Alliance, Department of Conservation and Recreation, National Park Service, and Boston’s Best Cruises for a creative day on the islands. Travel by ferry to Spectacle Island to capture some amazing photographs, or set-up your painting easel and get creative on the hills of the island. Enjoy a brief introduction of plein air art by landscape artist Joseph McGurl on the way to Spectacle.

Not an artist? Come out and explore the scenic trails, wildlife and the amazing views!

When: Saturday March 19, 2011

Where: Boats will depart from Long Wharf, Boston and Quincy Shipyard.

Quincy Shipyard: Depart 10:15 AM, return at 2:30 PM.
Long Wharf, Boston: Depart at 11:00 AM, return at 2:00 PM.

Reservations: Contact Boston’s Best Cruises Reservations by phone (617) 770-0040 or online. Reservations are strongly recommended.

For more information visit www.bostonharborislands.org.

Boston Parks Will Always Have Paris (to Make Them Feel Inferior)

Let me write this once, straight out: Boston is not Paris, and the Boston Common is not a Parisian park. It isn’t even in France. You’d think that having an ocean and a tectonic plate boundary between Boston and Calais would count for something, but apparently there’s some confusion on that point. Or, rather, there’s been a lot of wishful thinking going on since at least the 1830’s.

The most recent symptom is the comment by Elizabeth Vizza in the Boston Globe article on the Boston Common’s upcoming face-lift. Quoth the Globe: ” ‘It’s going to be like a Parisian park,’ said Elizabeth Vizza, executive director of Friends of the Public Garden, which also advocates for Boston Common and is spearheading the project.”

Vizza is not alone. Bostonians have been suffering Parisian park envy for more than 150 years.  For example:

1838: G.W. Light, The Boston Common, or Rural Walks in Cities: “It is gratifying to learn that measures have been taken for the laying out of a public garden  on the lands below the Common… though it may never equal the Garden of Plants, at Paris, the philanthropic friends of science among us ought not to forego the opportunity of making it a place not only of elevated and rational amusement, but of instruction in the wonders of nature’s works.”

1891: William H Brine, The Visitor’s Guide to Boston, and Gazetteer of Massachusetts: The [Public] garden is laid out in the French parterre style, modeled after the beautiful Parc Monceau, of Paris… We now turn into Commonwealth Avenue, a beautiful street on the model of the boulevards of Paris, being about one hundred feet in width and lined with shade trees. ”

And let’s remember that the lovely Brewer Fountain, due for a complete refurbishment of its plaza, is a copy of a fountain sculpted in… Paris.

But what is a “Parisian park”? Paris is a big city with thousands of acres of parks: there are twenty-three very different spaces listed on this page alone, ranging from modernist landscapes to man-made forests.

Perhaps the questions is really, “What do the Friends of the Public Garden think a Parisian park is like?”

I can’t speak for the Friends, but I know what I remember about Parisian parks. I’ve visited a few of them, generally in the company of my affluent, college-educated, pale-skinned parents. When I think of Paris’s parks, I think of orderly, clean, green places which I could visit any time I have a day and a half and $1000 to spare for air fare .

How many of the people who use the Boston Common have ever been to a Parisian park? How many of them could afford to get to one? The term “Parisian park” is only meaningful to people who have had the opportunity to visit Paris. That category includes some of the Common’s fans, and probably the wealthiest and most powerful of the park’s supporters, but not the average park user.

More importantly, don’t we need a Bostonian park? After all, the Boston Common was founded by Puritans, and soaked with the blood of Revolutionary War soldiers. Boston is home to some of Frederick Law Olmsted‘s most successful parks, and some of the most prominent landscape architecture schools and practices in the country. If our most famous park is supposed to be an imitation of Paris, what does that say about Boston? That we’ve offshored our identity? Or that we simply can’t imagine Americans creating successful city parks?

Boston Family Scavenger Hunt

Boston is a city of neighborhoods and while you can certainly follow the famous 2.5-mile Freedom Trail (and I’m not knocking it!), don’t count on your kids lasting long enough to finish it. One way to get your kids excited about a new city (or even their own!) is by an awesome scavenger hunt.

Besides some family team-building and bonding, a scavenger hunt provides entertainment and a common goal and along the way, perhaps you will have all learned something!

Below are a series of clues about sites in the Back Bay/Beacon Hill area of Boston. The answers follow with a bit of description about the sites. Try not to let the kids peek while you gently guide them in the right direction!

This scavenger hunt is specifically targeted for families with children under the age of 12 (or so). I suggest taking a photo at each point. Later you can organize them in a scrapbook to help remember your visit.

Happy hunting!

Clues

1. Read Between the Lions

2. Slow and Steady Wins the Race

3. Where Three Famous Women Hang Out at the Mall

4. The Ugly Duckling was One

5. Mrs. Mallard Leads the Pack

6. Former Cow Pasture

7. Mr. Toad’s Friend

8. Where the Governor Works

9. Three signers of the Declaration of Independence rest here

10. Where Boston Cream Pie and the Parker Roll were Born

Answers

1. Boston Public Library Lion Statues
Inside the library’s main entrance on Dartmouth St.
Connecting the Entrance Hall with the Main Staircase is a deep triumphal arch. The great twin lions sit on pedestals. They are memorials to Massachusetts Civil War infantry regiments, the Second and the Twentieth.

2. Turtle and Hare statues at the Boston Marathon Finish Line
In the Copley Square Park along Boylston St.
A tribute to all the runners who have participated in the marathon.

3. Women’s Memorial Statues
In the Commonwealth Avenue Mall, (Between Fairfield and Gloucester streets)
The Boston Women’s Memorial celebrates Abigail Adams, Lucy Stone, and Phillis Wheatley. Each of these women had progressive ideas that were ahead of her time, was committed to social change, and left a legacy through her writings that had a significant impact on history.

4. Swan Boats
Boston Public Garden
The 130-year-old Swan Boats have to be one of the most charming and iconic activities offered in the city. No tot fails to love them, especially if they’ve read Make Way for Ducklings (see below).

5. Make Way for Duckling Statues in the Public Garden
The official children’s book of Massachusetts. The Make Way for Ducklings sculptures are at Boston’s Public Garden, where author Robert McCloskey’s book of the same name comes to life.

6. Boston Common
Bordered by Tremont, Park, Boylston, and Beacon streets
The country’s oldest park, established in 1634, was used for grazing livestock, then for hanging criminals, and now happily is just a great place to escape the city sidewalks.

7. Frog Pond and Tadpole Playground in Boston Common
In July and August, the Common’s Frog Pond becomes a six-inch deep wading pool with a spray head fountain in the middle. The adjacent Tadpole playground is open year-round.

8. Massachusetts State House
Beacon St.
The gold-domed building sits atop Beacon Hill and is the state’s capitol building.

9. The Granary Burying Ground
On Tremont, between Park and School streets
Established in 1660, the Granary is notable as the resting place of Boston’s most famous sons. Look for John Hancock’s tomb, Paul Revere’s grave and a plaque marking the tomb of Robert Treat Paine. He along with Sam Adams and John Hancock were all signers of the Declaration of Independence.

10. Omni Parker House Hotel
25 School Street
The longest continuously operating hotel in the United States. Besides its tasty innovations, many well-known people have worked there, including Hô Chí Minh, Malcolm X, and Emeril Lagasse.

*Boston Family Scavenger Hunt was originally posted on TravelingMom.com, a great resource and community for moms who travel. Look for further posts from Kim Foley MacKinnon, author of Boston Baby: A Field Guide for Urban Parents, at Boston TravelingMom.

Boston Oysters in Unexpected Places

Once upon a time, Bostonians would fish things out of the rivers or pick them up off the ground and actually EAT them. In some cases, they’d dig strange creatures out of the mud and suck the bodies out of their shells alive. Alas, the oyster pickings around here aren’t what they used to be, as the Massachusetts Oyster Project reminds us, but Bostonians will soon have the opportunity to eat things off the grass at the Common, if the new food truck accidentally drops them while you’re trying to pay.

But first, the oysters. Once upon a time, there were plenty of squelchy mud flats around the Shawmut Peninsula, the funny lump of land that was later renamed Boston. Those mud flats probably had oysters, clams, saltwater cordgrass, and hordes of salt-water mosquitoes for all I know—but the Massachusetts Oyster Project (MOP?) blogger seems to be exclusively concerned with bivalves. Today, these mud flats are known by land that was dumped on top of them between 1750-1900: the Boston Public Garden, the Back Bay, East Cambridge, and North Point Park. Have I mentioned that Boston’s topography has changed a lot in the last four hundred years?

One of the spots where Bostonian oysters enjoyed the waters was Miller’s River, which appears to persist near where the Charles River Skate Park should be under Route 93. The oysters couldn’t stand it nowdays, alas; since the Charles River was dammed in 1910, the Miller’s River has become fresh water. If you have a particularly nostalgic elderly oyster in your household, you can show it the 1777 map. It labels Miller’s River as “Willis Creek,” and shows acres of salt meadows all around the Charles. Those were good times, oysters.

The Massachusetts Oyster Project is a nonprofit seeking to restore oysters to Boston Harbor. It isn’t such an odd idea; oysters have been successfully reintroduced to harbors around New York City, and they do a fine job of filtering all sorts of unmentionables out of the water. You weren’t thinking of actually eating them, were you?

Should the MOP find its way to recreating local oyster beds, perhaps a few of their lucky little mollusks will find their way to the Boston Common, which is supposed to be getting a new “high-end” food truck as part of its face lift this summer, according to the Boston Globe. I’m not sure why Boston needs “high-end” anything in the Boston Common, which is one of the few places Bostonians can visit for free. Or are people with middle- and low-end incomes only supposed to eat at home?

Instead of class-based delectables, how about an historically accurate food truck? It could reflect the Common’s original inhabitants ca. 1641: cows, sheep, and Elder Oliver’s horse. After all, horse meat was good enough to be served at the Harvard Faculty Club up through 1985. I bet someone around town still knows how to cook it. If they don’t, I guess we’ll just have to eat it raw… like the erstwhile Public Garden oysters.