By Honor Scorzelli
At 527 acres, Franklin Park dwarfs the Boston Common seven times over. Frederick Law Olmsted never intended it to be a place for strolling past flower beds. He built it as a dense, working forest — the kind that could make a city person feel, briefly, like they weren’t in one. He called it the “Jewel” of his Emerald Necklace. Named for Benjamin Franklin, the park brings together rural scenery, spectacular rock outcroppings, a woodland preserve, expansive pastoral vistas and an area for active recreation and sports. The park has six miles of roads and fifteen miles of pedestrian and bridle paths. The park has miles of some of the best walking trails in the city. Scarboro Pond, Ellicott Arch and the Wilderness, a historic forest, are special places to visit.
A single large tree captures up to 332 gallons of stormwater a year. It filters particulates, cools the air through shade and transpiration, holds carbon that took generations to accumulate, and provides habitat, according to the USDA Forest Service. What the numbers don’t capture is what happens the moment a trunk hits the ground — much of it disappears at once. In January, 145 mature trees came down in Franklin Park. The city said most were dead, dying, or invasive. To replace them, it promised 500 new trees over the next decade.
“500 trees is not a forest,” said Dan Wilder, director of Applied Ecology at the Norcross Wildlife Foundation, where he stewards roughly 8,600 acres of habitat across rural Massachusetts. “500 trees is 500 trees, especially if they’re 500 separate trees. A forest is a unit. It functions as a cohesive thing.” Urban parks, Wilder explains, tend to prioritize appearances over function — green space that reads as nature to the public but supports little ecologically.
“People confuse lawn with nature,” he said. “Lawn is not habitat. Lawn is lawn.”
The people most affected by this tree removal live closest to the park. Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan are predominantly black and brown neighborhoods that already have less green space and run hotter in summer than the rest of the city — a finding from the city’s own Urban Forest Plan. Between 2014 and 2019, Mattapan lost more tree canopy than almost anywhere else in Boston. The trees are coming down in these neighborhoods which need the ecological services a forest can provide.
The Emerald Necklace Conservancy sued the city over the removal. Judge Matthew Nestor ruled in the city’s favor in April 2025, finding the proposed stadium site was not protected parkland but a schoolyard — allowing the city to sidestep Article 97 of the state constitution, which requires a two-thirds legislative vote before public parkland can be transferred to private use. The Conservancy has since appealed. The Massachusetts Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.
Ethan Carr, a professor of landscape architecture at UMass Amherst and author of Boston’s Franklin Park: Olmsted, Recreation, and the Modern City, has studied the park for decades. He does not buy the city’s framing.This is not an investment in the park,” Carr said. “But a usurpation of it for an entirely new purpose” — calling the decision a “ridiculous fiction.”Advocates often frame the project as a balancing act between Olmsted’s vision and modern needs. Carr rejects this.“There is no ‘tension’ between Olmsted’s vision, the current use of the park, and sound future management of the landscape,” he said. “People claim there is when they want to do something wildly inappropriate — like build a $300 million professional sports stadium.”
The standard promise when cities remove trees is replacement. The math sounds reassuring. Nature is not impressed. A U.S. Forest Service review of more than 50 studies found that approximately half of all newly planted urban trees do not survive beyond 15 years — meaning the city will be cycling through replacements long before anything resembling a canopy has had time to form.
David Meshoulam, executive director and founder of Speak for the Trees Boston, said those numbers track with what he sees on the ground. His organization planted 59 trees in 2024 — far fewer than the city’s promised 500, but 59 trees with a real chance of survival. Another 119 already in the ground continued to receive care throughout the year, still living because someone kept showing up to care for them. Survival comes down to soil. “Trees in small tree wells with compact soil have the lowest survival rates,” Meshoulam said. Salt, gas leaks, and inconsistent watering compound the problem.
The gap between what a mature tree provides and what a sapling can offer is not a matter of degree — it is, in Meshoulam’s framing, exponential. For large shade species like oaks and maples, meaningful ecological benefits don’t arrive until 20 to 30 years in. Full maturity takes 75 years.
“For smaller ornamental trees,” Meshoulam added, “the environmental benefits are less significant as the tree never becomes as large.” That distinction matters because the city’s replacement plan does not specify species. If the 500 promised trees are ornamental rather than canopy trees, the ecological math changes entirely.
The city has established a $3 million Franklin Park Tree Bank, jointly funded by Boston Unity Soccer Partners and the City of Boston. Details are thin. There are no public documents specifying where trees will be planted, on what schedule, or at what size. There is no species list, no survival benchmarks, no year-by-year targets. For a project that felled 145 trees in a matter of weeks, the replacement timeline stretches a decade.
Oversight falls to Boston’s Parks Department — the same department that approved the removal. Replacement trees will be counted not by ecological contribution but by caliper inches, a metric that measures trunk diameter the way a lumber yard might size up a plank. The fund covers installation and maintenance through what the city calls the “critical establishment period” — a phrase no public document bothers to define. There is no independent oversight body, no public annual reporting requirement, and no penalty clause if trees fail to survive.
To understand what accountability looks like in practice, consider a parallel effort across Boston’s neighborhoods. Sixty percent of the city’s urban forest sits on privately owned land — a finding from the city’s own 2022 Urban Forest Plan, which identified residential land as one of the greatest sources of ongoing canopy loss. To address that gap, the city partnered with Mass Audubon to administer the Boston Tree Alliance, a coalition of community-based nonprofits that has distributed over $800,000 in sub-grants for planting and care projects citywide. All funded projects require two years of on-site inspections. Maintenance is built into every grant.“We’re not necessarily pushing a specific number of trees to be planted,” said Amara Chittenden, program manager at Mass Audubon Boston. “We really want to fund maintenance as a big part of the cost — where other programs in the past might have fallen short.”
Meshoulam described what a well-run replanting program actually requires: community input on species and site selection, local engagement during planting, and sustained care. “At least two years of watering and mulching, ideally five to seven years,” he said. The tree bank, as written, commits to none of this.
Even measuring success is harder than it sounds. “This is not an easy thing to measure if you’re growing living things that take at least 20 years to fully demonstrate a difference,” Meshoulam said. “Really, the best indicator we currently have is the number of trees planted and their survival rate.”
Wilder put it plainly. Urban accounting of this kind mistakes the appearance of restoration for restoration itself. “People don’t think about what that looks like after 10 years,” he said. “They think about what it looks like six months from now.”
The $3 million tree bank is a large number in press releases and a modest one in ecology. Getting a canopy back requires soil work, the right species, and enough spacing for trees to function together rather than simply exist near each other.
The deeper problem, in Carr’s view, is how value gets assigned to these spaces in the first place. “The forest is only valuable once you cut it down,” he said — the logic that kicks in when land is cleared for timber or development. The habitat itself never shows up on a balance sheet.
