Shirma Pierre loved the trees that surrounded her Hyde Park home. They provided her with shade and brought birds to her windows. But after a new homeowner next door cut some down, one fell in a storm and another was at risk of falling on her house, she was left with a lot of space and just one tree.
“My beautiful canopy, my shade, so during the summer I could sit out there,” she remembered. Now? “I’m just in the brutal, hot sun.”
It’s normal for neighborhoods to lose trees — weather takes them down, or they start to die, making them dangerous. And Hyde Park has been one of Boston’s leafiest neighborhoods because it is relatively underdeveloped. But it’s losing trees faster than any other neighborhood in Boston, according to the city’s 2022 Urban Forest Plan, which analyzed city tree data collected from 2014 to 2019.
Since the city launched the forest plan, Hyde Park has seen lower rates of city tree planting per square mile than any other neighborhood.
Todd Mistor, Boston’s urban forestry director, said that it “might be natural that the city is not planting a lot of new trees there,” especially since Hyde Park has a large tree canopy compared to other neighborhoods. That sets it apart from other racially diverse neighborhoods in Boston, including Dorchester and East Boston, which have both struggled under a lack of canopy for many years — and have had several hundred new trees planted by the city in recent years. City and nonprofit leaders are hoping to bridge that divide and plant more saplings.
One major tool is the Boston Tree Alliance, launched just two years ago to try to get trees on private land, where most of the canopy loss in Hyde Park — and across the city — has been taking place. The Tree Alliance provides grants to local nonprofits and connects them with residents to get trees on their land.
Pierre saw the Tree Alliance mentioned in a news segment on TV and filled out a form on the city’s website, and a community-based tree planting nonprofit called Speak for the Trees Boston reached out to her.
The organization planted four trees in Pierre’s yard and taught her how to care for them. Now, she has her little canopy back — and soon she’ll have her shade again — which she said has a positive effect on her physical and mental health, and she feels good about the positive impact her trees have on the environment.
“I love my trees and just looking forward to seeing them growing,” Pierre said. “If anything, I wish I had gotten those trees years ago.”
City and nonprofit leaders say that Pierre is the exception: most residents won’t call and ask for trees, even if they have the space and would care for them. That’s what sets East Boston apart.
“One of the success stories is really what’s going on in East Boston,” Mistor said.
The city has planted more than 575 trees on East Boston streets and in parks, more than almost any other neighborhood. And there are concentrated efforts to get more trees in private ground, too. Both efforts are thanks to a nonprofit.
Tree Eastie was founded by Bill Masterson in 2021. The volunteer-based nonprofit works with residents to plant trees in their yards — private land — and works with the city to plant on streets and in parks.
Mistor, who is white, said working with Tree Eastie helps him build trust in the heavily Latino neighborhood.
“That’s been a really good partnership in looking at how we can utilize an existing group that is much more connected to the community than myself or anyone on our staff,” Mistor said.
“I don’t look like everybody in every community in the city of Boston, right?” he continued. “I have to realize that I may not be the best person to make that initial contact.”
Mistor said people in the neighborhood may not reach out to get trees planted because they don’t trust a city government with a discriminatory history to take care of trees on or in front of their property. And the city doesn’t want to use limited resources to plant trees where they’re not wanted and won’t survive.
That’s where Tree Eastie comes in.
In the last three years, Tree Eastie has planted hundreds of trees in streets, yards, parks and schools, according to Masterson. When Masterson created Tree Eastie, East Boston sidewalks had a lot of empty pits of dirt meant for trees. Now, Masterson said they’ve filled those and have started planting in parks and yards.
While the city has a program that allows residents to call 311 to get a tree planted, Masterson said a lot of people don’t do that. So, his volunteers go door-to-door, encouraging people to petition for trees.
“Our volunteers have been ... educating residents on the fact that when you live on a street and it has very few trees, that’s really not healthy,” Masterson said. “We’ve had probably between 75 and 100 new street trees planted in East Boston as a result of us going out to residents and getting them to sign this petition.”
Boston is hoping to release new citywide tree data by the end of the summer to further the Urban Forest Plan’s 20-year effort to increase tree canopy and equity in Boston.
Meanwhile, tree-planting season began in April and runs through the end of June, and the city has already put dozens of new trees in the ground.
Abigail Pritchard is a graduate student at Boston University studying journalism. This story was produced as part of coursework with Boston University journalism adjunct professor Kevin Sullivan, and refined with the help of journalism professor Brooke Williams.
