caption: A worker removed empty fungicide vials from an elm tree last week.
caption: An elm seed.






As days grow warmer, residents shift walking routes to find cooler paths to their destinations. Some of the neighborhood’s best shade is the deep canopy created by tall heritage elms in parks, along streets and in yards throughout the city.

People strolling on Commonwealth Avenue last week saw workers, hired by the Commonwealth Avenue Mall Committee, inoculating elms against Dutch elm disease. Those plastic vials, encircling the base of trees, contained a systemic fungicide. Inoculation is an expensive but necessary step in the year-round effort to prevent the destruction of elms. A single large tree costs nearly $500 per year for this treatment which must be repeated every spring.

With state land abutting city land, the Commonwealth must also inoculate against the disease. “We have about 35 elms that we have identified as worth saving in the urban parks area,” said Wendy Fox, press secretary for the Department of Conservation and Recreation. Some of those elms are on the Esplanade and in the Charlesgate parks.

Tree lovers can join the watch to detect early signs of the disease. To identify elms, look for their seed casings — small, translucent circles with a visible seed inside.

In an at-risk tree, after a few days of hot weather, the elm bark beetle comes out of hiding and begins spreading the disease. That’s when volunteers look to the treetops for signs of distress. “We call it flagging, which is the yellowing of the leaves on a certain section,” said Greg Mosman, Boston’s arborist.

This may eventually lead to the removal of the elm. “Sanitation and making sure we eradicate the disease is what it is all about,” said Mosman. He explained that the possibility of the disease spreading is his worst-case scenario.

Regular pruning and removing the sucker growth from the base of dormant elms also helps keep the trees healthy, as does giving them an occasional break from the holiday lights.

If you spot this symptom or see yellowed leaves falling from an elm before foliage season, call the “Parks Line” at 617-635-7275.

CAPTION: Susan Ashbrooke (at left) hosted the annual meeting of the Garden Club of the Back Bay. Joining her were about 25 members of the club, including Co-president Sarah Monaco (middle) and past President Ann Kneisel, both of Beacon Street.




Focusing on the theme of trees, the Garden Club of the Back Bay announced both its donations for this year and the program for next year at the group’s annual meeting on May 21.

The club will contribute about $15,000 toward buying, planting and pruning street trees. Seven trees will be planted in the next week or so.

They also voted to distribute about $15,000 more in grants to such organizations as the Mall Committee for fertilizing the trees on the Mall, and the Friends of the Public Garden to help in their effort to inoculate the Back Bay’s remaining elms against Dutch elm disease. Ten groups in all will benefit from the club’s donations, which are made possible by proceeds from

Program chair Francine Crawford announced that next year’s programs would focus on trees and would include such activities as a presentation about the trees at the Arnold Arboretum and a session learning to create bonsai.

The group also elected Co-presidents Jackie Blombach and Sarah Monaco, both of Beacon Street, to another shared year of leadership. Also elected were Elisabeth Lay, treasurer; Jolinda Taylor, assistant treasurer; Francine Crawford, recording secretary; Debbie Roberts, corresponding secretary; and Marie Crocetti, publications chair.

Crawford and Margaret Pokorny will serve as co-chairs of the wreath committee and Crawford will also serve as program chair. Kathy Dietz will handle publicity, Francie Cramb will take on nominating, Nancy Devereaux will become membership chair, and Pokorny and Devereaux will co-chair the tree committee. Susan Juretschke is civic development and horticulture chair.

Sub-committee chairs are Linda Zukowski for Hale House, Catherine Bordon for the Clarendon Street Playground, Sherely Smith for the Women’s Lunch Place and the Esplanade Children’s Playground and Margaret Pokorny and Peggy Frost for the Snowden School.

Members at large on the executive committee are Calla Jean Schaefer-Adams, Patti Bifulco, Chris Lombardo and Kimberly Wedge.

Beverley Barlow will serve as the liaison to the New England Flower Show and the Garden Club Federation of Massachusetts and Mary Lou Abbruzzese will serve as webmaster.

In a city where more and more young families are choosing to raise their families, there is space in the public school system for little more than 1000 four-year-olds — which some think may be less than a quarter of city children in that age group.

Private preschool programs in the Back Bay, Beacon Hill and Charlestown are filling up fast, causing parents to worry about whether there will be room for their children in pre-school.

Mayor Thomas Menino wants something done about this, and for the last ten years has called for the expansion of early childhood education. In 1995 the schools first offered free full-day kindergarten classes for children and special classes for preschoolers. Next year it will add 350 more preschool seats.

But before expanding, City Council President Maureen Feeney wants to take a closer look at what’s going on in the city’s preschools today. According to her spokesman, she is particularly interested in discussing the status of the preschools in relation to findings reported in a study on the state of Boston’s early childhood education, recently released by the Wellesley Centers for Women. That study found the education to be flawed and inadequate in successfully preparing preschool- and kindergarten-aged children for moving ahead.

The Wellesley Centers, which brings together an interdisciplinary community of scholars to engage in research and analysis, studied 128 city classrooms and found that 70 percent had not achieved the Boston Public School System’s own goal of getting children up to speed for first grade. It also found that more than 50 of the schoolyards were deemed dangerous due to the lack of adequate fencing to protect the younger children from parking lots and busy city streets.

To discuss those issues and to learn about the city’s long range growth plan, Feeney has called for a public hearing with Boston educators. It will take place before the City Council’s committee on education Wednesday, May 30, at 2:30 p.m. in Boston City Hall.

Musing on walking

Walking in Boston has a lot to commend it. We’ve got routes through parks, down boulevards, and near shop windows.
Throughout all of the city’s history, Bostonians have walked. Almost 400 years ago Boston wasn’t built for the car, and, on many streets, it still isn’t.

Bostonians have recently begun walking through the new Greenway, which is far enough along to imagine what it will look like by the end of the summer, when most of it will be in place.

It was surprising, amid the mysterious blade-like structures that line one park, the acres of bright granite, the fine trellises and the newly planted lavender, to come upon a very old-fashioned, low-tech and uniquely Boston piece of equipment — a button that walkers must push if they want to get a legal time period to cross the street.

Shouldn’t pedestrian buttons be passé now that we’re in the 21st century? Can’t Bostonians move on into a high tech world, ditching such antiquated and unfathomable features as the red and yellow lights that used to appear simultaneously to let pedestrians know they had a chance to walk? (You have to be a certain age to remember that one. Only a few such intersections are left.)

Transportation department officials maintain that the buttons are actually pedestrian friendly. They say that pedestrians now get their own walk lights automatically at most intersections, so they really no longer need the button. They’ve installed the button, they claim, so that pedestrians can override the system and get a pedestrian signal sooner than they otherwise would.

The question is: should we believe them?

On their side is that most of them are a jovial bunch who, like us, are forced to walk because they can’t find a parking place for cars any more than we can.

They also have taken some recent steps to better our pedestrian lives. They’ve installed countdown lights at many intersections, which let us know how much time we have to cross an intersection before cars start mowing us down. Traffic planners are finally making it legal for walkers and cars heading in parallel directions to proceed through intersections at the same time. This is known as concurrent phasing, it shortens wait times for both pedestrians and vehicles, and is practiced in virtually every other American city as well as foreign ones.

But as much as Boston’s traffic planners historically have believed they were looking out for our interests, Boston’s pedestrians thought otherwise.

Almost no one believes the push buttons work. Since pedestrians think they’ll never get a walk light, they just cross willy-nilly at any time and any place.

Moreover, pedestrians have endured many years of traffic planners appearing to promote vehicle movement over pedestrian movement. The city will plow streets but not sidewalks after snowstorms. The T, which pedestrians make use of, keeps raising its rates, while drivers get a free ride. So walkers have a hard time believing that the city is doing anything that works in their favor.

But this time, it might be true. The buttons might actually work. They might over-ride the system. We believe it partly because in intersections that have new systems, the traffic control office in City Hall can also over-ride the automatic pedestrian phase at 2 a.m., for example, when few pedestrians are likely to be out.

For the first time ever, we see a glimmer of hope for pedestrians. We may still believe that pressing the buttons doesn’t work, but at least a walk light — possibly with that helpful countdown — will eventually appear.