Growing up in Southern California, my favorite books were filled with girls climbing trees, hosting clubhouse meetings in their tree houses, and swinging beneath leafy branches. The palm trees in my neighborhood offered none of these enchanting pastimes, so for my 10th birthday I asked for a climbing tree. I received a maple and a sycamore, but they were saplings. I was disappointed. I would need to wait decades before I could climb them. 

As a young mother, I lived in the Vermont village of Newbury, where I met Ken Rower, a Massachusetts transplant, who served as volunteer tree warden and tireless, passionate ambassador for planting and maintaining native trees on the Newbury Common.
When I remarked that Vermont seemed to already have a lot of trees, he launched into an explanation of the importance of expanding the tree canopy for health, the environment, and beauty.  Could I not see the beauty of each tree?  Ken taught me to fight for trees.

When we moved to Dorchester a few years later, I was struck by the absence of trees, particularly compared to the wealthier parts of the city. On Jones Hill in Uphams Corner, there were hardly any trees on our street.  

I called the arborist for the city of Boston, and he told me, “People in Dorchester don’t want trees. That’s why we don’t plant them there.”    

When I probed further, I learned that only property owners could request a tree to be planted on a city sidewalk abutting their property, and the wait-time was over a year. This policy, still in place, is blatantly biased against renters, who are disproportionately people of color.  

In the mid-1980s, our neighbor, Joan Banfield, shared a commitment to getting more trees planted on Jones Hill and she organized a youth group, including my daughters, to petition the city to do a blitz of tree plantings in our neighborhood.  The youth went door to door to collect permission slips from property owners, and these were presented to the city.  

The campaign was successful. Thirty-six years later, I write this from my third-floor study, looking out at the two locusts and two maples that weere planted back then. They stand taller than my three-decker.   

Last summer at the height of the heat wave, I took the temperature at sidewalk level in front of my house and then farther down the street, where there were no trees, and there was a 4 degree difference.  When the temperature is in the 90s, four degrees is huge. 

In 1987, I wrote a poem, “Dot Ave,” as I imagined what Dorchester Avenue could look like if it had a consistent, mature canopy on both sides. There are patches now, particularly south of St. Mark’s to Lower Mills, but the stretch from Freeport Street to Columbia Road cries out for a comprehensive tree planting blitz of its own.   

I cannot walk or drive down Columbia Road without getting roiled about the long stretch of the island down the middle that is bereft of trees. Huge four-foot-high cement planters add insult to injury.  

The Emerald Necklace was originally designed to circle to the city down Columbia Road to the ocean. We are missing the green jewels we were long ago promised. Driving by the narrower median newly planted with trees at Forest Hills triggers my outrage, so by the time I’m exiting Franklin Park onto Columbia Road, I see where the trees should and could be as gaping open wounds.  

What is most frustrating is to realize that it will take a concerted, sustained, organized citizen mobilization to get what people in wealthier neighborhoods have always had: Trees.

Fortunately, two groups have sprung up to offer leadership and advocacy on behalf of Dorchester’s tree canopy. Michael Keamy has organized the Dorchester Avenue Vision Action Committee, focused on the stretch of Dorchester Avenue from Freeport to Columbia Road.  David Meshoulam founded Speak for the Trees, and with board chair Liz Luc Clowes, the landscape designer who recently designed Boston’s very first “micro forest” at 45 Norfolk in Codman Square, their organization is combining working with youth to plant  and maintain trees, as well as advocating at the city and state level for policy changes.  

Developers, whether they’re proposing projects large or small, have been given free rein to cut down mature trees, and if they are replaced (mostly they are built over), it is with saplings like the ones I received on my 10th birthday.  I hope to be 100 in 30 years. I hope Dorchester Avenue and Columbia Road can finally become the boulevards of my dreams.

Dot Ave
Boulevard of my dreams,
I get a wild fever to walk you someday
end to end losing count of your trees.
Flowering trees,
bushy trees, trees that shade.
Trees that screen, trees on the sides
Autumn and spring, up and down every block.
First, trees.

Now you sag with double-parked trucks,
who like wayward elephants will not move along.
Billboards blemish,
and chain link, barbed wire stretches chafe 
and bruise you.

Let me catalog your riches:

This many languages sung on Dot Ave:  English, Spanish,
Creole, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Laotian, Italian,
Irish brogue, French and rap.

This many children, like tropical birds, daydreaming
out windows, bedding down each night.

1 library, 5 churches, 1 hospital,
3 train stations, 2 health centers, 3 schools,
2 parks, 1 day care, 3 elderly high-rises,
and 1 renovated chocolate factory.

Dot Ave.  If Dorchester were Venice,
You would be our main canal.
If Dorchester were a pomegranate,
You would be our seeds, our ruby juice, our core.
If Dorchester were a fairy tale,
You would be the toad
waiting for our aromatic kiss.
By Meg Campbell.

The poem was published in DOT AVE, an anthology by the Dorchester Arts Council, 1987.