Unless a champion steps forward, bulldozers and chainsaws are coming for Harston Woods in October. The 4.7-acre parcel (behind 350 Haws Lane at Atwood Road) is home to more than 100 mature trees – including more than 20 100-year-old oaks, and not one, but two 200-year-old vernal pools.

 “I cannot tell you how important those trees are. Five types of oaks, tulip poplars, cherry trees. In our lifetimes, you are not going to be able to recreate that,” Jenny Rose Carey, well-known horticulturist and gardener, told a recent gathering at booked., The Chestnut Hill bookstore.

Mature trees are priceless. They absorb 10 times as much air pollution, store up to 90 times more carbon, and possess a leaf area as much as 100 times the size of a young tree. A 25-inch diameter oak tree can intercept 3,492 gallons of stormwater per year. Spindly young replacement trees – as they have installed at Enfield Elementary – won’t sequester the carbon that mature trees do until the children are old enough to be parents themselves. 

Harston Woods was once a Beatrix Farrand garden, Carey said. Under President Woodrow Wilson, Farrand designed two gardens at the White House. Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., and the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at New York Botanical Garden are two of her most famous projects.

Carey first visited Harston Woods in 2003 when she was writing her graduate school thesis on the gardens in the 1929 book Portraits of Philadelphia Gardens by Louise and James Bush-Brown. One feature made Harston stand out among the 22 gardens in the book – a moat with goldfish. “How many gardens in America have moats with goldfish?” Carey asked.

In 2007, Carey took a visiting European expert on garden designer Gertrude Jekyll to see Harston, only to find that Harston Hall had become a care home and the moat had been filled in. 

“I am a scientist and I look at things logically,” Carey said. “Harston can give back so much to the community as a 5-acre park than a few extra townhouses. This is a site with layers of meaning and history.”

It is tragic and misguided that the township criteria for development projects are so narrow and short-sighted. For the developer’s benefit, the township bent over backward to change the zoning to allow the project to go forward – even though many better locations exist. The overflow parking lot that the township owns at Flourtown Country Club would not have cost anything.

Springfield sorely needs the beauty and sense of place that Harston Woods provides. Yet the educational value for science and art students at the three adjacent schools was not even considered in the permit process. The danger from the added traffic for the kids who walk to the schools has not been given proper consideration. Neither has the added flooding risk in a neighborhood that already floods in heavy rains.

The township insists it wants to preserve many of the Harston Woods trees but construction protection of the trees and guidance from a certified arborist has not been mandated. Tree roots run very close to the soil surface and extend well beyond the tree canopy. Heavy equipment – even a dump truck – can fatally wound a mature tree’s roots. The second asphalt parking lot that the township agreed to build on the taxpayer-owned portion of the Harston site is sure to kill and weaken more trees.

Our township leaders need to reread "The Lorax," the Dr. Seuss classic about a magical creature who speaks for the environment: "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not."

Zeta Cross

Springfield Township