By Linda Relson
Watertown Community Gardens, Board Chair
Volunteers have been working on the Watertown-Cambridge Greenway all year, and their efforts got a boost earlier this month with the award of a MassTrails Grant.
The Watertown-Cambridge Greenway is a treasured ribbon of green space that connects School Street in east Watertown to Fresh Pond Reservation in Cambridge. The path is a rail trail converted from the former B&M Railroad’s Watertown Branch, now owned by the State of Massachusetts’ Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR). It is frequented by commuters, dog walkers, and bicyclists every day of the week. Unfortunately, since the path’s construction, many of the shrubs, trees, and perennial flowers that were originally planted have been overcome by invasive plants.
For the last few years, volunteers from Watertown Community Gardens’ (WCG) Pollinator Pathways Committee have been working to remove these invasive plants along the path with permission from the DCR. These ecologically harmful plants tend to form dense monocultures, crowding out more beneficial plants while feeding fewer types of wildlife, thus reducing biodiversity. Volunteers also plant more ecologically beneficial plants, pick up trash, and return throughout the season to keep unwanted plants at bay.
In February of this year, WCG team members submitted an application to the State’s MassTrails Grant program. The application requested $35,000 to bring in professionals for poison ivy removal, and creation of a comprehensive invasive species management plan (ISMP) for the years ahead. When the MassTrails Grant awards were announced in early October, Watertown Community Gardens’ application was one of 50 that were accepted.
Poison ivy provides many benefits to the natural world, including light-colored berries that birds happily eat in fall and winter when other food sources are scarce. However, approximately 85 percent of the human population is allergic to urushiol, a substance found in all parts of the plant. The team has identified a few poison ivy patches along the trail for removal. Repeated manual removal of the vine and roots in these areas will protect passersby from potential exposure, and allow volunteers to more easily work to tackle the invasive plants and remove trash.
The ISMP will help the team prioritize sections of the Greenway for volunteer work, and inform where mitigation by professionals is necessary. While volunteers can be hugely effective in manual removal of some plants, other plants can require larger equipment or targeted herbicide application as the most effective form of removal.
The MassTrails Grant program requires grantees to contribute a financial match towards the project. A unique aspect of this grant is the ability to use volunteer hours towards the match. Volunteers working through WCG have contributed close to 500 hours so far in 2025, and the robust volunteer program was a key contributor to their grant application’s success.
If you are interested in helping with this Greenway project, the team would love to meet you. Signing up for a volunteer event is a great way to see the work firsthand and get your hands dirty. Events include trash pickups, cutting/pulling/digging out invasive plants, weeding, and planting native plants. You can also contact the team by emailing greenway@watertowngardens.org with your ideas and questions.
The 2025 season is nearly over, but there is one more Greenway maintenance event on the calendar to round out the fall, this Sunday, Nov. 2 from 10 a.m. until noon.
Following the winter, Greenway maintenance will resume in March with the third annual Spring Cleanup event, scheduled for Saturday, March 14 from 10 a.m. until noon.