Aaron Goode, Jean Webb, Marty Lendroth take on the jungle in the Heights.
It’s technically Ailanthus Altissima, or colloquially Tree of Heaven, but in Fair Haven Heights’ Fairmont Park it’s more often called, with a grrrrrrrr, as gardeners labor to uproot it, the Tree of Hell. Or from Hell.
But there’s now a lot less of this quick rising (thus toward heaven?) invasive Chinese species, and that’s thanks to decades of effort by Sylvia Dorsey and her stalwart crew of Friends of Fairmont Park.
In part because the park sits high on the ridges of Fair Haven Heights, which used to be part of East Haven, you could be forgiven for not knowing its unique history, ridge trails, or the panoramic views it offers of the Quinnipiac River below and the city spreading out toward Downtown.
In the post-Civil War 19th century era it was the site of the home of Charles Ives, not the composer, but an influential anti-slavery oriented speaker of the Connecticut House of Representatives. His house, later moved across Clifton Street, and the land given to the city, sat somewhere among the giant beds of invasives that have been cleared.
The central circle that you now meet when you enter the park from curving Clifton, where it meets Robertson Street now comes to life as the circular driveway. There Ives and visitors and political movers and shakers left their horse-drawn buckboards and gigs.
Sylvia Dorsey beside the "mansion for animals"
Likewise two sets of historic steps leading down from house and driveway emerged from beneath the vegetation. Who knew that removing invasives revealed not only healthy new local plant life, but local history as well.
On Thursday afternoon, Dorsey, a Minnesota, rural-raised, native-tree and native-seed obsessed grandmother of six, was leading her core crew — Jean Webb, Aaron Goode, and Marty Lendroth — to focus on uprooting that particular invasive.
“They grow super fast so we have to get them out now while they’re small. If not, the root sends out runners, and more will come,” she said, and then they grow, essentially to tree height and require machine-help to take down.
In March the city, Dorsey reported, helped them eradicate large swaths of that particular invasive that had grown too tall to be removed by human hands alone.
One Tree of Heaven specimen had grown so large there was a catch of honey inside, Goode remembered.
This day he was laboring in a tangle of other invasives such as bittersweet, burning bush and multiflora rose but focusing on a tough stump of Tree of Heaven, from that spring removal exercise, and pulling out rising runners already sprouting anew.
“It’s a race against time,” said Dorsey.
Dorsey has been walking the park every day for decades checking on the war against invasives and how the native plants that have been put in – goldenrod, asters, anise – are doing,
One of Dorsey's favorite plants, sassafras, also called the mitten plant because of the leaf shape
She as well is pleased at the quiet miracle of how native plants and flowers — glossy sumac and black raspberries — often just appear on their own when the invasives are sent to the exits.
Why does she labor so, a labor of love? “I grew up on the shore of Lake Superior, and my mother knew birds, and plants. I’m driven, I guess. Obsessed. I saw how [in Fairmont Park] the natives were being crowded out by invasives and I decided to do something about it.”
So she in effect began addressing the problem 30 years ago. “However, you can’t make [real] progress unless you do it systematically, weekly,” she said, and over a long period of time.
It was only in 2020 that she and neighbors Peter Davis and Nicole Davis began an intensive campaign against the invasives.
Jean Webb said she joined the effort too around that time. Although she’d been living in the neighborhood for 30 years, between work and other obligations, she’d never been involved with the park.
Then came the pandemic. “It got me thinking,” she said, “what can I do both to come out and be with others [outside], get some exercise, and also help the park.”
They joined forces not only to cut the Trees of Heaven down to size but also to mark trails, and, working with URI, the city, and especially with neighbor (and URI deputy director) and one of the city’s most prominent Invasive Removers, Chris Ozyck, to begin to lay out larger plans for restoration of this unique park.
Ozyck helped to clear the Ives carriage driveway and then also helped to rebuild the steps leading down to the street. You can still appreciate the original blue stone on the risers, likely quarried, said Goode, from, yes, Quarry Park, further up off East Grand Avenue. East Haven volunteer Marty Lendroth, a retired fireman, uncovered yet another set of steps beneath invasives that he was clearing.
Part of the larger vision, with a restored Fairmont Park as the hub of the wheel, said Dorsey, is “building a trail to connect all the green spaces of Fair Haven Heights: a network up to the park, with a posted map, so people can have a nice walking experience.”
Dorsey, who collects and trades native plant and tree seeds (and grows at home many of the plants that she then transplants to the park) was particularly proud of her ongoing effort to deal with a large stand of beech trees that, she says, are dying from beech leaf disease.
By the struggling beech trees
“So we’ve planted 100 baby oaks [along with white pine] under the beech, so when they do die, we’ll have a nice forest restoration going.”
She’s clearly thinking of generations to come in this kind of effort, and there are plans afoot in the park also to restore a play area on the east side of the park facing Clifton Avenue (and the half of the original Ives house that remains, a residence across the street).
There Dorsey and neighbors have already walked the area with city officials, landscape architect Katherine Jacobs and City Engineer Giovanni Zinn. Although precise locations have not been established, a first playscape or apparatus with a splash pad feature is going to go in. In decades gone by, Dorsey said, there were, at most, some swings in the park.
Dorsey said she was reassured that $100,000 has been found in state funds and ARPA (American Rescue Plan Act) money is also part of the funding plan. More consultations and design work are to go on this year, and the finished product expected to be available for play in 2024.
The future playscape area will be between, on the west, old benches uncovered in the invasive removal campaign adjacent to which asters, grey dogwoods, summer sweet, great blue lobelia, and cardinal and anise now flower; and a “yellow garden” of coreopsis, black-eyed susans now waving away along Clifton.
Nearby them are a dozen shade trees put in by URI, to which Dorsey and her team must bring 25 gallons of water every week until the trees are established.
They do that now by stretching a hose from the community vegetable garden patch, at the entry to the park, a full 600 feet away! When the playscape and splash pad are installed, a water spigot will be a lot closer, and a lot of labor eliminated.
While there are other groups and volunteers at the park – working more specifically on the community garden, flower beds, and other features – Dorsey is the moving force. She recalled how when her kids were young and she was in there herself chopping down the burning bush and Tree of Heaven and leaving the piles for the animals to use for nests, her kids called the piles “mansions for animals.”
In the absence of a play area for the kids, she recalled schlepping them across the river and all over the city for playground spaces. Now her two youngest grandchildren will be able to enjoy the playscape coming to Fairmont Park.
To volunteer with the Friends of Fairmont Park, participate, learn more about the park, or to trade seeds, the contact is Sylvia Dorsey: sylvanseeds@gmail.com