Parks + Restoration

Working with volunteers across the city, Cincinnati Parks land management teams are revitalizing wild spaces and removing invasives, benefitting the woods, the community, and the planet.

photography by Sybilka Storie

If you often walk Cincinnati’s woods, you’ve seen transformations along park trails, where honeysuckle and other invasive plant species have been cleared. The difference is striking. Trails recently claustrophobic with undergrowth are open to the surrounding woodland, showing a new diversity of plant life.

In early March, I visited the Cincinnati Parks Division of Natural Resources to meet the Conservation and Land Management (CLM) team responsible for much of this work. They’re based in the former Cincinnati Police Department’s District 5 headquarters on Ludlow Avenue, below Mt. Storm Park. Like the officers who once worked here, this team also protects and serves—repairing trails, combatting invasives, and rejuvenating the ecology of our region’s wooded spaces.

With a small crew of seasonal workers and help from volunteers across the city, Conservation Technician Drew Goebel, Trail Technician Horticulturist Greg Torres, and Conservation Volunteer Coordinator Brendan Bogosian are responsible for managing Cincinnati Parks’ 5,000 acres of forest and 60 miles of trail. They’re continuing a long legacy of forestry in Cincinnati’s parks.

Landscape architect George Kessler’s 1907 “A Park Plan for the City of Cincinnati” inscribed greenness into our city’s future, creating hilltop parks connected by parkways and replanting barren hillsides. That plan also set in motion the planting of an urban forest, Mt. Airy. In his recent history of Mt. Airy Forest’s 1,459 wooded acres for Ohio Valley History, University of Cincinnati Professor of Urban History David Stradling writes that this grand experiment is “more than just good evidence of the conservation movement’s role in reshaping urban landscapes.” It’s also testament to the value of long-term public investment in our natural resources. Fluctuations in Mt. Airy’s wellbeing are connected with the care it’s given, showing that forests require ongoing investment and management, and that the returns on that investment are manifold.

Enlisting Community Help
It’s a daunting job for such a small team, one that was only recently formed in response to public interest in better management of the trails and forests. “We have a lot of pressure on all of our natural areas,” Torres says. There’s foot traffic. Development. Encroachment by invasive species. While pressure on parks comes from surrounding, dense, urban communities, so does the will to care for them.

Given Ault Park’s gorgeous gardens today, it’s hard to imagine that in the 1970s its grounds had gone to pot, its beautiful pavilion taken over by a motorcycle gang. The Ault Park Action Committee was organized to boot the bikers and beautify the place. Ever since then, neighborhood park-advocacy groups like it, called Cincinnati Parks Action Committees (CPACs), have taken many parks under their wing. Recently, an interest in conservation and eradicating invasive plants has reinvigorated CPACs, making them essential collaborators with CLM at a time when volunteer brains and brawn are direly needed to stem a tide of issues over a dauntingly large area.

Heartwarming as it is to see citizens gloving up and grabbing loppers, their efforts need to be organized according to best practices. Developing a comprehensive management plan falls to Goebel. In many locations he’s starting from a tabula rasa because record keeping has been less than consistent over the decades. “Before you make a decision about how you’re going to manage land, you have to have information,” he says. “So we’re getting out there, actually surveying those 5,000 acres and assessing the ecosystem.”

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While the CLM team is interested in fauna, they focus on the plant life because, as Goebel says, “if you can document that, you can make inferences about everything else.” And those surveys need to be done strategically across the seasons. The team goes out in spring to note the presence of spring ephemerals, for example. “Identifying the presence of sensitive species serves as an indicator of undisturbed or more healthy parts of our properties,” Goebel says. “Because it’s always better to try to save what’s there than to try to build it.”

They’re mining both Cincinnati Parks archives and area residents’ memories to glean what they can, as Goebel notes, from “people with longstanding connections to these spaces who we can turn to and say, ‘teach us.’”

All of this field research feeds back into identifying where work is needed, and balancing what’s possible given volunteers’ interest and ability. Volunteers often receive a high degree of training in identification and technique.

“At every step of this process of land management,” Torres says, “we’re trying to find ways to engage the community, from kids all the way up, so that we can have a broader sense of awareness. If we can start training people to tackle these problems, we end up building a culture of conservation, a community of people who all understand the problems and are working in a systematic way.”

Mitigating Invasives
The beauty of this collective effort is that the effects of volunteer work are immediately seen and felt. In Laboiteaux Woods, for example, shortly after a recent volunteer-powered invasive species removal campaign, wildflowers began to pop up. “Over the following years we can start to work with volunteers to help monitor that site to see what’s responding,” Goebel says. “We’re trying to build a groundswell of support for parks from the outside, hopefully to wash over the entire department so that it all kind of clicks.”

I ask whether they see a response in new growth and species when they remove invasive plants like lesser celandine that shade out natives. “It really depends,” Goebel says. “We’re starting from a really bad place in a lot of these parks. It depends on the timing. If you get to an area in the right amount of time since [native] plants have disappeared, they will come back because there’s a seed bank. But you don’t have that much time.”

He cites the West Side’s Bender Mountain Nature Preserve as the poster child for invasive species removal success stories. Honeysuckle removal there came just in the nick of time. “Now it’s a wildflower haven, one of the best examples of what our hillsides should look like.” That’s not possible in areas that were converted to lawn or pasture for decades. In those areas, they replant. But where they can, Goebel says, they work to restore historical plant populations. “Genetic diversity is very important, and that comes from these distinct populations,” he says, referring to pockets of plants with an “ecotype” adapted to hyperlocal conditions.

The high degree of skill and knowledge that volunteers and park staff bring to this project is evident on a geographic information system (GIS) map on a monitor in Goebel’s office. The map layers satellite imagery, tree-height data, and other data layers, along with species identifications shared by CPAC members via the plant identification and data-sharing app iNaturalist, plus records of where they have worked in parks.

We look at a GIS map of French Park, where a CPAC has been caring for its wooded creek bed. It shows various emerging threats to the natural landscape. “Many of them are coming from horticulture,” Goebel says. Bird-dispersed, non-native viburnums are particularly problematic “because while the plant stays here, the seeds are going somewhere else. Shade-tolerant plants, including English ivy, winter creeper, and garlic mustard are particularly opportunistic.”

Bogosian notes that many of these non-native species have come from the temperate forests of Europe and Asia with climates similar to ours. So they thrive here, but since they haven’t co-evolved with organisms in our ecosystem they lack checks to growth and therefore outcompete important elements of our Eastern deciduous forests.

It’s a weird time to throw around xenophobic-sounding words like “invasive” and “native” even if we’re just talking plants. There’s a degree of ambiguity inherent in such terms, especially when you step back and view populations as they change over long periods of time. What exactly is native? Goebel says the question really is, “What is going to support an ecosystem that has long evolved here?”

How does a small team stem a tide of porcelain berries, Japanese knotweed, lesser celandine, English ivy, winter creeper, garlic mustard, and honeysuckle, and more—often working with a narrow timeframe before they multiply exponentially across a park site?

For those invasives that are essentially rogue ornamental plants (hello, Bradford pear!), homeowner education and state-level policymaking through the Ohio Invasive Plant Council helps. Unfortunately, the laws are a patchwork across neighboring states, Bogosian says, and these plants can easily cross state lines. Saws, shovels, loppers, and hands are essential. But they can’t do this without herbicides.

Before you freak out, like I do, when anyone even whispers “chemicals,” CLM uses only the safest herbicides at the lowest possible concentrations. Goebel conducts trials on test plots to determine the minimal percentage strength at which they’re effective and chooses chemicals with short half-lives.

Eking back woods and trails is hardly glamorous work. Community members have at times expressed hostility, reopening areas that CLM has closed for recovery, building unsanctioned trails, and otherwise misusing the land. We think of parks as ours, after all, and that’s mostly a good thing. But CLM has seen crimes against park property. There’s a stolen truck sitting in Greeno Woods’ creek, Torres says, and it isn’t the first or even the second stolen vehicle that’s been ditched there. Antifreeze and floor stripper have been dumped into that same creek.

Then there are the well-meaning community members who have taken lopping back growth and guerrilla-planting the woods into their own hands. CPACs play an essential role in monitoring park property, channeling volunteer efforts, and reporting problems.

Public service announcement: Foraging is not permitted in Cincinnati Parks. “With so many people living around such a small footprint, it adds up really fast to a social trail that’s trampled, for example, our only trillium patch that we’re trying to restore,” Goebel says. “Everybody thinks, ‘It’s just me. I only collected five of the seed.’ But so did 25 other people that you never saw. We all have this big impact, so we all need to like think about how easy it is to destroy these places.”

Management for Past and Future
After our meeting, Bogosian and I hike the hillside trail that rises from their office, through the woods to Mt. Storm Park. It’s a perfect example of how removing honeysuckle—widely planted in Cincinnati as an ornamental and to stabilize hillside erosion—exposes hidden beauty. Over the last few years I’ve explored this place with my son. We’ve watched it change from a narrow corridor, treacherous with dreaded face-level poison ivy (not an invasive and, in fact, quite beneficial to wildlife), to open and breathable, inviting one’s gaze into the woods.

History is everywhere in this park. It’s in the stone slabs set a century ago to hold the path we walk, and in the big, windswept Osage orange trees that were probably put in as hedgerow trees, Bogosian says. Osages are both native and not, extirpated from the region by glaciers, then likely replanted for their wood, valued for making bows, by Native Americans.

Mt. Storm Park was once the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Bowler, who hosted Edward, Prince of Wales, and Charles Dickens in the grand home that once stood up there. They hired Adolph Strauch, the designer of Spring Grove Cemetery, to design their gardens. Strauch’s hand can be seen in the classical rotunda, the “Temple of Love,” which he placed as a cap over a reservoir that once fed extensive gardens. Then there’s the Works Progress Administration-built shelter that perfectly frames the valley view, a monument to how, during hard economic times, public investment in parks created meaningful jobs and a legacy for the future.

The woods below that shelter have been extensively managed with help from one of Groundwork Cincinnati’s “Green Teams.” Bee balm, coneflowers, and St. John’s wort are coming back. It’s a work in progress, Bogosian says, noting a persistent wild parsnip problem. But they’ve sown a native seed mix and planted plugs of wild blue phlox.

Bogosian points to some oak seedlings that he hopes will have a better chance now that the woods have been cleared because “oak seedlings are not particularly tolerant of shade.” The seedlings still have to contend with deer, but if they make it, they will enrich the ecosystem. Bogosian cites the noted entomologist and author Douglas Tallamy, who has documented hundreds of species that are supported by the oak, more than any other tree. Oaks are the foundational species of our regional forests, Bogosian says, “so the thought of the forest losing those over time is troubling.”

And that, in an acorn cup, is why CLM’s work is so vital for both an urban park system and for the planet itself. Restoring these woods maximizes their ability to support the greatest number of species, knitting the deep, ecological web on which humans, too, rely. And the culture of conservation Cincinnati Parks is building will have ramifications far beyond simply removing invasive plants. Conservation-minded citizens will need to organize and join in to meet many more challenges to come. 

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Civic Beautification

Did you know that Cincinnati Parks’ Greenspace program maintains gardens and planter boxes on public property throughout the city? That includes flowerpots for small businesses through the Business District Beautification Program, which was set up in 2014 with funds allocated to beautify and promote small businesses in 52 business districts throughout the city, says Greenspace crew leader Ann Uhlman.

It’s a matching funds program, she says, where businesses split the cost with the city and then the Greenspace team creates three annual displays a year. The Greenspace team orders and plants flowers, fertilizes, waters, and maintains flowerpots. “It’s a full-circle beautification program,” Uhlman says.

Uhlman, who previously worked as a florist, says one of the challenges is staying on top of watering. She chooses plants that can take hot, dry conditions, often native pollinators, because “they’re more drought-tolerant in this area than a lot of other choices. But even then, you definitely don’t want to skip a watering. That’s the most important element in summer.”

Greenspace is on track to care for 430 containers in 2024, Uhlman says. So if you or anyone you know is interested in working with plants, she’s hiring. Interested small business owners should contact the leader of their local community group, and reach out with them to the city.