Don't tell anyone
Don't tell anyone
A short journey into Brookline's secret gilded wetland
Recently, on a walk through the Allandale Woods urban wild in Boston—right next to Arnold Arboretum—I met a fellow urban hiker from Brookline. We stopped and spent nearly half an hour talking about the sort of things that people in Boston talk about these days. Spring flowers, our favorite parks for wandering, the housing market, the need for new affordable housing (my stance) versus the aesthetic shortcomings of taller multi-unit buildings (their stance). But before parting ways, this fellow traveler offered a parting gift. “About a mile from here, as you go west, there’s a real hidden secret of an urban conservation area for taking a hike,” they said. “Don’t tell anyone.”
This hidden gem of a conservation area—which I’m about to tell you about—has been on my list of Boston green spaces to explore. I found it one afternoon while scrolling around various GPS maps of the city, looking for routes left by other hikers. I’ve been doing a lot of local green space foraging these past few weeks, for a potentially big project that I hope to announce in one of the next newsletters. And it was deep within the tony hills of Brookline and Newtons, a realm of lush private green space, where I spotted a parcel of soggy public wetland known as the D. Blakeley Hoar Sanctuary.
You wouldn’t know it looking at all the multi-million dollar homes with their dutifully manicured lawns, but a good portion of South Brookline is a floodplain for Sawmill Brook. Many decades of off-and-on flooding left this corner of Brookline with an unusual heft of wetlands and in 1961, the town formally nabbed 25 acres of these wetlands at the bequest of a local lawyer and conservationist named D. Blakeley Hoar, who wanted part of the land to be transformed into a bird and wildlife sanctuary.
Today, the crown jewel of Hoar’s sanctuary is a 0.7 mile loop trail through the wetland that includes some dreamy stretches of boardwalk that seem to burrow through the flowering trees (built and maintained by the Town of Brookline.) At one point, a larger wooden bridge that connected the Hoar loop trail to a neighboring forest—Leatherbee Woods—but this link path was wrecked by flooding. However, unless you plan to drive straight to the sanctuary trailhead (located by Edith C. Baker elementary school) the process of actually reaching D. Blakeley Hoar Sanctuary can be a bit of a hike itself.
Here’s the thing about the Brookline and Newton hills, relative to most other Boston neighborhoods. There’s a lot of money up here, but not a lot of public transportation. From Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain, or from Coolidge Corner near the center of Brookline, you’re looking at a hike of roughly two miles each way to reach the Hoar sanctuary. Thankfully, the gilded residential streets that lead to the sanctuary trailhead offer consistent sidewalk—not always a given in wealthy neighborhoods! If you’re all decked out in well-worn hiking gear, there can be an ironic thrill to sauntering through areas like this on foot: areas where most people motor around in Teslas or BMWs. During my hike to the sanctuary, I saw one other pedestrian in the course of an hour. The historic houses, their gardens, and their stone staircases made for neat scenery.
When you approach Edith C. Baker School on Beverly Road, a large green sign for the D. Blakeley Hoar Sanctuary dispels any whiff of ambiguity about where you’re going, or whether you’re actually welcome in this hidden wetland. As I descended stairs past the school’s tennis courts, wrapping around them toward the thick woods on the other side, I thought about what the hiker whom I met in Allandale Woods said to me about D. Blakeley Hoar Sanctuary. Don’t tell anyone. I understand why it might be instinctual to guard our favorite woodlands and wild spaces like precious gems, even when the spaces are meant to be welcoming to all. But there’s a point when reasonable mindfulness about green space overuse becomes a territorial paranoia, not unlike the concerns about crowded schools and parking lots that can fuel housing opposition. Somehow I don’t think we’re going to see the hordes of Instagrammers and TikTokers stampeding over each other to take selfies of a fragrant old wetland in the middle of a residential area with limited bus or train stops. But hey, maybe I’m an out-of-touch.
In any event, it’s worth the effort to make it out to the Hoar sanctuary loop trail, where you’ll begin by crossing a little wooden bridge over Sawmill Brook from the tennis into the woods. Much of the brook has actually been routed into underground storm pipes until the brook reaches the sanctuary, to mitigate flooding in residential areas. (This process of burying streams and brooks is being re-evaluated today, with some cities “daylighting” their lost waterways by digging them back up and restoring their natural capacity.) After the bridge, a trail map kiosk for the sanctuary confirms your arrival and the path become a rooty ramble through a sunlit hemlock-beech forest.
My suggestion, as the trail splits here, is to go left and take the clockwise route. This will save some of the trail’s most beautiful sections for the finale of the hike. As you emerge from the woods into a red maple swamp at the heart of the wetland, keep an eye out on your left for the “bridge to nowhere” that once led into Leatherbee Woods, and note the bat houses on wooden posts throughout the marsh. After the first section of boardwalk (which is made of a material derived from recycled plastic bottles and jugs!) you’ll pass cliffs of Roxbury Puddingstone, the porridge-like state rock of Massachusetts. I was taken aback by how ruggedly rocky the trail becomes in these sections. I was wearing my running sneakers but you could easily justify hiking boots for traversing these stonier trail segments. The final stretch of boardwalk takes you on the most romantic passage through the swamp, past an immense understory of shrub and vernal pools before returning you to the woods from whence you came.
Of course, the real return journey starts when you close the loop and retrace the miles you covered to reach D. Blakeley Hoar Sanctuary. Leave time to linger in the wetlands and woods here, because as soon as you re-emerge from the sanctuary, you’ll quickly be surrounded by roaring suburban traffic and structural wealth again. I concluded my hike at the sanctuary by east on Grove Street to a rotary with a tiny strip mall. I bought a medium-sized bag of neon-orange cheese puffs from the convenience mart and ate them while hiking northeast, past opulent houses with security systems and private forests owned by Dana Farber and the British International School of Boston. It’s not easy finding public woods and wetlands to poke around in a neighborhood like this.
But thanks to Mr. Hoar, a soggy slice of Brookline still beckons to us all.
CLICK HERE for a trail map
CLICK HERE for the official sanctuary brochure
In outdoor news this week, I really liked this Conde Nast Traveler essay from Esme Benjamin, in which she re-lives her experience with hiking through the National Parks in the aftermath of a miscarriage. “I’d learned to appreciate and respect my body in a deeper way on this trip,” Benjamin writes. “I had come to appreciate it in new ways, and during the two months we’d spent living nomadically it had even started to feel like home again.” This would have been a moving read any day, but it was especially moving last week, as five troglodytes in judicial robes prepare to strike down Roe v. Wade—opening the door to states criminalizing miscarriages. See you in the streets.