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ELYSIAN PARK - In a jaw-dropping display of incompetence and apathy, the City of Los Angeles Recreation and Parks Department (RAP) recently decided that the best way to care for a children’s learning garden was to destroy it. Yes, in their infinite wisdom, RAP ordered the obliteration of a beloved children’s garden — one funded by public money. Originally installed 25 years ago as a community planting project at Elysian Park, this thriving woodland was home to Northeast LA Forest School, providing a nature-based early childhood program in a cool green escape from the sprawling hardscape of Los Angeles.
This was the sort of place where children’s imagination ran wild, and nature was both a playground and a teacher. Situated within one of the city’s oldest and most iconic parks, the garden was a wooded sanctuary where children could explore, play, and learn about the natural world in a safe and inspiring environment.
This garden featured a variety of native plants, trees, and shrubs, carefully selected to reflect the local ecosystem and to attract wildlife, including birds, butterflies, and pollinators. Listening to the soft chirping of song birds or spotting an Acorn woodpecker brought joy and perspective to children and adult urban-dwellers alike. Overall, the school was a cherished community resource, providing a vital space for children to learn, grow, and develop a lifelong appreciation for nature.
Then, in late June, contractors armed with chainsaws and a skid steer — a vehicle similar to a bulldozer that turns by skidding and dragging its wheels across the ground — went to work. They ripped through the woodland like lumberjacks, cutting hundreds of trees and shrubs down to stumps and breaking the school’s educational plaques that identified the various plants. The community, predictably outraged, has dubbed this fiasco “Eco-side” and is demanding answers.
Why was the Forest School woodland garden for children dismembered? RAP claims that they were just following Los Angeles Fire Department “brush clearance standards”. But in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, a Los Angeles Fire Department spokesperson said they were “saddened by the approach that was taken with this brush clearance.”
The problem began when RAP placed a metal storage shed next to the children’s garden, which triggered the fire department’s Defensible Space policy. The Defensible Space policy is designed to reduce fire risk in the high fire severity zones by keeping plants maintained up to 200 feet from any structures, year-round. But what RAP did is the equivalent of using a flamethrower to light a candle. Instead of applying the defensible space protocols thoughtfully and maintaining the plants throughout the year, RAP hired a contractor to do a one-time clearance. This misguided implementation of Defensible Space led to the needless destruction of hundreds of native trees and shrubs that had flourished for decades.
RAP's failure to involve their own biologist to oversee the project during prime nesting season (February to August) is particularly puzzling. As a result, bird nests were destroyed, and a fledgling red-shouldered hawk was found dead in the debris, likely squashed by the skid steer without the driver even noticing.
The presence of fledgling and juvenile birds in the understory is characteristic during nesting season because they remain near the nest for weeks before becoming fully flighted and independent. This underscores the problem of relying on City arborists to manage our more natural spaces. Arboriculture is an important field, but the training emphasizes care of individual trees, often in highly manicured urbanized settings where disease or limbs falling on people or things is the focus rather than wildlife and the broader ecological relationships that sustain an entire woodland ecosystem. Without understanding the complex interactions between species and their environment, the health and resilience of the woodland could be compromised, leading to unintended ecological consequences like loss of biodiversity and the disrupted natural processes that occurs when you bulldoze a woodland. At minimum, RAP should have had their biologist conduct a bird survey prior to work and then supervise that work.
Outside of Los Angeles's hillside areas, much of the habitat for urban wildlife is provided by the urban forest. The term “urban forest” is used to refer to all the plants in a city. Trees along our streets and in our manicured parks are the most visible. However, natural areas exist in our less manicured parklands and around our homes. We refer to these more natural areas as woodlands. Though trees along our streets, and in our parks and yards are important in the city, woodlands outsize their benefits when it comes to cooling the surrounding air temperature, shade, controlling stormwater runoff, providing habitat, and serving as stopover sites for migratory birds. For these reasons, and many more, woodlands are a critical but an apparently overlooked component of public health, social justice, and community wellbeing.
By sheer scarcity, green space is the most valuable resource in the City of Los Angeles and therefore the stewardship of these woodlands should be a priority. The City would be wise to realize that our health, wellbeing, and resilience may be directly tied to the urban forest. Nature in cities is not a luxury, but a necessity of human spirit, and is as vital to our lives as water and bread.
With the garden destroyed, the Children's Forest School is looking for a new home. But Los Angeles is short on parks, ranking 74th out of 100 cities. The shortage of wooded green space in Los Angeles, makes finding an appropriate new spot for the school a major challenge. The loss of trees and natural green spaces or woodlands is happening in bite-sized chunks throughout Los Angeles. A few trees here, a woodland there, a Forest School Garden at Elysian Park. It’s death of green space by a thousand cuts. When the habitats are carved up to make way for a storage shed, a big development or a backyard ADU, wildlife disappears, too. As we remove more and more and more, we get down to less and less.
You know something is terribly wrong when a Los Angeles City Councilmember says the “big mistake was not communicating with the community groups who frequent that space” before the City went all ‘Chainsaw Massacre’ on it. There is no disguising the hollowness of a City that says it cares about the environment and then destroys a woodland garden where the next generation of environmentalists learned and played. To state it bluntly, nature is not a priority, whatever lip service City policy makers may pay to it. Soon the City will be looking for the next woodland or stand of trees to rip the heart from.
(Diana Nicole is an ecological horticulturist and board member with the Los Angeles Audubon Society. She transforms gardens into living protests that reclaim the natural beauty and sustainability of California’s native woodlands and she works with attorneys to protect land and community to stop the unnecessary loss of trees and destruction of what’s left of California woodlands. She can be reached at [email protected].)
