A giant in green circles, he's happy to choke poison ivy
Don Lubin, a soft-spoken man who quietly cultivates ferns in the garden in his Allston yard and roams the woods of New England cataloging fern species, is not one to fly into rages. He is likable enough that in April, when he invited former tenants to celebrate his 40th anniversary of owning his three-family house, 27 showed up.
But poison ivy infuriates him, at least in Allston's Ringer Park.
"I'm willing to share the woods with it - it feeds the birds - but it doesn't belong in parks," Lubin says.
Four years ago while looking for ferns among the park's steep hills and granite boulders, he found poison ivy growing everywhere. Vines covered a dead tree, dangled over the entrance, crawled across the wooded paths and climbed a stone wall, creeping onto the sidewalk along Allston Street. He imagined people brushing against it as they hurried to work and dogs running through it, getting the oil on their fur and transferring it to children's faces.
"I just got so angry about all that poison ivy in a public park, and it was obvious that no one - not the city, not the residents - had done anything about it for 50 years."
But instead of stewing over it, he recalled the lesson he learned as a child on a family road trip. His father discovered a filthy sink in a gas station men's room and scrubbed it clean. He told young Don that because the sink was available free to the public, everyone shared responsibility for it.
In that spirit, Lubin took on the poison ivy that covered nearly a quarter of the 12-acre park.
"I know what it looks like, I'm physically able and I have the flexibility to devote the time to it," he said.
The loss of the public's enjoyment of those acres was especially damaging in Allston, where parkland is scarce and residents have to cross Soldiers Field Road to reach much of it.
The neighborhood has 25 percent greater population density and 40 percent less open space than Boston at large, according to Kate Jordan, green space advocate for the Allston Brighton Community Development Corporation.
Lubin joined a community group, the Friends of Ringer Park, to find support for eradicating the poison ivy, and led four members on an all-out assault one day in 2004.
They tore up the noxious plants by their roots and sawed down 3-inch-thick vines that snaked 40 feet up tree trunks. At day's end, one volunteer landed in the hospital with a severe rash.
Still, Lubin persevered. Twice a week for four summers, he returned with a dull garden pruner, the perfect tool for grabbing vines and yanking them up while keeping them at arm's length.
When shoots kept coming back, he resorted to herbicides.
"If I don't have to use it, I prefer not to. It blows around and affects other plants," he said. But he finds it necessary in persistent patches.
He called the city's Department of Parks and Recreation and convinced officials to have a maintenance crew spray along the paths, and he personally sprayed in less-accessible places, thanks to a donation of herbicide from Model Hardware in Allston.
After about 100 hours of his volunteer time, it looks like the poison ivy is almost wiped out. He sprayed 13 small patches last week. However, it still lurks in a stand of trees owned by the West End House Boys & Girls Club, adjacent to the park. Lubin has urged the management to eradicate it to keep it from coming back on park land.
Jordan, who helped pull up vines that first day, nominated him for a Boston Green Award, which he received this spring.
"Don is the perfect embodiment of the award, a green resident through and through," said Jordan. The award was officially for his garden, with 43 species of ferns, but she also wanted to acknowledge the eradication project and his survey work.
Lubin's fascination with ferns began in seventh grade when he found a perfectly preserved fossil of one at an old strip mine near Coal City, Ill.
He started his garden with a lady fern, a gift from his mother, in 1980. Each year, a few plants die off over the winter. One spring, a maidenhair spleenwort didn't come back, but the next year, a new one popped up from the seeds of the original, a rare occurrence.
"That totally thrilled me," he said.
Lubin helps teach fern identification classes through the New England Wild Flower Society with Ray Abair, and has surveyed the fern, horsetail, and club-moss populations of 17 sites around New England, beginning with the Blue Hills Reservation in 1991. Most recently, botanist Bryan Hamlin tapped Lubin's expertise for a plant survey of Middlesex Fells in Stoneham. An 1896 flora census identified about the same number of species as the current one, but some have disappeared, and invasive plants have replaced them.
"I think it is important to be careful about recording the biodiversity status we have now, so we will at least know how it is changing," Lubin said. He believes that the greatest global mass extinction since the dinosaurs may be underway, a product of global warming and pollution.
That painful notion seemed far away on a recent afternoon in his garden. Lubin spotted a beetle trundling through the leaf litter and greeted it like an old friend.
His respect for living things includes the plant he has battled for four years, often contracting its itchy, oozing rash.
"I don't like to get too mystical about things," he said, "but I've done enough damage to the poison ivy, so if it does some to me, that's fair."
