Boston forest gets its own app

The Harvard Gazette reports on a new smartphone app to guide people around Bussey Brook Meadow, a 24-acre parcel across from the main portions of the Arnold Arboretum, between South Street and the small side streets off Washington Street on the Roslindale/Jamaica Plain line.

The app, developed by Peter Del Tredici, retired senior scientist at the Arboretum, and artist Teri Rueb, guides users through the wilder side of Harvard's holdings in the area:

The site looks like a natural forest, thick with trees, shrubs, and undergrowth, but it’s a modern concoction of native and non-native species, of escaped plantings from the surrounding city - the Forest Hills T stop is just across the street - and even fugitive specimens from the Arboretum’s collections.

The app, called Other Order, is available for both iOS and newer versions of Android.

Bussey Brook runs through the meadow, at least some of the time:

It eventually goes down an eight or nine-foot drop into a culvert, which joins up with the equally underground Stony Brook.

As you can see, even though this is a wild area, humans have made their presence felt. This secluded valley has a fire pit surrounded by empty Pabst Blue Ribbon and Natty Ice cans - and the remains of a frozen dinner.

The tracks where Orange Line trains get stored run along one side of the woods:

Still, for all that, it's still easy to find vistas with no apparent human intervention: