Saving the Forest on Forrest Dedication (and a little fairy dust) helps preserve green space in Lockeland Springs
By Leslie LaChance
O
nce there was a fairy forest at the end of Woodland Street in East Nashville’s Lockeland Springs neighborhood. Tall old trees caught the breezes as they swayed over fantastic fairy houses that captivated children’s imaginations. Students from Lockeland Elementary School learned about the natural world in an outdoor classroom. They scrambled around the rocky ruins of a 19th-century water bottling plant, splashed in the bubbling springs, and walked home dirty, wet, and happy. But in 2020, a tornado came through Lockeland Springs Park, felling the beautiful trees and carrying the fairy houses into the stormy sky. “The fairy forest was just flattened,” Noam Pikelny, a Lockeland Springs resident, says. “It was really sad. For a while, no one could get back there because the paths were blocked by the fallen trees.” To make matters worse, clean-up and tree-planting efforts were stalled by the COVID pandemic. One portion of the fairy forest, though, had survived. Or at least the folk assumed it was a surviving portion of the fairy forest. An
Photographs By Chuck Allen 36
theeastnashvillian.com March | April 2022
adjacent parcel of wooded land just northeast of the established Metro neighborhood park beckoned. A flatter expanse than the escarpment/valley location of the bottling plant ruins and springs, it boasts ephemeral streams, mature trees, a pond, and a thread of a path that ends at a stream-bordered Shelby Golf Course. It doesn’t have the same magic as Lockeland Springs Park proper, but it would do in a pandemic. And so, the people walked there among the trees and away from their computer screens. Then private property signs appeared, and the people despaired. They knew the land was no longer theirs, that developers had come at last to bulldoze the beloved trees. “People had comforted themselves in the face of all the other development with Lockeland Springs Park. ‘At least we’ll always have our magical fairy forest,’ we thought, every time another new house appeared. And then we lost our park as we knew it to the tornado. And it raised the stakes on the possible development of the adjacent parcel. It felt like a park expansion was more important than ever. We couldn’t bear the thought of losing this potential,” → Pikelny explains.
