Wildwood’s Witchy Path an oasis worth saving

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This article was published 19/11/2021 (1549 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A small protected green space in Wildwood gives visitors a true forest feeling within city limits. Manchester Park, often called the Witchy Path/Woods, allows native species the space to thrive while giving neighbourhood residents a place to rejuvenate.

The green space lies between Manchester Boulevard North and South, with a pathway through the woods from Wildwood Street to the Oakenwald School grounds.

How did this little forest escape the chopping block and survive in a time of urban sprawl?

For some background knowledge, I spoke with Hugh Penwarden, a former professional gardener who lives across from the park.

Penwarden referred to the hard-to-come-by book Wildwood Park through the Years, which provides a history of the Wildwood area. A 1928 street plan for Wildwood featured a traditional linear street system, with Manchester Park as the grand entrance. Developers built the proposed roads from this street plan, but only four houses on either side of Manchester Park were constructed at the time.

A newly conceptualized Wildwood was fully developed after the Second World War. Manchester Park wasn’t wide enough to fit two rows of houses with a laneway in between, which may be why the forest survived.

In the early 1950s, Penwarden says, some bulldozers began to take down the trees in the park, but women in the neighbourhood stood at the forest edge to prevent the operation. Soon after, Penwarden’s father, Hugh Sr., became a member of the Fort Garry Parks Board (Winnipeg wouldn’t unite as a city until the 1970s), and the board had the woodlands designated as a park.

The City of Winnipeg’s Natural Areas of Winnipeg map (www.winnipeg.ca/publicworks/maps/naturalareas.asp) considers the park a high-quality forest with oak, aspen and riverbottom forest. You can use this interactive map to discover native and invasive species found in this one small patch of forest and other parks citywide.

As with other easily accessible green spaces, people dump stuff in the park. Even throwing away garden waste causes problems. Penwarden says the benign-sounding Lily of the Valley is currently upsetting the park ecosystem and diversity.

Given the busyness of daily life, we often experience much of our exposure to nature close to home. Like other green spaces throughout the city, Manchester Park provides access to the natural world that seems an innate human need. Such spaces are worth protecting.

Kirby Gilman is a community correspondent for Wildwood. Email her at kirby.gilman@shaw.ca