Shortridge Park Is Still "The Sledding Hill" to Most of Wynnewood. It's Also an Accredited Arboretum Now.

If you grew up on this side of Lancaster Avenue, you know Shortridge Park by one feature: the hill. Kids have hauled sleds down that slope for generations, and the township's own listing for the property still describes it in exactly those terms, a sledding area and a nature park tucked along Shortridge Drive between Remington Road and East Wynnewood Road.

What that listing doesn't mention is that the same 12.3 acres now carries a second title. In 2025, Shortridge Memorial Park Arboretum was added to ArbNet's Morton Register, the international database that tracks accredited arboreta. The registry describes the site plainly, as a park with "a large collection of trees and woody shrub species" spread across a landscape that shifts from creek bank to dry ridge in the space of a few hundred yards. Forty-four tree species are now labeled on the ground. Most of the neighbors walking past them still think they're just walking a dog past a hill.

What Actually Earned the Designation

An arboretum accreditation isn't a plaque the township ordered and hung up. It requires a documented, maintained collection of woody plants, and Shortridge has one: 44 labeled species, 26 of them native to North America, running from sugar maples old enough to mark the property's former life as farmland to a stand of dawn redwoods planted along the creek bank more than 70 years ago. The park's own terrain does a lot of the work here. It's long and narrow, sloping gently from a steep dry ridge down to a rocky-bottomed stretch of the East Branch of Indian Creek, which means a single walk down Shortridge Drive passes through several distinct micro-ecosystems rather than one uniform patch of lawn.

Walk it this fall and you'll pass, among others:

• Ginkgo bilobas and amur cork trees near the upper path
• American sycamores, American elms, and Eastern hemlocks along the slope
• Red oaks pushing close to 200 years old
• Kentucky coffee trees and black tupelos scattered through the mid-section
• A run of mature eastern white pines planted not long after the park was first established
• Young swamp white oaks that self-seeded along the creek and are only now getting protective cages and mulch

None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened because Lower Merion Township allocated a line item for it.

The Group That Built It, Tree by Tree

The Shortridge Civic Association has run a volunteer program called Friends of Shortridge Park since the winter of 2022. Registered through the township's official Friends of Lower Merion Parks system, the group's job is unglamorous: pull invasive vines, plant natives, cage saplings, walk the creek and pick up trash. What's notable is who keeps showing up to do it.

A summer cleanup day in August 2025 drew more than 20 volunteers who worked the meadow, cleared invasive growth near the Remington Road bridge, and walked the creek collecting debris. A spring cleanup paired with the Darby Creek Valley Association's annual watershed cleanup brought out 22 volunteers, including Cub Scouts and students from The Agnes Irwin School and Marple Newtown High School. In March, teenagers from Beth Am Israel synagogue spread hardwood chips around more than 20 self-seeded swamp white oak saplings along the creek. By fall 2025, the Lower Merion Conservancy had donated more than 40 additional trees and shrubs, among them staghorn sumac, sweetbay magnolia, and arrowwood viburnum, all planted by the same rotating cast of neighbors and students.

The science side has kept pace with the planting. With support from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and a Pennsylvania Environmental Protection Environmental Education Grant, the Lower Merion Conservancy worked with Dr. Steve Goldsmith of Villanova University to install water quality monitoring equipment in the creek, tracking how road salt runoff affects the waterway over time. A volunteer also maintains a rain gauge on site that reports daily to the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, one of roughly 26,000 such stations nationwide.

None of this is the kind of thing a passerby notices. It's the kind of thing that shows up three years later as an arboretum designation, after enough native plants have taken root and enough invasive alders have been cut down near that same Remington Road bridge to change what the landscape actually is.

What the Township Hasn't Caught Up To Yet

For a park with an international accreditation, Shortridge is still remarkably undeveloped. Aside from a handful of benches and a few stone and steel pedestrian bridges, there are no permanent structures. There's no sidewalk along Shortridge Drive itself. The park never had a formal master plan until the township recently opened one for public input, and the list of things residents have asked for tells you a lot about what's actually missing: a sidewalk, a bike lane along Shortridge Drive, a picnic area, a fenced off-leash space, and expanded riparian buffers along the creek.

Separately, the township has been working through a multi-phase project to stabilize the eroding banks of the East Branch of Indian Creek as it runs the length of the park, using natural channeling and native plant buffers rather than hard armoring. The final phase is scheduled to proceed as funding becomes available, which is township language for "not yet."

The arboretum, in other words, grew up faster than the infrastructure around it. That's arguably the more honest description of Wynnewood as a whole this year: a place where a volunteer-run tree collection can earn a spot on an international registry while the sidewalk two feet away is still just a request on a wish list.

Walking It This Fall

If you haven't been down Shortridge Drive since before the ArbNet listing went up, this is a reasonable month to go back. The dawn redwoods along the creek bank turn a rust orange before dropping their needles, the sugar maples along the upper path do what sugar maples do, and the ginkgos will hold their yellow for a shorter window than you'd expect before dropping it all at once. Parking is street parking, the terrain is uneven in spots where the wet transition zone meets the dry ridge, and there's still no sidewalk, so mind the road on the narrower stretches near the bridges.

If you want to see the collection with some context, the Friends of Shortridge Park page posts seasonal updates on what's been planted and where, and the group is generally glad to have more hands at the next cleanup day. The township's master plan page is also open if you have an opinion about that sidewalk.

This is the kind of detail that doesn't show up on a listing sheet or a walk score. It's also exactly the kind of thing that makes a neighborhood feel like more than its median price when you've lived here long enough to notice it changing. If you're weighing a move in or around Wynnewood and want a read on a specific block, a specific street, or a specific park's worth of context, reach out to Arielle Roemer to schedule a consultation.