In Roslindale, far from the protests of Cambridge residents opposing Harvard’s growth, another development controversy has blossomed.

Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum has just released preliminary plans for three new buildings, including a state-of-the-art molecular research lab, in what would be its largest construction project since the 1960s.

But while this project puts the arboretum in step with University President Lawrence H. Summers’ vision of a florescence of sciences at Harvard, many neighbors worry that with this construction, their beloved parkland will go to seed.

Arboretum officials presented plans this month to add more than 50,000 square feet of labs, offices and classroom space to Harvard’s botanical outpost in the Roslindale and Jamaica Plain neighborhoods of Boston.

Arboretum Director Robert E. Cook told neighbors at a pair of meetings in the last two weeks that the arboretum would have to expand to stay competitive.

“Modern research requires that you use modern techniques,” Cook said in an interview this weekend. “Without lab facilities to do the best work, certainly those who use molecular approaches would not consider coming here.”

The proposed labs would allow research in phylogenetic systematics, tropical forest ecology, woody plant physiology and whole plant development—all blooming areas of botanical exploration that cannot be done justice in the arboretum’s current facilities, Cook said.

But neighbors are planning to block the project, protesting that the expansion will ruin the natural beauty of their neighborhood park.

More than 150 people attended the two community meetings, where they aired concerns about destruction of natural landscape, increase in traffic, construction nuisances and the impact on neighboring ecosystems.

Lisa Evans, a neighbor who describes herself as “the most vocal” opponent to the plan, fears that the arboretum’s new building on Weld Hill will ruin her beautiful view.

“If Bob Cook gets his way I’m going to look across the street... at scraggly little baby trees, and a road with pockets of parking,” she said. “I wouldn’t have bought my house if I had know I was going to have to put up with this.”

The controversy is, at its core, a tug of war between researchers interested in pushing back the frontiers of scientific discovery, and neighbors who will see the project’s impact in their own back yards.

Recent scientific trends have shifted the role of arboretums from one of collecting to one of interdisciplinary research. The explosion of genetics research in the past decade forces the arboretum, like all things botanical, to evolve if it wants to stay relevant.

The arboretum now collaborates with professors from the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, especially those from the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. But according to Cook, the planned facilities will lead to much fuller integration with the rest of the University, and probably to more undergraduate use.

“We’ve talked to President Summers about this,” said Cook, “It is certainly consistent with the larger emphasis of integration of the sciences.”