Our Meadowood Sites
The Sangha has both forest and meadow projects at Meadowood. To see where these projects are located, open the Meadowood Map. (The map uses large files, so a broadband connection is recommended.) All of our projects are long-term, and all involve some combination of invasive plant control and reestablishment of appropriate native plants. All of our planting stock is local-ecotype and produced at our own Wild Plant Nursery. (Our nursery stock is grown from seed, spore, and cuttings that we ourselves collect, with permission, from local natural areas.)
A brief description of each site follows. The descriptions are organized, roughly, by project start date, with the oldest projects listed first.
The Horse Barn Site
The Horse Barn Site includes about three quarters of an acre behind Meadowood’s large horse barn. Most of this area slopes and has been eroding because of the large volume of runoff that passes over it during heavy rains. At the base of the slope, just beyond the site, there is a seasonal stream—an unnamed tributary to Thompson Creek. (A seasonal stream flows during the wet seasons and dries out during the summer.) A narrow strip of forest encloses the stream, but the slope is steep and the band of forest is not broad enough to absorb large amounts of run-off, so the stream channel is badly eroded and very deep, which makes it unstable.
In collaboration with the Lake Braddock High School Environmental Science program and Meadowood staff, we began planting this area in May 2008, with the aim of reducing run-off and restoring the area to woody oldfield and, eventually, forest. (Woody oldfield is a transitional formation: it’s meadow on its way to forest.) Our planting includes a wide variety of native trees, shrubs, and herbaceous (nonwoody) plants. Meadowood staff also seeded the area with grasses to help control erosion while our plants grow.
The Ecological Display Site
The Ecological Display Site covers about four acres and lies close to the Horse Barn Site. When we started work here, in April 2009, the site was nearly featureless pasture, only recently fenced off from surrounding pastures. The pasture was covered entirely with a species of alien fescue, a kind of Eurasian grass introduced for grazing. The fescue is very tough and has proved both a blessing and a curse—a curse because it can outcompete the native herbaceous plants that we are trying to reestablish, and a blessing because it also outcompetes most of the other invasives that would otherwise make their way into the site. A long, serpentine depression—a little like a dry stream bed—runs through the center of the site, draining both the site itself and parts of the surrounding pastures. The depression empties into the seasonal stream mentioned above.
We are working to transform this site into a window on the ecology of the local coastal plain. Our plan calls for sample patches of several different native-plant communities: two forest types, an herbaceous meadow, a narrow, undulating “river of grass” to cover that depression, and tracts of woody oldfield. (Woody oldfield is an important habitat type that is increasingly rare in the Washington, DC, area.) All this ecological variety should pay off for animals as well as plants. Birds, amphibians, reptiles, small forest mammals, various native insects—all these creatures should eventually find a home within the site.
At the base of the river of grass feature, there is a stormwater collection pond that we hope can be managed to mimic a vernal pool. (Vernal pools go dry in the summer; they are very important habitats for amphibians because they do not contain fish. Many fish species prey on amphibians.) Other features of the site—actual or eventual—include check-dams (to help control stormwater run-off), interpretive and botanical signage, and a wheelchair-accessible trail. As with the Horse Barn Site, volunteers and interns from the Lake Braddock High School Environmental Science program are our principal partners on this project—along with Meadowood’s own staff, of course!
Eventually, the Horse Barn and Display Sites will be joined into a single planting. We began planting the area between them in spring 2009.
The Thompson Creek Site
The Thompson Creek Site is a riparian (stream-side) area along about one-third of a mile of Thompson Creek, deep in Meadowood’s forest. Although the site lies within a large forest, the trees along this part of the creek are dying because of chronic flooding. Here’s what is happening: heavy stormwater runoff is moving large volumes of sediment into the lower reaches of the creek, where it is clogging the channel and slowing the rate of drainage. The slower drainage is raising the water table, and that is killing the forest along the stream—partly because the trees’ roots grew out in response to a very different moisture regime, and partly because the current tree species composition is not well adapted to very wet conditions.
In April 2009, we started planting the area with a selection of native trees and shrubs better suited to current conditions. This should help arrest the loss of forest canopy and speed up the rate at which the forest adapts to the flooding.
The Little Meadow off Belmont Blvd.
The Little Meadow covers slightly less than an acre near Meadowood’s Belmont Blvd. office. Even though it is small, the Little Meadow is valuable because it is one of the few fields on the property that is not dominated by Eurasian fescue. Many native grasses and forbs occur here, intermingled, unfortunately, with many invasive grasses, forbs, and vines. (A forb is an herbaceous plant that is not a grass.) Various tree seedlings are also emerging in the Little Meadow. We have been working here since May 2010. We are removing the tree seedlings to prevent the meadow from reverting to forest; we are also controlling the invasives, and doing a little judicious planting.
The Big Meadow off Belmont Blvd.
The Big Meadow consists of about 17 acres of fescue-dominated field; it lies northeast of the Little Meadow. The Big Meadow is covered almost entirely by alien fescue, but along the northern edge, some tree seedlings and native grasses have managed to make their way in. Elsewhere, unfortunately, Chinese lespedeza (Lespedeza cuneata), an invasive alien forb, has formed several patches. A small stream runs down the center of the field; it is bordered by patches of marsh, which support the most diverse flora on the site. Much of this area is dominated by Rubus species (Rubus is the blackberry genus); there are also native sedges and rushes growing along the stream. We started working in the Big Meadow in April 2011. We are taking a “patch approach” here: we are discing (plowing up) patches of fescue and planting into the patches. We are also attempting to suppress the Chinese lespedeza by “solarizing” it (basically, baking it under a plastic cover).
The Gravel Quarry Meadow
This little meadow lies to the south of our Ecological Display Site and is reached by the same trail. It covers about three-quarters of an acre and lies in a depression created by gravel quarrying many years ago, when Meadowood was still a private farm. This area is already home to a diverse native-grass community but has been invaded by two species of native trees: sweetgum (Liquidamber styraciflua) and Virginia pine (Pinus virginiana). Both of these species are native, and Virginia pine is a kind of “pioneer species”—something that you would expect to find colonizing a site like this. Sweetgum is one of the most common trees in this part of Meadowood; it is very efficient at seeding itself into open habitat. Since we and Meadowood staff are committed to conserving this area as a meadow, we are taking down the sweetgum and thinning the Virginia pine. We are also extending the grasses upslope a little, just to prevent erosion. We started work in the Gravel Quarry Meadow in March 2011.
Where to Find More Information
For additional background on Meadowood, read the About Meadowood page. For more coverage of our projects, view the slide shows listed in the Links panel of the main Meadowood page. For recent activities, see the Meadowood News.
If you like what you’re reading—and what you can see in the Meadowood slide shows—we could really use your help! Take a look at the Volunteering at Meadowood page.