DECEMBER

December 10: The Springfield Connection published a profile of the Sangha!

NOVEMBER

We have launched a major renovation of our Tree Bank nursery on the island of Hispaniola, along the Dominican Republic – Haiti border. We are installing new shade cloth, a large cistern to store water on-site, and we hope eventually to buy a used pickup truck to transport materials into the nursery—and seedlings out of it. The renovation should roughly double the nursery’s capacity, which of course will make it a much more useful resource to the poor, rural community that it serves. If you’re interested in tropical forest restoration, now would be a great time to become a Tree Bank Partner!

November 7: We replanted the Rain Garden at the Marie Butler Leven Preserve. The garden was installed in 2007 as part of our Native Arboretum project. Unfortunately, the garden’s soil mix did not perform as expected, so the Northern Virginia Soil and Water Conservation District, the Fairfax County Park Authority, and the Sangha collaborated on a remodeling effort, which concluded with this new planting. For an updated account of the Rain Garden project, run the Rain Garden slide show on the Native Arboretum page.

November 1: We wrapped up this fall’s Fairfax County stream-buffer planting season on Saturday by adding more trees and shrubs to a site originally planted last year, on the grounds of a water treatment plant in the Lorton area. All of this season’s plantings went in without a hitch; some 250 volunteers installed 1,270 native trees and shrubs, representing 37 species, on six sites, amounting to just under 2.6 acres. Nearly all the stock was propagated at our Wild Plant Nursery. We are very grateful to everyone who participated. Special thanks to staff and students of the Lake Braddock Secondary School Environmental Science program, volunteers from Network Solutions and George Mason University’s New Century College, our colleagues at Greater DC Cares—and, of course, the Sangha’s own indefatigable volunteers!

OCTOBER

October 25-26: Over the weekend, about 130 people, most of them volunteers from the Lake Braddock Secondary School Environmental Science program, turned out to help reestablish forest buffer along part of a tributary to Flatlick Branch. The buffer site is on the grounds of the Franklin Middle School, in western Fairfax County. These people did a fantastic job! They put in about 440 little trees and shrubs.

Sunday, October 12: Lisa Bright led a group of students from Lake Braddock Secondary School and some of the Sangha’s own volunteers on a seed collecting expedition at Huntley Meadows. The main objective was to collect seed of the native Indian grass (Sorghastrum nutans)—and participants emerged from the seven-foot stands of grass with numerous shopping bags stuffed with seed. The seed will be used at Huntley for meadow restoration. We're currently collecting seed from about a dozen other species at Huntley as well. (See September, below.)

Dominion Power held its local "Environment Day" in support of our Native Arboretum at the Marie Butler Leven Preserve—and achieved several major advances for our project all at once. Here, a Dominion crew clears the invasive groundlayer from the Preserve's Pollinator Garden Forest.

October 9: Dominion Power held its local 2008 "Environment Day" at Fairfax County’s Marie Butler Leven Preserve, in support our Native Arboretum project. Some 50 Dominion employees joined us for one of the most successful days in our four years at the Preserve. Dominion crews cleared a dense paperbark mulberry infestation, cut down various other invasive alien trees, sectioned downed logs for trail repair and erosion control, built two huge raised beds for propagating the Preserve’s native herb layer on site, mulched the “pollinator garden forest,” installed our first set of botanical signs, and hauled off two enormous dumpster-loads of invasive slash. An incredible day! Dominion also made us a $2,500 grant for our local restoration work. Our thanks to all our Dominion participants—and to Fairfax County Dranesville District Supervisor John Foust, who came out to tour the project.

Our fall 2008 stream buffer plantings are off to a great start—as you can see from the photo above, which shows students and staff of George Mason University's New Century College putting in a buffer planting at Roundtree Park, in the Annandale Section of Fairfax County. (Roundtree is in the Holmes Run drainage.)

SEPTEMBER

The staff of the Fairfax County Park Authority’s Huntley Meadows Park has asked us to become the propagator for a major restoration project scheduled to begin at Huntley next year. Our role will be to gather seed from a wide range of the Park’s native-plant populations, grow the plants out at our nursery, then plant them back into the Park in areas where revegetation is necessary. Working at Huntley Meadows is a huge deal for us because Huntley encloses one of the largest non-tidal wetlands remaining in our region. We are very pleased to have been invited in, and we’ve already started collecting seed.

The Bureau of Land Management, an agency within the Department of the Interior, has awarded the Sangha a contract for restoration work at the BLM's Lower Potomac Field Station on northern Virginia's Mason Neck Peninsula. Our work will focus on forest restoration and mitigation of stormwater run-off. This is a large, long-term project; we are excited to be working with the BLM, and we're looking forward to getting started!

September 28: Our Wild Plant Nursery Open House, held on Sunday, was a big success—to judge from both the attendance and the emphatic but understated enthusiasm for native plants that is a distinguishing feature of our gatherings. (It takes practice to sense these things.) In the photo above, Lisa (small figure in green T-shirt and funny hat) explains everything about plants to some of our guests. Our special thanks to Valerie, Melissa, and Elizabeth for creating this event!

Both the vegetable and animal denizens of our Wild Plant Nursery are flourishing, thanks largely to the enormous growing troughs that Philip and Kris have been building. Those things are big—70 feet long—and they hold a lot of plants. Among our animal collaborators: assorted turtles, toads, frogs, and butterflies. The wooden structure at left is part of a meditation and picnic platform.

AUGUST

Native plant and wildlife gurus Rod Simmons and Greg Zell took us seed-collecting in August, in the Roaches Run Waterfowl Sanctuary, near National Airport. (Yes, well, we didn't believe it either.) Among the species we collected was Virginia sweetspire (Itea virginica), the red-leaved shrub on the left. That's a new species for us. The red-flowering herb directly in front of the tree is a cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis). We grow that too.

Suzanne Holland, at the Hidden Oaks Nature Center in Fairfax County, Virginia, sent us this photo of a monarch butterfly caterpillar on one of the milkweed plants that we donated to Hidden Oaks earlier this year. (We distributed several thousand milkweed and boneset plants to local parks last spring.) Hidden Oaks used our plants for their new Monarch Way Station. Apparently, the station is working!

Many thanks to all 21 of our new collaborators from Georgetown University, for coming out to our Native Arboretum project on August 21st. Field leader Joshua Peary did a fantastic job organizing this event, and it gave our work out there a big boost, as you can see from the photo above. The Georgetown crew nearly completed the invasives-control effort over about half an acre of forest. By next spring, this area should be replanted and integrated into the Arboretum’s Restored Habitat Area.

JULY

Our thanks to Ray Mims and colleagues at the US Botanic Garden for supplying our Wild Plant Nursery with all those wonderful pots! (During the week of the 21st, USBG staff delivered a large and impeccably cleaned shipment of used plant containers to our nursery.) Ray says that additional contributions of used pots should be feasible. That's very good news for us, since pots are expensive if you have to buy them in large quantities. The reuse option also helps us make our operation "greener," by reducing our demand for new plastic. (Plastic pots are made from oil.) We're very grateful to USBG!

Our colleague Jeanette Stewart, President of Lands and Waters, recently sent us this photo of the pollinator bed at the Kimball School. Jeanette says that there is still a huge amount of work to do on the Kimball grounds. We don’t doubt it—but Jeanette’s extraordinary creativity and stamina are clearly pushing things in the right direction.

At the Native Arboretum, our Restored Habitat Area continued to expand, thanks to Sangha intern Joe Hayes, our numerous heat-resistant volunteers, and a group of first-rate Park Authority invasives-control interns, one of whom is shown here raking out mulch.

JUNE

June 4: Severe storms badly damaged our Wild Plant Nursery. Both of our large shade structures were partly blown down, as was our main herb enclosure. But the next day, thanks to the efforts of: a group of hardy volunteers, our staff and Joe Hayes (our summer intern), and a team of interns “on loan” for the occasion from the Resource Management Division of the Fairfax County Park Authority, all of the nursery structures were reassembled, and are now back in full working order. And as far as we could see, not a single plant was lost!

MAY

Gaspar Pérez Aquino, our Tree Bank / Hispaniola Nursery Manager, reports a big success in our efforts to propagate local populations of the endangered tree, West Indian mahogany (Swietenia mahagoni): This season’s propagation effort has yielded nearly 500 mahogany seedlings so far—at a germination rate that is probably over 95 percent. Another 500 or so mahogany seeds will soon be sown.

At the Marie Butler Leven Preserve, the site of our Native Arboretum project, the "Divas" returned to work, weeding in an area near the top of the gorge in the forest on the eastern side of Preserve. The work of the Divas—aka Jody, Sheri, Donna, and Angie—is more complex than our other invasives-control projects at the Preserve because their area contains many valuable native plants, which they have to avoid disturbing.

We also launched our summer internship program at the Preserve. Joe Hayes, back from his freshman year at William and Mary, has joined us for two days of work per week. Joe is a veteran of the Preserve: He was on our Native Arboretum crew last summer, and we think he’s getting to know the park quite well.

The Prince Charitable Trusts informed us that we will receive a $10,000 grant for the continued development of our Wild Plant Nursery. This is the first grant that we have ever received from Prince. We are very pleased and grateful to have Prince as a partner in our efforts to conserve and restore local native-plant populations.

We were notified that the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors had included $20,000 in the County’s FY 2009 budget for the Sangha’s conservation activities within the County. The Sangha is collaborating with the County’s Urban Forestry Division to help the County reach its goal of increasing tree canopy coverage from its current level of 41 percent to 45 percent by 2047. We think this goal is going to create some very important opportunities, not only for tree preservation, but for local conservation in general. We’re excited to be part of this effort.

Lake Braddock High School students demonstrated their post-planting esprit de corps, at the BLM Lower Potomac Field Station. Their teacher, Maureen Goble, is second from left in the back row, behind the Sangha's Lisa Bright, kneeling in the foreground. Lisa and Maureen are developing our work at the BLM property as part of Lake Braddock's environmental science program.

May 18: In collaboration with the Bureau of Land Management and the Lake Braddock High School environmental science program, we did a forest-restoration planting on about half an acre of steeply sloped, degraded horse pasture at the BLM’s Lower Potomac Field Station in Lorton, Virginia. The planting is part of a long-term undertaking, in which the Sangha and the BLM plan to restore forest to a much larger area and reduce stormwater run-off on the Field Station property. This planting was done by Lake Braddock students who, as usual, did an excellent job. Our work on the entire project will be developed as a field-learning component of the Lake Braddock environmental science program.

APRIL

April 26: We finished our spring planting season at Wilburdale Park, along Backlick Run, with a half acre forest-restoration planting. Our spring 2008 season at Wilburdale was a big success, thanks especially to four very important partners: The Virginia Department of Forestry, which is generously funding our riparian plantings at Wilburdale this year, the Fairfax County Park Authority, which owns Wilburdale and has proved a tireless and very patient collaborator in our efforts there, the GW Community School, whose staff and students have been working with us to control invasives at Wilburdale for several years, and finally, Professor Lisa Williams and her Northern Virginia Community College botany class. Lisa and students were responsible for much of the restoration work at Wilburdale this spring. Our spring agenda in this park involved invasives control and planting over roughly one acre. We are very grateful to these collaborators and to all the other volunteers who came out. We hope to see them in the field again soon!

April 22: We wrapped up our Earth Day—or maybe we should say “Earth Week”—activities at the Marie Butler Leven Preserve, with a major invasives-control event for members of the EPA Superfund Community Involvement and Outreach Branch. This was our second EPA event at the Preserve this spring, and like the previous one, it was a huge success. Participants did a rough clearing of most of the area we call the “Witch-Hazel Forest.” (See the Native Arboretum page under “Project Activities.”)

MARCH

The Shared Earth Foundation renewed its support for our Wild Plant Nursery with another $10,000 grant. As the first foundation funder of our nursery, back in 2001, Shared Earth could rightly be regarded as a co-founder of it! We are very grateful for Shared Earth’s support over the past seven years—support that has been crucial to stabilizing and expanding the nursery program.

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