We seek peace in our own lives through meditation and the study of the Dharma (the traditional Buddhist teachings). We contribute to peace in our communities through ecological restoration, as a remedy for some of the violence done by development.
At our Wild Plant Nursery and the field sites that it serves, we work to conserve the native plant communities of the greater Washington region, home to one of the richest floras in eastern North America. Our Tree Bank / Hispaniola is conserving the forests of central Hispaniola, the richest surviving remnant of the Caribbean forest biome, a global biodiversity hotspot.
We see ecological restoration as essential to conservation because many natural areas are now too small and isolated to persist over the long term in their current state. In the greater Washington region, we are reestablishing forests and meadows on degraded sites. In central Hispaniola, our Tree Bank farmers are replanting native forest on their lands.
NOVEMBER
November 3: Our colleague Taylor Beach spent most of this Thursday in Fairfax County’s Big Rocky Run Stream Valley Park, near Awbrey Patent Drive, amending one of our stream buffer plantings. Taylor is Executive Director of Fairfax Releaf and a seasoned tree planter. Her crew of 12 volunteers put in 40 native trees and shrubs, all of them selected from our Wild Plant Nursery. Most of Taylor’s volunteers came from Loundon County’s Adaptive Recreation Program, which serves people with developmental disabilities. “I try to have an event with them every year,” she says, “and your site worked out very well as it wasn’t nearly as far for them to travel as most of our other sites.” (Awbrey Patent is not that far from the Loudon / Fairfax line.) Our initial Awbrey Patent planting dates from 2006, but we have had some trouble keeping the site in good shape. Mile-a-minute weed (Polygonum perfoliatum), an invasive alien vine, has been a big problem here, and powerful floods have carried off our tree-tubes, uprooting seedlings in the process or exposing them to deer browsing. So we were very pleased to have Taylor’s help! Taylor apologizes for the lack of a photo—“too busy digging!” But she reports that everyone had a good time and all the plants went in.
OCTOBER
Volunteers go after invasive alien vegetation in one of our tree plantings at Roundtree Park.
October 22: This Saturday at Roundtree Park, we hosted 33 volunteers from St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church, the University of South Carolina Alumni Association, and 10 local middle and high schools—all for a bout of invasives control. Roundtree is one of our stream-buffer sites; it’s in the Holmes Run drainage. We have several buffer plantings in the park, the oldest of which date from 2006. Some of our trees and shrubs are pretty good-sized now; if it weren’t for the “tree tubes” around many of them, you wouldn’t know that they had been planted in. Unfortunately, Roundtree’s invasives burden is also pretty good sized, and we have to go into the plantings periodically, to cut away the invasive vegetation so that it doesn’t overwhelm the native plants. Today, the volunteers did a fantastic job cutting vines—mainly porcelainberry (Ampelopsis brevipedunculata) and English ivy (Hedera helix), and taking down Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii), a big invasive shrub that infests much of the park’s streambank. Little by little, thanks to the volunteers, Roundtree is regaining its native cover!
SEPTEMBER
Bob Hassett works our little meadow planting on the south side of Long Branch. Note the sycamore trees behind Bob. We put those in just four years ago.
September 17: Lisa and nine volunteers returned to Rutherford Park, to do an enrichment planting in one of our stream-buffer sites along Long Branch Stream. Rutherford includes three of our buffer sites, one of which is planted as forest, one as meadow, and the other, on the south bank of Long Branch, includes both forest and a little patch of wet meadow. This is the patch that the volunteers were working in this Saturday. They did a great job; they put in about 70 native herbaceous (non-woody) meadow plants, including Desmodiums, mistflower, seedbox, cardinal flower, and sneezeweed. (And no, as far as we know, proximity to sneezeweed does not seem to induce sneezing.) All of the stock was propagated at our Wild Plant Nursery. The volunteers also pulled out quite a lot of Japanese stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum), an invasive alien species. We have been working this site, off and on, for four years, since it was released from mowing, and our plants are doing really well. But the stiltgrass is a big problem—and not one that we can readily solve. Even if we were to clear all the stiltgrass out of the site, more stiltgrass seed would arrive the next time Long Branch flooded—a pretty frequent occurrence. So for now, we’re just trying to keep our plants growing, in the hope that they’ll displace some of the invasives.
Lauren, Rodney, Jerry, et al. emerge from Waples Mill with bags of seed bound for our Wild Plant Nursery.
September 15: Lisa, a group of about a dozen Arlington Regional Master Naturalists, and Lauren, our new George Mason University intern, spent several hours collecting seed from Fairfax County’s Waples Mill Park, in the Difficult Run drainage. Waples Mill is a Fairfax County stream-buffer site; it also contains a large area, formerly in turf, that was released from mowing a couple of years ago, and that is coming back as wet meadow. Lisa reports that the place looks pretty good—which is why it was on her seed-collecting agenda. The haul this time included a couple of native grass species (deertongue and southern rye), and elephant’s foot, a forb that likes moist areas in sun or partial shade and that, in our judgement, must have received its common name from people wholly unfamiliar with elephants.
FEBRUARY
Multiflora rose and brambles get a thorough haircut at Rutherford Park, along Long Branch Stream.
February 27: Lisa and a group of hard-working high school students spent this Sunday morning at Rutherford Park, which includes a couple of our stream buffer sites. Lisa and company were trying to finish up one item on our spring agenda: Suppressing multiflora rose and brambles along a small section of Long Branch stream, in one of those buffer plantings. Multiflora rose is a large, thorny shrub native to East Asia; it is highly invasive in mid-Atlantic forests and fields. The brambles at Rutherford—also large and thorny—are native. We don’t want to eliminate the brambles, but they have taken over a substantial section of our planting and we need to push them back somewhat. (We would love to eliminate the rose, but we have sense enough not to put that on our spring agenda.) As for the item that was on the agenda, Lisa reports that we can check it off. The rose and brambles are down and “the kids were great! I actually had to stop them and tell them to go home.” All finished. At least for now.
JANUARY
Volunteers free our saplings from a bramble patch at Rutherford Park.
January 30: A dozen hardy volunteers came out with us to Fairfax County’s Rutherford Park, to help cut back bramble and multiflora rose in one of our stream buffer sites along Long Branch stream. We first planted this area in 2007. Most of the planting has done well, but over the course of the past growing season, the rose and bramble had begun to overwhelm parts of the planting. Rosa multiflora is an invasive alien species and a widespread pest of forest and meadow in the mid-Atlantic. The bramble species on this site is native, and a good thing to have. We weren’t trying to eliminate it—we just wanted to push it back a little. The volunteers took down most of last season’s bramble growth and managed to free up five or so bramble-encumbered saplings. Despite the thorny ambiance, everyone left pretty well puncture-free.