Courtesy: Ginny Neil
“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.” —The Lorax
At this time of year my thoughts always turn to searching for the perfect evergreen, but today I find myself thinking about a totally different kind of tree.
I am in Lexington, Virginia, and my arms are full of white tubes. The weather is surprisingly warm for a December day and before long I will be sweating but, for now, I am listening to instructions from Sarah Coffey. She is in charge of me, and my tubes, and all of the saplings nestled in brown paper at my feet.
We are standing at the base of a very steep hill. Did I say steep? A better word to describe the ground in front of me might be vertical. The madness that has brought me here is the fact that I am still about seven hours shy of the volunteer time required to keep my Master Naturalist certification current. I usually choose much more sedate activities to earn my pin, but extreme hills are the cost of procrastination.
So here I am helping a landowner protect this hill from erosion by planting a variety of hardwoods along its sheer face. Coffey directs me to place a tube at every one of the 85 flags up and down the small mountain in front of me. After the first two tubes, it feels like a great way to get a little aerobic exercise. Ten tubes later, it just feels like hard work.
After she and I finish dropping the tubes off, I walk over to sit down and cool off by buckets of saplings wrapped in brown paper. Their labels read like a song list: sourwood, pin oak, red maple, persimmon and downy serviceberry. These trees are all native to the area and are being established here as a result of the state-sponsored Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program (CREP).
Soon, we are joined by groups of students who have come from nearby Washington and Lee University. They are here because one of their professors requires them to complete 20 hours of community service, but they seem happy to be out on such a beautiful day. It is exam week and, as one student exclaims, “Digging in the dirt is way better than staring at notes.”
The addition of these energetic young adults makes the afternoon feel less like an impossibility and more like a party. As they stride up and down the hill with their shovels and saplings, they laugh and call out to each other. I learn their names and majors. A few are headed into careers that will put them back out into the natural world, but for many of them the act of planting something is a brand new activity. They speak about what they are doing today with reverence in their voices.
The final step is to drop one of those 85 tubes down over each sapling to form a mini greenhouse. Coffey wraps bird net across the tops because bluebirds love perching on the tubes. A pretty thought until you learn that the birds often tumble in and can’t escape such close quarters. The netting will keep them safe.
Help Build Riparian Buffers
The Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program is a nationwide effort to improve water quality and habitats in North America. In Virginia, it helps provide money and manpower for establishing areas, called riparian buffers, along streams and wetlands that will filter and slow erosion and runoff. If you have land and are interested in helping to enhance Virginia’s wate4rways for the future you can find more information by scanning the QR code below or visiting the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation website.
The story above first appeared in our November / December 2022 issue.
