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Volunteering for Education, Ecology & Community: City of Chico Parks Division, Mt. Lassen CNPS & Chico High School Native Plant Restoration Project

In this day and age of budget and labor cuts in all areas of society: private, city, state, federal, non-profit and corporate, volunteers are often the stopgap measures between families and organizations grinding to a dismal halt or continuing on. Volunteerism can work well or it can work not-so-well depending on myriad circumstances and variables. When volunteerism works well, it’s a thing of beauty, bringing benefit to the volunteers themselves, the organization for which they are volunteering and to the greater community in which they live.

Successful volunteerism and the betterment of our community – as well as one of our region’s well-known plant communities – are just a few of the rewards of an almost-4-year partnership between the City of Chico Parks Department, the Chico High School Agriculture program, and the Mt. Lassen Chapter of the California Native Plant Society (CNPS).

Lise Smith-Peters is the Management Analyst/Volunteer Coordinator for the City of Chico Park Division – this month celebrating her 6th anniversary with the division. At the bottom of each of her emails is this quote, which speaks volumes: “If our hopes of building a better and safer world are to become more than wishful thinking, we will need the engagement of volunteers more than ever.”
~Kofi Annan, Secretary of the United Nations.

While Chico has many parks, Bidwell Park is by far Chico’s best known and even in the context of the larger North State region, Bidwell Park is something of a jewel-in-our-crown, as it were. Bidwell Park figures highly in Lise’s day to day duties and priorities. For more than three years now, Lise has been working with Quinn Mendez, teacher and Department Chair of the Agriculture program at Chico High School, and with Paula Shapiro, Horticultural Chair of the Mt. Lassen Chapter of the CNPS, on a collaboration restoring native plantings in a handful of designated sites within Bidwell Park.

The success and elegance of this tri-partnered program lies in the fact that while areas of Bidwell Park are being actively restored, the program is simultaneously teaching high school students interested in agriculture and plants valuable lessons and skills through professional mentoring and hands-on work at school and in the “field”.

As we all know, public services, including schools and parks as part of county, state and federal spending in the North State, have been particularly hard hit by the economy of the past five years. The way I see it, creative solutions such as this partnership in Bidwell Park is a win-win-win-win: for students, for parks, for teachers, and for our communities.

One of the on-going restoration sites that this partnership is working on is Sycamore Glen, not far from the Caper Acres playground, for those familiar with the park. When I visited with the 2010-2011 crew of high school juniors and seniors involved in the program, it was a glorious March day. The crew of 6 students was actively re-planting the edges of this riparian area along Big Chico Creek as it makes its way through the heart of the park. The students laughed, chatted, got their hands dirty and happily showed me around the cleared site where they were planting native willow, gum plant (Grindelia robusta), red bud (Cercis occidentalis) and grasses.

Lise tells me that collaboration began when “I contacted Quinn in the summer of 2008 and we brainstormed the idea of having the students learn how to propagate and grow native plants plants for the park. That fall we had the whole class working on the project and it was really crazy. So the next year, we decided to offer it as a special component to her regular horticulture class and now we have about 6-8 students in the program each year. And they work with me the whole year.”

In the course of a year, the students involved learn about native plants and their role in the ecology of a site. For instance, Lise describes: “Last October, I took the 2011-2012 group for a field day in Bidwell Park where I showed them the Sycamore Restoration site and they learned about various characteristics of the mature plants and what the plants have been used for — whether for restoration — willows and santa barbara sedge (Carex barbarae) or for medicinal purposes – mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris)!”

Through their daily in-school classes and their handful of field days in the park throughout the school year, students learn about invasive plants and methods for removing and/or eradicating them. “When we started, Sycamore Glen was completely covered in 6′ high Himalayan blackberry,” explained Lise. Himalayan blackberry, as most people know, is a non-native invasive pest of a plant that chokes stream banks throughout the area. Sycamore Glen was cleared of the blackberry before replanting could begin. The students subsequently learn about erosion and its effects along a riparian corridor after such clearing, and the importance of re-planting for the health of the site’s soil, water quality and habitat. They learn about the propagation of plants by seed and by cutting. On this year’s crew’s first day in the field “They took cuttings of some of the plants and then put them into soil in the greenhouse” to grow along until they are big enough to plant out this spring. They also learn about growing plants from seed, as well as how to collect and care for that seed: “This group has been working with me and volunteer native plant advisor, Paula Shapiro, since August. We teach them about how to propagate a variety of different native plant seeds that volunteers including Wes and Jim Dempsey, Adrienne Edwards, myself and my park intern, collect in Bidwell Park throughout the year.”

The students learn other basics of general horticulture: “We plant or transplant once a week between Chico High greenhouses and the park site. Last week Denice Britton, Chico’s Urban Forest Manager, came in and taught the whole class how to plant a western sycamore (Platanus racemosa) properly after it had become root bound.”

“We are growing over 18 different California natives right now – all sourced from the park itself. All of these will go back into restoration sites throughout the park and at park entrances,” Lise tells me, with pride. The only non-park sourced natives are some of the grasses used for restoration, including purple needle grass (Nasella pulchra), meadow barley (Hordeum brachyantherum), and creeping wild rye (Elymus glaucus) are grown from seed from Hedgerow Farms in Winters, California. This from-site sourcing not only decreasing the amount of money the project spends, it also ensures that the plant selections are adapted to the area and of the same locally-native strains, so that the genetic pool of native plants is not disturbed.

The 2010-2011 Bidwell Park student restoration crew included Philipp, Dana, Hailey, Kyle and Raina. The 2011-2012 crew includes Bree, Roxie, Tiffany, JT, Andrew, Jacob and again this year Kyle. During both my site visit with the 2010-2012 crew, and with Kyle and Tiffany from the 2011-2012 crew during the radio interview portion of this segment, what most struck me was that plants and horticulture were not the most important lessons being taken away by the these students from this experience. More important seemed to be their deeper levels of appreciation for the park, for the native and wild areas of the North State which they could now look at and feel connected to and knowledgeable about, and for the great satisfactions of hard work for something you believe in. They all seemed to express a deeper appreciation for the critically important interconnectedness of things. The interconnectedness of the groups mentoring and educating the students; the interconnectedness of plants and the health and beauty of the environment.

Appreciation is likewise what I took away from this story. Appreciation for the dedication and creativity of the many adults involved in this project, but especially Lise, Quinn and Paula. Appreciation for these students and their spirit of volunteerism as they learn their way into their own adulthoods. They are building a better world, they are the change we want to see.

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In a North State Garden is a weekly Northstate Public Radio and web-based program celebrating the art, craft and science of home gardening in Northern California. It is made possible in part by the Gateway Science Museum – Exploring the Natural History of the North State and on the campus of CSU, Chico. In a North State Garden is conceived, written, photographed and hosted by Jennifer Jewell – all rights reserved jewellgarden.com. In a North State Garden airs on Northstate Public Radio Saturday mornings at 7:34 AM Pacific time and Sunday morning at 8:34 AM Pacific time. Podcasts of past shows are available here.

Jennifer Jewell

In a North State Garden is a bi-weekly North State Public Radio and web-based program celebrating the art, craft and science of home gardening in Northern California and made possible in part by the Gateway Science Museum - Exploring the Natural History of the North State and on the campus of CSU, Chico. In a North State Garden is conceived, written, photographed and hosted by Jennifer Jewell - all rights reserved jewellgarden.com. In a North State Garden airs on Northstate Public Radio Saturday morning at 7:34 AM Pacific time and Sunday morning at 8:34 AM Pacific time, two times a month.

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