by John Sparks
Saturday, December 6th witnessed Friends of Oaks Bottom’s last work party of the year. We convened at Tadpole Pond after rain sprinkles ended and patches of blue sky expanded overhead. The actual task was to get 150 red osier dogwood (Cornus sericea) starts in the ground as a first stab at mitigating the impending emerald ash borer disaster (see Ruth Howell’s blog post from last month).
We had several crew leaders, volunteers, three representatives from the Youth Conservation Crew (YCC), and Anne Marie Santos of the City’s stewardship program, a total of 19 people in all. We all moved to a part of the ash swale next to the paved North Woodland Trail. All over this area, ash trees have been identified with blue flagging. The emerald ash borer could kill the entire grove, so direct responses may include inoculating a select few of the trees, allowing others to get infected and then slowly die, and felling ash trees that might topple and become a hazard to passers by.
The job was fairly simple. We laid out pots with the bright red dogwood saplings in groups of five, shaped like the five on a die. Then we dug holes into the already soggy soil. After planting, we surrounded the plants with mulch to see them through until they are well established. Finally, we tagged each plant with a blue ribbon.
This job is directly connected to the ash borer issue. The City of Portland’s main response in natural areas will be to assume a full canopy die off of ash trees. (This will take several years.) However, planting shrubs will initiate a well-established understory that will then replace the ash trees and provide a different, but flourishing, vegetation zone in the affected areas.
At the end of the day, the YCC members demonstrated “live staking”, another way of establishing new stands of riparian plants like red osier dogwood and willow. They cut sections of a thin branch and then simply stuck them in the ground, burying one or two nodes of the branch from which roots might sprout. You can expect to see much more live staking and planting in the ash swales of Oaks Bottom in the coming months!
