Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

A Sunny & Successful Day of Native Plant Restoration in the ¡®Rainy Woods¡¯ of Sylvania

Posted by joe.culhane

This past Saturday the PCC Sylvania Habitat Restoration Team, under the leadership of Instructor April Ann Fong partnered with the Tryon Creek Watershed Council and planted nearly 300 native shrubs and groundcover. These native plants all help support local wildlife and especially our amazing pollinator friends, including butterflies, bees, and hummingbirds. Besides attracting all these wonderful pollinators, the stormwater quality in the area will be improved by these plantings as they help to capture water before it lands, and then filtering the water when it enters the soil around them.

The event had a great turnout that including several students, a few youth, and elders as well. The native plants themselves were financed through the City of Portland Bureau of Environmental Services¡¯ Community Watershed Stewardship Program grant that Terri Preeg Riggsby, the Tryon Creek Watershed Council Executive Director wrote for the project. Also in attendance was Weiwei Wang and her son, Weiwei was our guest Urban Planner and Stormwater Specialist from Beijing, China and was kind enough to lend some assistance and also came to learn from April and Terri on how they were addressing urban stormwater challenges and habitat restoration.

This truly was a wonderful and rewarding event. We are so fortunate to have April Ann Fong here at PCC. Her 25 years as an instructor along with her 22 years of improving the land on our campus (and so many other places here in Oregon) since founding the Sylvania Habitat Restoration Team have been a blessing. Besides helping to plant these native species that help the local natural areas, invasive species removal has also been an integral part of the Team¡¯s efforts. Because this event had so many good people ready to be of service we were able to finish the planting early and get into removing a great deal of unwelcome invasive plants like Herb Robert, Garlic Mustard, Nipplewort, and English Ivy so that our new friends in the forest could have a better chance to thrive.

It was a quite extensive list of natives species planted, some of the more familiar in the group were Oregon Grape, Sword Fern, Licorice Fern, Sorrel, Wild Ginger, Star-Flowered False Solomon¡¯s Seal, Western Trillium, Red Flowering Currant, Vine Maples, Salal, Nootka Rose, and Baldhip Rose.

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It truly is wonderful to see what can be accomplished when a group of people come together to take on a stewardship project like this. These are great reminders of ways we can create opportunities to find a sense of purpose and strengthen our communities while being of service to the larger world we are connected to. This is one of the key fundamental parts of creating a more sustainable future. And what perhaps was the most memorable part of this planting party, that is good advice for any activity we take on, was April’s reminder throughout the day to “Make sure you are planting with love in your heart”.