Class Field Trip

High School Park Restoration Manager Kevin (bearded, far left) with students

On Friday, November 7, I accompanied my Ecological Restoration students from the University of Pennsylvania on a field trip to High School Park in one of Philadelphia's "inner ring" suburbs.  I've written about High School Park in several earlier posts.  The park is the site of the municipality's original high school, which was abandoned when a new school was built in another location, fell into decrepitude, and was finally razed.  Since then, the 11-acre park has been adopted by a "Friends" group, which has been working to restore the riparian woodlands, up-slope forests, and hilltop plateau with native plants.

Stairs leading from former athletic fields to the hilltop location of the old school

Our guide for the trip was the Friends' Restoration Manager, Kevin.  Although the site is small, it is overrun with invasive plants.  Because the park is public property, Kevin is not authorized to use herbicides.  In addition, he has no help other than volunteers that he can cajole into working.  In my opinion (and experience), he's fighting a losing battle, but he is supremely dedicated to the work and to the Friends.

Along a mid-slope forest trail

Because the park is located in an "inner ring" suburb, its infrastructure is old.  The sewer line following the creek that runs along the north edge of the park is leaking, and the municipality must replace it.  Next spring, the municipality's contractor is going to excavate a massive trench alongside the creek and through a major portion of the park to install a new 5-foot concrete sewer pipe.  Any work that Kevin has accomplished to date there will be destroyed.  I'd find such a setback really disheartening, but Kevin sees the silver lining in these storm clouds because the construction will require streambank restoration and he thinks the park could actually end up better than it is now.

I'll withhold judgement until I get a chance to see the work.

Return to High School Park

High School Park Stewardship Manager Kevin preparing a dogwood live stake

A year ago, I brought my undergraduate Landscape Restoration students to High School Park, a 10-acre municipal park in a Philadelphia suburb that a non-profit "friends" organization adopted in order to re-establish native ecosystems on the site of the community's old high school.  At the end of our field trip in 2013, as I was preparing to leave, a young man came by walking his dog and we struck up a conversation.  It turned out that this fellow, Kevin, was enrolled in the graduate landscape architecture program at the university where I serve as an adjunct instructor, and that he had just applied for the part-time Stewardship Manager position at High School Park.

I needed some part-time help in my preserve, so I asked Kevin to call me if he found that he had some time.  Kevin got the job at High School Park, and he did some restoration work for me, too, all while trying to finish his Master's degree (which he will do next month).  So, when it came time for a field trip this year, I asked Kevin to escort my students - graduate students this year - around the park, which we did on a drizzly, cold April 3 morning.

An introduction to the restoration work

We spent a lot of time in the floodplain of Tookany Creek, which forms the northern border of the park.  Like all the streams in the Philadelphia suburbs, Tookany is a "flashy" stream that roars after rains and then dries up to nearly a trickle between storms.  Water quality is "impaired," a polite term for terrible.  The streambanks are constantly eroding, and much of the work in the park is dedicated to trying to stabilize them as best as possible. 

Considering options for streambank restoration in an urban watershed

The municipality has spent a lot of money installing "cribs," telephone poles anchored into the streambank and filled with soil, then planted with trees and shrubs.  The cribs hold for a while, but inevitably the stream begins to erode behind the structures, which usually results in a catastrophic failure during a major flood.  In the lower right of the image below, the upstream end of one of the cribs is visible.  If it doesn't receive some attention soon, that crib is doomed.

Downstream view of Tookany Creek with crib 

Though spring is finally getting underway here in the northern Piedmont, only a few flowers have dared to blossom yet.  One that is not so shy is lesser celandine, an invasive buttercup that carpets our urban and suburban floodplains excluding native spring ephemerals.  Though the plant flowers profusely, ecologists believe that tiny bulbettes attached to the tops of the roots are actually more responsible for its spread than are its seeds.  Because he plant favor floodplains, the bulbettes detach from the mother plant and wash downstream during floods, establishing new colonies.  

Lesser celandine (Ranunculus divaricata)

The site of the demolished high school on a plateau above the creek has been converted to a meadow.  Though the "friends" have tried twice to create a meadow dominated by native species, the meadow consists mostly of non-native, invasive weeds.  The repeated failure can be attributed to the fact that the building was bulldozed into its basement, leaving a calcium-rich, high pH substrate for plants that prefer low pH soils.  In addition, the layer of topsoil spread over the site was far too shallow to support most native species.  Scheduling difficulties with the planting contributed to the failure.  And, finally, becaue the park is public property, the private "friends" group cannot apply herbicides that might help keep the weeds in check.   

At the edge of the "native" meadow

Kevin also has to beg for help from the municipality's parks department, which has mowing equipment that the "friends" group cannot afford.  While the park employees try to be helpful, sometimes they act more like "cowboys" more adept at mowing large expanses of turf.  Two weeks ago, the park guys mowed down shrubs planted at the edge of the meadow - another setback.

Colorful stakes failed to prevent the parks "cowboys" from mowing shrubs

At the end of our tour, Kevin showed the group some "planting logs" he invented to try to speed-up the development of a riparian shrub layer.  Kevin creates a "burrito" of mulch and soil wrapped up tightly in burlap, and then he inserts dogwood cuttings into the logs.  He keeps the burritos moist, which encourages the dogwood cuttings to develop roots.  Then, he takes the rooted logs down to the streambank and secures them with more dogwood cuttings in an effort to jumpstart a stabilizing shrub cover.

A burlap planting log

How Kevin will secure the rooted logs onto the streambank

Back to High School...Park

Amy, a board member of Friends of High School Park showing off a new informational sign

I took my undergraduate Landscape Restoration class on a field trip to High School Park on Thursday (April 11).  I've profiled High School Park several times before in this blog; it was the site of a stone and brick high school that was abandoned when the community built a new high school.  The building was vandalized and burned, then finally demolished by bulldozing all of the debris into the basement.   The municipality purchased the 9-acre parcel from the school district and turned it into a municipal park.  The Friends of High School Park were formed soon thereafter to look after the parkland, and to try to restore native plant communities on the site: native grass meadows on the plateau where the school had stood, mesic woodlands on the steep slopes below the meadows, and riparian forest along a "flashy," flood-prone suburban stream called Tookany Creek.

We began our tour in the meadows, escorted by one of the Friends' board members, Amy, a good friend of mine.

This actually was the second meadow installed on the site.  The rubble from the building was covered with only a few inches of soil, so the calcareous debris sweetened the soil so much that the acid-loving native grasses and perennials that were planted on the site languished and were quickly overwhelmed by weeds and invasive plants.  This time around, the Friends got a grant from the state to restore the meadow, and planned to do it "right," with soil amendments to make the soil more acidic, followed by a planting of native grasses, and then a planting, one year later, of native wildflowers.  However, time constraints imposed by the state grant required the group to plant all of the plants together, which will not allow the grasses to get established before the wildflowers are added as the group  had hoped.  Unfortunately, I do not predict good things for this meadow.

This meadow is not going to "cut the mustard"

Non-native plants and grasses are evident everywhere in the meadow, and controlling them is going to be a yeoman's task.  At one point, we stopped at the edge of the meadow in an area sporting a huge patch of a non-native mustard - a typical challenge facing the Friends.  The Friends are not allowed to use herbicides (this would be a private group applying herbicides on public land - a real no-no, even if the Friends had someone certified to apply herbicides, which they don't).  The municipality's public works department has a certified applicator, but that individual has little or no time to devote to High School Park.  So, it's all hand-pulling, mowing, and cutting by volunteers.  Yikes!

When we came to the mustard patch, I invited the student to pick a few leaves from the plants to see how they tasted (very sweet and a bit spicy).  This completely freaked-out my students, who were sure that this was the last they would see of their instructor.  I can almost always freak-out group when I'm giving a tour if I nibble a plant.  Urbanized people are so divorced from the natural world that the thought of eating anything that doesn't come from the supermarket upsets them.

Stopping to discuss the value of meadows as a source of bird food:  insects and caterpillars

Some of the same meadow species, now up close and personal

After circling the meadow, we came to a garden with benches and paved walkways.  The Friends plan to use this spot as a demonstration garden to highlight many of the species planted in the meadow but in a format that is accessible to the public in attractive, designed beds.

Reviewing the plans for the demonstration garden

Amy had another commitment, so the students and I finished the tour by walking along the riparian trail paralleling Tookany Creek.

The Tookany Creek Trail bordered by highly invasive lesser celandine (Ranunculus ficaria)

The creek trail is short, and ends at a arbor and a sitting area overlooking the creek.   The wooden seats are shaded by huge specimens of a nasty, invasive shrub, Siebold viburnum (Viburnum sieboldii), a horticultural landscape plant.  Unchecked, this Japanese viburnum can overwhelm the understory of a disturbed woodland in short order.  However, the plant does have one interesting characteristic of which I take full advantage when I lead a group through the woods - when crushed, the leaves of Siebold viburnum are extremely odoriferous.  I love to crush the leaves and watch school children wrinkle up their noses when they whiff the rank odor!

Siebold viburnum about to bloom