It’s now all up to nature, now that about 1,000 trees, shrubs, ferns and berry plants have been installed into the slope along the stairs and the Tsawwassen Beach Trail in Fred Gingell Park.
The project involving volunteers, the City of Delta and corporate sponsors, took place during two days in October and included planting Douglas fir, big leaf maple, spruce, red alder, sword ferns, Nootka rose, snowberry, thimble berry, salmon berry, flowering red currents and huckleberries.
“Over four hard weeks, we put in close to 1,000 plants,” said nearby resident Blake Willson, a retired tree specialist. “It was quite an enormous project.”
The project began about eight years ago when Willson began volunteering with the city’s parks department.
Under the city’s supervision, he started trimming away blackberry bushes and English ivy from young trees that were trying to emerge out of the underbrush.
The pace of the work intensified in the last year or so as volunteers joined in and started digging out the invasive species and preparing for the mass planting in October.
With any luck, the area around the stairs will end up looking like Monument Park, just across the border in Point Roberts.
“It’s a big feeling. It’s the pinnacle of quite a few years of work,” he added. It’s good to do something for the community.”
It won’t take long for the bare slope, about .4 hectares, to green up. Douglas firs and red alders grow about a metre a year, he pointed out.
Willson graduated from forestry management at UBC and has lived in South Delta since 1972.
He has also created a database, a process that took several years, for all 1,300 or so tree species that belong in the Northern Hemisphere and has them catalogued on (http://TreeLib.ca).
The work on the slope was needed because plants such as blackberry bushes were choking out native plants and contributing to slope instability, said Richard Fristak, urban forestry superintendent with the City of Delta.
The newly planted trees and shrubs will improve slope stability, provide a nicer environment for trail users, and provide flowers for pollinators.
“The project would not have occurred if it weren’t for the ambitions of the volunteers and the prep work they put in,” said Fristak.
In the past year, a group of community residents known as the Friends of Tsawwassen Beach Trail, lead by Willson, spent countless hours removing and digging out blackberries from the slope, Fristak added.
“We are happy that The City of Delta was able to support this amazing initiative,” he said.
In addition to volunteers and the city, Tree Canada, based out of Ontario, provided all the plants.
Labbatts Brewing Company helped out by providing some of the volunteers for the most-recent planting that took place Oct. 27.
