PLOTTING THE FUTURE

Huxley and Fairhaven students are working to restore a berry patch in the Outback Farm, but who will care for it after their class ends?

Story by Jonathan Flynn | Photos by Erin Ruark and Elizabeth Hansen

“He’s going around back again!”

I squint and focus on the flurry of movement behind the thimbleberry bushes.

Apparently someone left the farm’s gate open and, once again, a deer has made his way to the berry grove and munched on the plants we were trying so hard to maintain.

I look over at my project partner, Lydia Dennee-Lee, just in time to see her roll her eyes and run off into the bushes to flush-out the lone invader.

Lydia and I are two of five students restoring the native berry grove in Western Washington University’s Outback Farm as part of a capstone class called Restoration Ecology. The class is made up of 32 students from the Huxley College of the Environment and the Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies. Each student is a part of a group of four to six people working on sites in the Sehome Arboretum and the Outback Farm, projects ranging from removing invasive plants to repairing land trampled by hikers looking for shortcuts. Chasing deer is also a part of the job.

The berry grove is a variety of what’s known as a food forest, something similar to a natural forest except for one thing: nearly every plant in a food forest is edible. It has all of the components of a natural forest, including an understory of shrubs and herbs like trailing blackberry and salmonberry, and a canopy created by an apple tree.

A question every restoration ecologist asks themselves is what exact state they want to restore their site to. Landscapes are constantly changing, and to say that any specific ecological state is the true and intended state is like trying to replace an entire film with a screenshot. Although we’ve done what we can to emulate the management practices of indigenous berry garden tenders by planting native plants and removing invasives, we’re not restoring the grove to a truly native state.

Traditional berry garden sites were selected for harvest by Heiltsuk gardeners by how well natural berry stands were doing. In some cases, as reported by Bessie Brown in the book Keeping it Living by Nancy Turner and Sandra Peacock, berry groves were placed next to waterfalls because the plants would be enshrouded in a constant mist. This includes summertime. Unfortunately, there are no waterfalls in the Outback. Our berry grove is where it is because it was simply the best space available at the time of its conception.

The grove is deceivingly small: a mere 72 square meters, and overrun with invasive plant species such as creeping buttercup, Himalayan blackberry and morning glory. Removing invasive species from even a tiny fraction of the site is laborious — in some cases, the root ball of a Himalayan blackberry vine embedded a foot into the ground can be the size of a human fist.

Invasive species are appropriately named so. According to the National Wildlife Federation, the aggressive growth and high reproduction rates of invasive species allows them to overwhelm native species by out-competing with them for sunlight and using up soil nutrients. For some weeds like morning glory, these characteristics can make them next to impossible to eradicate once their roots have been established.

For as much of a hassle invasive species can be, there are ways they can be controlled. In the berry grove, we’re planting a variety of native shrubs and herbs that fill ecological roles similar to that of the invasive species. In the south end of the grove, we planted native strawberries in the hope that come springtime, they will grow and begin pushing back the invasive creeping buttercup that has overrun the understory.

But our efforts to restore the grove will be in vain if future students leave the grove in its current state. It will be years before the grove is in a state we truly desire. It will require the hard and dedicated work of future students to continue the fight against the invasives so that the community can continue to use the space for harvesting and learning.

That’s restoration work for you. In a landscape that has experienced so much change over such a short period of time, there’s no real way to truly restore it. Some would argue that small-scale restoration is a futile, pointless gesture in the face of rising carbon emissions and ecological destruction. And they’re not wrong. Restoration projects can fail or have unintended consequences. They might not fix anything in the long run. But at the very least, the people who work to establish and maintain these projects share one thing in common: the desire to make their little corner of the world a better place.

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