Journal, Oct 17 How Far We've Come [Nature Center Forest]

 

How Far We’ve Come (Into the Forest, and as Volunteers) – Oct 17^th

Back into the privet and plants I go!  On Tuesday, October 17^th, I headed back to the Fort Worth Nature Center as a part of my Treks and Texts class, volunteering to clear the forest of invasive plants.  While the gist of the event remained the same, many new things happened, such as becoming well acquainted with the three major plants to be removed and taking a bold step towards clearing briar.

In past times at the Nature Center, I had become familiar with two plants that we needed to remove.  First was privet, green plants with smooth circular leaves that grow low to the ground, and sometimes it grows a bit higher and expands across the forest floor.  This invasive plant looks nice and is good for décor, until it begins to overtake the ecosystem of course.  Second was briar, a vine with thorns that wrapped around trees and branches and sticks, so it would cover anything it could get its hands on, and it would originate from the ground and be difficult to yank out.  I quickly discovered how sharp and mischievous briar is when trying to remove bunches of it from certain areas.  I am glad to have prepared gloves and full-body clothing to protect me from the thorns, but occasionally it gets a little close and I feel a bit of a poke.  It’s probably one of the more difficult plants to manage because it isn’t a singular sturdy object like bamboo that one can hold and carry to the chipper, it is flexible and lengthy so it can drag on the ground or get caught on your sleeve.  Much like privet, briar easily takes over an area and really settles itself there.

Speaking about briar, on this volunteer day I found a particularly unkind bit of the thorny plant dangling from a tree.  It originated higher up in the branches and dangled downwards so that a person like me would get their head and upper body brushed against a ‘curtain’ of briar.  If I wasn’t watching where I was going, I could have had a nasty brush with the plant.  With this in mind, I decided this bit of briar could really use removal, so I fetched some clippers.  I attempted using gloves at first to bring it down, but it was so firmly attached to the upper part of the tree (as if tied with rope) that I knew I had to cut it to get it loose.  I didn’t use the saw tool because that works better on stable plants, and briar would just flail around if a saw was put to it midair.  It was not a quick task, clipping each of the connecting limbs of the briar, but eventually I was able to detach a sufficient part of it that a solid tug made the dangling danger give way.  It was nice to remove it and put it in the chipper, and although it was only a small thing that I did, I felt satisfied.

Privet and briar are indeed plants that cover a large part of the forest, but on this volunteering day we saw a lot of bamboo.  I remember being told that bamboo was brought here from China and it grew a lot, making it a powerful invasive species.  Since our work clearing the forest brought us further down the strip of road, we came across a big patch of bamboo.  With some clippers and determination, the Treks and Texts team started to remove chunks of bamboo which we collected for the chipper.  Bamboo posed a different problem than privet or briar.  It was not small and short nor vine-like and thorny, but it was lengthy, an elegant pipe-like wooden stick with some leaves, just what I envisioned as bamboo.  The greatest problems of bamboo were that it is heavy and that it is lengthy, much like tree branches that we’d removed before.  Anyways, even though it was an unwanted plant in the forest, I still thought it was cool that we got to see such a variety of plant life with different natural qualities.  Bamboo is the coolest and my favorite thus far.  Also, I find that bamboo symbolizes something more for us.  It shows that we’ve worked our way through the forest onto our next challenge, a testament to what we have accomplished and what we are determined to do in the future!  A glance towards the end of the road from which we had begun shows me a very clear forest floor which makes it easier for animals to navigate and makes it nicer for visitors to the Nature Center to look at and enjoy!

Now we have three major plants to take care of, and I continue my determination to make an impact on the forest.  I can see the perseverance and hard work in the rest of the class, too.  I’ve noticed that students now take more ambitious handfuls and armfuls of plants to bring to the woodchipper, which helps with our efficiency.  Also, I’ve seen how we are more excited to venture deeper into the forest and really get into that bushy plant life to remove that which is invasive and undesirable, such as the plentiful chunks of bamboo.  I know that on my first day, I would not have taken the risk of yanking down that dangling briar, but now I have more confidence and perseverance when approaching the challenges of nature.  I’m proud of how far we’ve come, not just physically in the forest, but as volunteers for the Nature Center, because we are more passionate and hard working than ever!