By the end of next month, the final trips up and down the steep staircase below Fred Gingell Park will have been made, the plants will have been lovingly laid on to the slope, with only time needed to turn the hill into a verdant passage from a suburb to the sea.
“We’re going to do about 540 plants, and about 90 sword ferns,” said Blake Willson, who’s been coordinating the effort in partnership with the City of Delta.
In the last six years, he and local volunteers have ripped out hundreds of invasive blackberry plants and English ivy and, with the help of the city, planted native vegetation.
About 180 big trees have already been planted in Tsawwassen Beach Trail Park, while for the final part of the project, on Oct. 10 and 11, he and James Reeve will organize the planting of the final few hundred plants in the southeast part of the park.
Those remaining plants include Indian plum, salmonberries, snow berries, a few vine maples, red dogwoods, and some willows and a dozen red alders.
As for sword ferns, Willson said they’re a part of the local coastal Douglas fir ecosystem and can grow a metre wide. “They’re just a natural part of the ecosystem that have been highly regarded,” he said.
Afterwards, the park’s appearance will improve quickly.
On the coast, trees can grow quickly, some up to a metre a year. In 20 years, some of the trees planted will be 50 feet tall, he said.
“It’s going to be like Memorial Park (nearby) in the U.S. (Point Roberts),” said Willson, who’s a plant specialist.
He pointed out that Tsawwassen is part of a glacial terminal moraine, left after the last ice age, and which resulted in compacted till that’s rock hard.
The volunteer group, Friends of the Tsawwassen Beach Trail, provides most of the manpower when needed, such as for the fall planting. And this month, he’s looking for a bit of help with cleanup, on Sundays, at 11 a.m.
The park will still need a few more years of work to remove any returning invasive plants, Willson said,
Tree Canada is supplying the plants at no charge while 15 helpers from Rogers Cable will be there on Oct. 11 to complete most of the planting.
“It was really important to have a lot of people volunteering,” he said.
“To do something that has a purpose, when you achieve something involving the community, it’s really important,” he said.
While digging out invasive plants last October, Willson unearthed a rusted, double-barrelled, sawed-off shotgun, along with some shells, that could have belonged to Pansy Mae Stuttard, a colourful resident who lived on the property on top of the slope in the early part of the 20th Century.
And most recently, he found a small rock, that had been inscribed with Japanese characters that could have belonged to a Japanese worker in Tsawwassen, or Point Roberts, in the early 1900s.
Now, it’s nice to see the project done. “It’s wonderful. We have a lot of people commenting on the area, happy to see it happening. Every day, we get people stopping and saying, ‘Thank you.’”
