green seattle day – Living, Learning and Letting Go

Each year, the Green Seattle Partnership sponsors a Green Seattle Day. On that day, work parties are held in parklands all over Seattle. Sarva and I decided to volunteer as team leaders at Cheasty Mt. View Park. Several other GreenFriends members and their friends joined us.

The number of people who registered for the work party amazed me. There were seven in our GreenFriends contingent, but 126 volunteers in the whole group.

One of the leaders encouraged the participants to plant from a place of gratitude. She suggested that the volunteers name their trees … and that they talk to the trees as they put them into the earth. As I wandered through our section, helping people with the planting, I heard many participants doing that.

After some of our GreenFriends group planted this tree, they decided to give it a kiss.

The 126 volunteers planted 800 trees, shrubs and ground covers during the first hour of the work party.

We spent the rest of the work party removing invasive blackberry and ivy vines. Again, it was phenomenal to witness how much can be accomplished in a short period of time.

We put vines we cut onto drying racks so that they don’t touch the ground and re-root. There were several drying racks in the area where we were working but they were soon full. Before long there were big piles of cuttings around the site.

Some of the volunteers built a new drying rack and then we moved the piles of cuttings to the new rack.

drying rack for invasive cuttings

loading the drying rack

Before long, the three-hour work party was over and we prepared to leave.

What a wonderful morning it had been. The work party was such a good example of the adage “Many hands make light work.”

On Green Seattle Day, Green Seattle Partnership sponsors three hour work parties in parklands all over Seattle. This year Sarva and I agreed to help lead a team at Mountain View, a park that is a few miles south of our Greenbelt restoration site. Susan Zeman, a forest steward who often helps at our work parties, coordinated the Mountain View work party as well as one at View Point park which is located across the street from Mountain View. Susan had gathered enough forest stewards that Sarva and I were able to plant trees as well as being leads. Visala, Haley and Bob, who like Sarva and me are part of Amma’s GreenFriends group, also participated in this event.

This experience was particularly meaningful to me because ten years ago this park was completely covered with blackberries and ivy. Today it is a beautiful, healthy forest. It was inspiring for me to witness a living example what reforestation work can do. Someday our Greenbelt restoration site will look like this one.

Below are several photos from the Mountain View work party.

Here are some photos I found on the Green Seattle Partnership Facebook page. They are from other Green Seattle Day work parties.

On the same Facebook page, I found a synopsis of the work that was done that day. What a testament it is to what can be accomplished when we come together in support of Mother Nature.

A few days later, I returned to Mountain View park. I loved walking through the leaves and gazing at all of the trees we had planted. I felt renewed and excited to continue the restoration work at our Cheasty Greenbelt site.