Volunteers celebrating National Public Lands Day at Springhill Lake Recreation Center Saturday cleared Greenbelt’s Food Forest of pandemic overgrowth and damage from summer storms. Uprooting invasive stilt grass, they revealed native ferns. With gloves and shears, they freed trees of choking vines.
“Look, I have dreams about porcelain berries strangling me,” said Carolyn Lambright-Davis, convener of the board of the Chesapeake Education, Arts and Research Society (CHEARS) and coordinator of the children’s environmental education group Earth Squad. “I get the bus a lot. There’s a bus stop over here, and there’s nothing but porcelain berries. It’s so beautiful.”
Beautiful but deadly
Kevin Carpenter-Driscoll, environmental coordinator at the Department of Public Works and director of Saturday’s event, told volunteers the vine weakens trees, causing treefalls, and produces sugary berries that lure birds but lack the nutrition to sustain them through local winters or southward migration. The Food Forest, a CHEARS project, aims to demonstrate sustainable cultivation practices and strengthen the community’s bond with nature.
Volunteers from CHEARS and area schools, Mayor Emmett Jordan and Greenbelt City Councilmembers assisted Public Works staff in removing invasive species and replacing pawpaw trees killed in July’s severe storm.
Lori Thiele, acting supervisor of the Public Works horticultural crew, said the storm felled a mulberry tree and half of a mimosa tree, which squashed two pawpaws in the Food Forest. A Public Works team rushed to clear the wreckage Thursday and Friday before Saturday’s event.
The Food Forest and
Springhill Lake garden in Greenbelt West, along with gardens in the central and eastern parts of the city, form the Three Sisters Gardens, a CHEARS project.
The event underlined the partnership between CHEARS and Public Works. “They lost two pawpaws, and we brought six,” said Thiele. Lambright-Davis said Public Works has enabled CHEARS and the Earth Squad to pursue goals of piquing youths’ appreciation of nature. “We have a great Public Works Department,” she said.
Whisper Shikwa, a 17-year-old senior at the SEED School of Maryland in Baltimore, said that although he hasn’t always been passionate about the outdoors, environmental stewardship puts him at ease. “What got me into it was volunteering. Service hours,” said Shikwa, who is from New Carrollton, while digging a hole to plant a pawpaw. “Giving me a peace of mind sometimes. Some quietness. Nature.”
Carpenter-Driscoll envisioned that National Public Lands Day would help in “building that community and making that introduction between the community and nature – how to interact with it and what sort of food system designs can we have and make them accessible.”
Amid the cranberry bushes, fig and pawpaw trees, Lambright-Davis and CHEARS’ other “weed connoisseurs” schemed about future events. Line dancing in the Springhill Lake garden. A work day in the Schrom Hills Park garden. A kids’ recycling program with special hats, if Franklin Park Apartments signs off. “Doesn’t that sound cool?” Lambright-Davis said.
Thiele said National Public Lands Day can inspire people to be “good stewards of the land.”
In Thiele’s words, “Even in an urban and suburban area, there’s oases that we can take over and give back to nature. And create food in the process.”
Stephanie Quinn is a University of Maryland journalism graduate student writing for the News Review.