As a Metro scientist, Kate Holleran sees nature's biggest challenges and most glorious surprises – and she has the muddy boots to prove it. Read her latest reflections on restoring the land protected by Metro's voter-approved Natural Areas Program.
By Kate Holleran, Metro Scientist
Conserving nature, one acre at a time
This is ridiculous; everywhere I step is already blooming. My colleague Jeff and I recently walked through an acre of native forest next to Johnson Creek. It was impossible to put my foot down without stepping on a spring flower: a yellow wood violet, trillium, false lily of the valley or spring beauty. A landscape that was brown and wet a few weeks ago soaked a few days of warm weather and emerged in a fantasia of native plants. So much of the urban landscape includes manicured lawns with tidy edges, finding an acre rich with native, wild plants gives me a reason to watch where I step.
But, technically, we weren't looking for flowers in the forest that day – we were looking for the property boundaries of a natural area Metro recently acquired. Knowing boundaries is an essential part of managing natural areas, and they're not always easy to find. Often, we're looking for an iron corner post set by a surveyor 50 or more years ago, and it may be buried by deep forest duff or hidden in a nasty hedge of poison oak. I have bad poison oak memories from digging around in the brush, hoping to find a corner stone or iron rod or any evidence of a boundary marker.
When finding property lines involves cutting brush and trees or crossing fence lines that neighbors thought defined their property, we call in a surveyor. That was our conclusion on the Johnson Creek property: call in the surveyor, get the property line marked and make friends with our neighbors.
Hope you know where your boundaries are.