There’s a stream flowing under the Drillfield.
It originates from three springs in downtown Blacksburg.
The water travels through town and under the Virginia Tech campus and into the Duck Pond and through farms in Montgomery County and under U.S. 460 and eventually into the New River, which flows to the Kanawha River and then the Ohio River and then the Mississippi and onward to the Gulf of Mexico and out to sea and, all along the way, that spring water from Blacksburg is evaporating into vapor and condensing into rain and snow, and falling back onto the earth and sinking into the ground and traveling through lands to oceans again, and again, and again in the global water cycle.
“It’s all one watershed. The whole planet is one watershed,” Lisa Stansell-Galitz, the New River Conservancy’s communications and marketing director, said in a phone call Wednesday. Stansell-Galitz defines a watershed “in its simplest terms, as an area that drains into a specific body of water,” such as the New River.
One way to improve the quality of the watershed is to plant trees. That’s why the Big Plant got started in 2019.
You call it trees. They call it ‘riparian buffer’
The Big Plant is an annual event in which hundreds of volunteers plant thousands of trees in the New River watershed. This past weekend was the eighth Blacksburg Big Plant, and the previous weekend, March 20-22, was the second Radford Big Plant.
One of the founders of the Big Plant is Tom Saxton, a restoration ecologist affiliated with the Ecological Restoration Collaborative and New River Conservancy. In 2014, he started planting what’s known as a riparian buffer along Stroubles Creek.
Stroubles Creek — pronounced STREW-bulls — is the stream flowing under the Drillfield. A riparian buffer is a strip of vegetation along a waterway. “Riparian buffers are among the most reliable and cost-effective steps to improving water quality and resiliency to storm events and flooding,” said Saxton over the phone Wednesday. “No matter how much money we spend, you can’t out-engineer the benefits of a native riparian buffer.”
A native riparian buffer, said Stansell-Galitz, “first helps with erosion so when we have things like [Hurricane] Helene the dirt will stay where it’s supposed to say. Second, is that a riparian buffer acts as a filter for trash and groundwater chemicals and pollutants. And third, one of the most important things, is that the riparian buffer creates shade that cools the water down. The more we can shade it, the cooler the water is, the better it is for all the aquatic life in the New River watershed.”
Stroubles Creek, which is one watershed within the broader New River watershed, has been designated as “federally impaired” since the late 1990s. “Stroubles Creek, unfortunately, is overrun with non-native species,” said Saxton. “Before European settlement of the East Coast, the landscape was 95% forest cover, particularly along the waterways. Hundreds of years of deforestation, a lot of which occurred along waterways, has led to issues with water quality, high water surface temperatures and poor habitat for fish and other life.”
To reverse the deforestation, Saxton and others have formed the Ecological Restoration Collaborative. The collaborative is a network of more than a dozen partners, including the New River Conservancy, Virginia Department of Forestry and Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, that run the Big Plant.
“The Big Plant started with Stroubles Creek and now we’re spreading to Toms Creek blackwatershed and in Radford along the New River,” said Saxton.
This year’s volunteer signups for Blacksburg planting sites filled up quickly. “We’ve had in the past as many as 1,000 people in a single shift, but have had to put on a cap on the number of volunteers to ensure quality of the work,” said Saxton.
From American plum to pawpaw
“All of the tree species being planted are native to Virginia,” said Saxton, “and we’re putting in a lot of biodiversity.”
At the Radford Big Plant, 350 volunteers planted 325 trees in Bissett Park. The new trees at Bissett Park span 60 different species including serviceberry, swamp white oak and American plum.
The Blacksburg Big Plant occurred at two sites where approximately 400 volunteers planted a total of 2,118 trees.
On Saturday morning at the first site, Heritage Community Park and Natural Area, volunteers planted 830 trees across 46 different species along a tributary of Toms Creek. There were 160 gray dogwoods for shady areas, 10 pawpaws for wetland areas and, for sunny areas, 35 river birches.
At the second site, the historical Smithfield Plantation, 1,288 trees across 24 different species were planted in the Stroubles watershed. “Unlike other events, where the volunteers don’t really do anything — the hole for the tree is already dug — here, we’re doing the real work,” said Morgan Haymaker, philanthropy chair of Veterans@VT.
Haymaker planted trees in Radford and at both Blacksburg sites with her baby, Stephen, in tow.
On Sunday morning at Smithfield, Haymaker worked with two other Veterans@VT volunteers, Brock Noble and Mia Daniels, to dig a hole for a particularly special species. Steven gave a toothless, slobber-slick grin to the twig in Haymaker’s hand. Technically, the twig was a seedling — the tender stem and roots of a very young tree.
It was thin and wispy, scrabbly as a nerve-strewn spinal cord.
If all goes well, this seedling, according to the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, will grow 1-2 feet per year. In 50 to 100 years, it’ll reach its full height of 100 feet. Its trunk may have a diameter of 4 to 5 feet. And it may be shading the Strouble in 2326.
Acorn to seedling from centuries-old white oaks at Stadium Woods
The seedling in Haymaker’s hand was one of the 200 white oak seedlings planted at Smithfield Plantation on Sunday.
Saxton explained that the Virginia Department of Forestry and Virginia Tech collected acorns from the centuries-old white oaks in Stadium Woods, the old growth forest behind Lane Stadium. The Virginia Department of Forestry raised those acorns to seedlings and donated them to the Big Plant.
“It’s really neat because these white oaks’ genetics are about 250 years old, which is also the 250th anniversary of this country. And they’re going in on the historic Smithfield Plantation, which is the first non-indigenous settlement in the area and dates back to 250 years ago. So it’s full circle: all of these people that are coming together and setting aside their differences to go back to their roots,” said Saxton.
With Steven still smiling, Haymaker, Noble and Daniels packed dirt around the white oak seedling. Then they slid a pale green “shelter” tube about 4 feet tall over it. By the time the volunteers left at 5 p.m., more than 1,000 of the tubes poked up to the sky around Smithfield.
“We had to make the shelters taller,” said Cathy Hanks, New River Conservancy Program Coordinator, “because they were deep lollipops.”
Despite the threat of deer, Saxton expects that 80% to 90% of the seedlings and trees planted this year will survive. “We’ll be checking the trees for a few years. Any that are dead, we’ll flag and then we’ll replant,” he said on Sunday morning.
One of the people checking the trees will be David McEwen, a certified master naturalist and certified master gardener. On Sunday, McEwen said that before the Big Plant, he and “three old guys spent about a day and a half taking out the barbed wire and fence posts and a field fence.”
After the Big Plant, McEwen will work to plant the field near the new trees with native pollinators and wildflowers. “I’m just a volunteer who thinks we need to do something to leave the place better than we found it,” he said, pointing out the cattle fields around the creek. “These [newly planted] trees will catch the cattle run-off with pollutants before it gets into the Strouble and,” he swept his hand in a rolling circle, “goes to New Orleans.”
Both Saxton and Stansell-Galitz talked about the power of seeing children and adults with different backgrounds work side by side on a singular task. “After 250 years, it’s divisive times, but the Big Plant makes you realize that we have more in common than we do different. We’re not arguing. We’re not divided. We’re coming together for one purpose, and that’s planting trees for the one thing we all share, and that’s our planet,” Saxton said.
He repeated exactly what Stansell-Galitz had said an hour earlier: “It’s all one watershed” — one ecological and emotional flow strengthened by the work of many hands for the benefit of many hearts, those of today, and those of the centuries to come.