The Stumpscape at Circle Forest is a demonstration of the importance of woody debris in the forest.

Happy Spring!

Circle Forest is full of birdsong. In fact, we have begun our educational Birding Workshop series, led by Detroit Audubon. We’ve had an Intro to Birding One and Two, and more are coming up. These are free of charge and open to the public, thanks to the NFWF grant we received last year.

Free Mushroom workshops are also coming this year, led by Fungi Freights. Everything is in our Event Calendar on the website, if you know someone who would enjoy attending these, please let them know!

More dates are in our Calendar

We have been removing English Ivy from Circle Forest with the help of volunteers, getting ready to plant dozens of native tree saplings into the forested area on Earth Day. You can help too, by coming to a volunteer workday, or spreading the word to others who can come. These dates are also in the Calendar.

This spring will also bring heavy equipment to the space: the open grassy areas will be graded for gravel paths and ADA accessible paths and a couple of gathering plazas. There will be circle ditches dug into the ground in places and the soil mounded up in the center for a change in perspective. The ditches will be filled with better soil - remember we are working on the sites of poorly demolished residential dwellings, with lots of clay and debris filling in the old basements! This fall we will plant over a hundred native trees into these rings amended with mycorrhizae that will help the trees’ roots take up nutrition, and form tree communities.

The rest of the areas that are now crabgrass will be plowed and seeded with a native wildflower mix, courtesy of National Fish and Wildlife Fund and Detroit Audubon, our partners in the project.

New England Aster with honeybee

And here are some highlights from 2021.

For a full report you can see Annual Reports on the website coming soon.

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We supported six “Greenspace Partners” in the neighborhood with dozens of trees:

18 were planted by Kt and Monk in their Community park, 14 were planted by neighborhood volunteers at Princess Dennis’ Elder Park, Sarah Addae planted 14 at Field Temple, Amos Kennedy planted 16 at his Pile of Bricks Printmaking Studio, Scott Hamilton “Snot” (not pictured) planted 15 trees adjacent to Callahan Park, and Julian and Erin (not pictured) planted 12 trees in their yard.

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On Earth Day 2021 we planted 300 native saplings into the Neighborhood Nursery, 100 of which are going to Circle Forest this year.

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We commissioned Detroit artist Jozie Bullard to paint a mural of Nobel Peace prize winning Kenyan activist/tree planter Wangari Maathai for the Neighborhood Tree Nursery. The mural is nearing finish, and will be installed this Spring!

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We purchased 9 lots from the Land Bank to expand tree space in 2021. 6 of them are outlined here in red, and three of them are part of Circle Forest five blocks North. These lots will help us get closer to connecting the Neighborhood Green Loop. They will be planted with trees this year. The lower left corner of the image is Treetroit 1, the upper left is Wawyeyawen.

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If you would like to get involved, please feel free to email us at treetroit@gmail.com.

You can come visit and enjoy the trees and the birds.

You can attend a Volunteer Workday, or a Birding or Mushroom Workshop. All these dates are in the Calendar.

You can follow us on IG or FB @arbdetroit, and spread the word.

You can Donate via PayPal or Venmo (@arbdetroit), or mail us a check.

You can wear an Arboretum Detroit T-shirt or Hoodie and rep for us.

You can talk to us, and give us your ideas, your feedback, your love, your criticism (constructive pls), etc.

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Trees are the Answer

 Even if you have not heard the term “nurse log”  you have likely seen them on your hikes in the forest. These are the fallen trees who surrender themselves to the forest. Some people can’t see the forest for the trees; well, these trees can’t see themselves for the forest. These are trees that have dissolved their egos, if trees ever do have egos. By this metaphor I mean to say that  more than individuals in the forest, the trees are forest. This is especially evident when the tree no longer stands with the attributes of an Oak, a Maple, or a BIrch, but is halfway to soil, subsumed by the other trees who now relish her sponge of nutrients and moisture.

Forest is forest; it’s not just a bunch of individual trees. When trees fall they are still and ever a part of the forest. The fallen limbs, leaves, and trunks become both giant vitamins and drip irrigation systems. The wood lays on the floor spending perhaps another hundred years soaking up water and cooling the soil below as it decomposes and becomes home to fungi, moss, bacteria, lichen, plants, trees, invertebrates, ants, snails, birds, rodents and many more beings that we cannot see, and thus a decomposing trunk is likely to comprise about 40% living cells, whereas a standing tree is only likely to have only about 5%. This is because life in a standing tree resides mostly in the cambium, the outer growing layer just under the bark. Really makes one ask the question: what do we mean by “alive?” I can’t look at a tree on the ground and call her “dead.” It’s truer to call them hosts, nurse logs, or nursery logs. These are the spaces where life is most abundant. And this is why coarse woody debris is an integral part of the forest. Without it what we have is at best a park or a tree farm.

These fallen trees stabilize the forest and the landscape. On hillsides and mountainsides fallen trees prevent the sliding of soil; they capture and hold the organic matter rather than allowing it to wash down the slope. These trees have spent a lifetime sequestering carbon from the atmosphere and storing it in their wood; when they fall they offer this carbon to the saprotrophs who fix it into the soil. Aren’t trees endlessly amazing? We are finally beginning to watch trees closely enough to learn their valuable teachings about how to live on this planet. They have been here for around 370 million years compared to we who just got here 300,000 years ago. Is it any wonder that we struggle to imagine the experience and knowledge trees possess about relation to Earth? They are so generous, so humble, and yet the most exquisite technology the world will ever know.

Do you remember the “conservation of matter” grade school from elementary science class? Nothing enters or leaves the system of the Earth. That gave me a lot to consider when I first heard it. It gives me a lot to consider even now. When I think about old growth forests, the ones that have been allowed to just be forests, I see this concept at work. True forests just fold in on themselves, rise and fall in waves just like the ocean in infinitesimally slow motion. We barely know what this looks like or what happens here because we (modern human settler colonists anyway) saw only resources and began cutting. As soon as we pulled the first timbers from these forests the system was disturbed, the chain interrupted. When we removed everything and left barren earth whole ecosystems vanished. We undid millions of years in about one hundred. Now we are left with only these tiny rare pockets of true forest. Capitalism can leave nothing alone. Capitalism doesn’t look back or take responsibility. So, how can we see what it’s done to our planet and to ourselves? Can we let them be? We struggle to give forest even a hundred years to begin to sing again?

All this to say that one of the lessons of the Circle Forest is the conservation of matter. We are not taking anything out of the forest except the garbage that has accumulated over the past few decades. We are using the project to demonstrate the power of fallen trees and coarse woody debris to generate life. Any invasives that were cut, or trees that have fallen remain in the forest to give themselves back to the forest. Even if this Siberian Elm is deemed invasive and is not allowed to propagate here as a Siberian Elm, she is still a welcome part of the forest, hugged by fungi, moss, and lichen until she is subsumed by the Oaks and Pines who replace her.

What this means for the Circle Forest is that we are looking at ways to organize the woody debris in a way that keeps it out of footpaths and puts it into the consciousness of visitors. We want an aesthetic demonstration of nurse logs and their importance. We are very excited and inspired by this puzzle. We are building a log raft, a stump scape, and a forest critter path. The challenge has been fruitful and fun. This is just one of the ways that we are assisting this forest in being her best self.

Wow, the first season of the Circle Forest project is complete. It’s good to pause and take a breath, as we know that arboretum projects, like gardens, never end- they just continue to evolve and grow. Circle Forest has done a lot of evolving in the past three months. We have not only had to do lots of hard work but also to ask lots of difficult questions. We have opened up questions for which there are no immediate answers. What does “restoration” mean? What is “invasive?” And how would we as descendants of settler colonizers be the ones to call anything invasive?

One thing is crystal clear- we are honoring Mother Earth by improving her treatment. We have spent  hundreds of hours removing garbage and other evidence of the traumatic past few centuries. It has felt very rewarding to clean this space and make way for beauty and life.

We hosted a bonfire celebration on Halloween to honor all the amazing thoughtful volunteers who have come from all over the place to put in their sweat and shape the project with their ideas.

We have volunteers who would put in hours cleaning and beautifying and then return in the early morning or at sunset for a walk or to birdwatch. One of the most exciting things to come out of these first months is the bird list that Kyle has created from his observations. We will share this list here because it is so key to understanding how this space has been functioning before we got here to “restore” it. Kyle has observed 54 distinct bird species visiting the Circle Forest. So, while the trees here may not all be native they do offer something important. Each tree is a challenge to consider.

I have been observing a pecked out hole in the deadwood of an Ailanthus tree about 30 feet up. Obviously this tree has been useful to someone in the past so it definitely gave us pause in our objective of cutting out invasive trees. Of course the trees that are no longer photosynthesizing, some say “dead,” are super valuable as snags for birds to forage and nest in. We know this and so every tree is another unique situation in which we must weigh out the value this tree has for shade, oxygen, beauty, history, safety, habitat against the fact that it could shade out new native trees, it may appear not beautiful to visitors, it may be able to propagate itself quicker than other natives, our maybe it’s just that we have not yet found a place for her in our vision and aesthetic.

The message is slow down. Remember we’re working with the trees and we need to consider tree time. It’s so easy to forget this and get swept up into the whirlwind of human constructed timelines and deadlines. We are grateful for the glitches and delays that require a pause and a step back. One cannot possibly make all the decisions required for a large landscape design before entering the space and working with everything and everybody who is here. Let’s allow things to evolve and grow and the players peek out and speak to us. In this case the players are the trees, the birds, the plants, insects and fungi who showed up long before we ever even looked at this space. 

For more pictures from Circle Forest, visit www.arbdetroit/circle-forest

If you’d like to keep in touch about volunteer opportunities, sign up here.

Here’s Kyle’s list.