I'm Shawn Donnillenal the CEO and owner of Mountain Roads Herbs and
we're here at the headquarters for Mountain Rose Herbs. It's a
four-acre industrial campus in the heart of West Eugene,
also known as west industrial Eugene. We're quite lucky because this four-acre
industrial campus affords us the opportunity to act as
land stewards for wildlife and habitat and when we took possession of this
building 10 years ago behind me was a large
mountain of blackberry and when we moved in
I told our facilities manager that I wanted to install a bioswale.
And 10 years ago you could imagine the look on his face. He said "What is a
bioswale?" And when I described the ecological importance of a
bioswale, he said "Okay great, I'll look into it.
About a week or two later he comes back and he says "You're not going to believe
this but we already have a bioswale," and I said "Where is it at?" and he said "You
know in the back of the building where that big mountainous pile of
blackberry is? It's right underneath all of that.
So what we did is we began to trench all of that blackberry out,
grub it out, and then enhance the entire area
with native species and species that specialize in bioaccumulation and
nutrient uptake. Bioswales are important in industrial
environments because through impervious surfaces like
concrete and asphalt stormwater runoff has PCBs, it has
dioxins, it has lots of pollutants. Here in the Willamette Valley, all of our
stormwater runoff discharges directly into our highly revered and esteemed
Willamette River. I don't want to contribute to the
pollution of our Willamette River so that's why I made it a priority to
enhance our industrial campus to capture all that stormwater runoff.
And that's what we've done here with our bioswale. But also what's unique about
our campus is that it's managed for both native plants, pollination plants, and
wildlife habitat. What we inherited was a more formally
landscaped industrial campus and where we've moved
it is more of a native landscaped area.
We were honored to actually be one of Eugene's only certified organic
accredited landscaping organizations and we used a landscaper
that specializes in certified organic landscaping. And as
a result we've improved the area with pollinator
species and native species, and as a result we
have a plethora of wildlife that comes in here.
And I want to emphasize once again that we're in west industrial Eugene. There is
no property like this that i know of in
west industrial Eugene. So we have beaver, we have mink, we have
river otter, we have deer, we have bald eagles, we have osprey. We have a plethora
of wildlife habitat that we didn't see when we moved here 10
years ago, but as a result of transforming this more into a holistic
native landscape we're definitely seeing the benefit that
it has for wildlife and also the benefit that it has for us as individuals and as
people because we love coming out here and
connecting with wildlife. And this is a rare opportunity in west industrial
Eugene. I'm happy to introduce Eric with
Friends of Trees. We've partnered with them for
several years. They've helped us enhance this landscape and we've also worked on
numerous other tree planting efforts throughout Eugene.
Hi this is Eric Burke with Friends of Trees
and representing the Friends of Trees Eugene Springfield office.
We're super excited to be here today and partnering with Mountain Rose Herbs
on these series of tree walks. This one on the
Mountain Rose Herbs campus here looking at some of the excellent
restoration work that's been done here, some of the cool trees around the campus.
Friends of Trees is a community-based nonprofit
that serves our office serves the Eugene Springfield
area and Friends of Trees as a whole works in the Pacific Northwest.
Our mission is to bring volunteers together to plant and care
for city trees and we have a bunch of different programs:
getting volunteers engaged to plant trees,
prune trees, care for trees in many different ways
and we have a lot of different programs to do that. Our planting season starts
November 14th this year and we've been piloting
Corona-safe ways to do volunteer events, and we just wrapped up
our volunteer pruning program and our summer inspector program, and
we're gearing up for our tree planting program.
We're super appreciative of Mountain Rose's support for our work.
We've been working together for I think eight years now
and several of our plantings would not have been possible without
Mountain Rose's support. There's a great planting near here where we're going to have
one of these tree walks at, near Beltline and Danebo and Roosevelt
Boulevard, where Mountain Rose has supported us to
try and extend the West Eugene wetlands and the wildlife habitat from that into
the core of eugene by planting along the Amazon channel
corridor and the bike path that follows that into
Eugene. We're going to be looking at a bunch of
the native trees here today and I think Anna is going to be talking
about some of those native trees. Hi, my name is Anna Bradley and I'm the
sustainability coordinator with Mountain Rose Herbs
and I am a naturalist, survivalist, and tree lover, and today I'm standing with
some native trees that we've planted with our partner
Friends of Trees who is going to talk about some of these awesome trees that
we have here on our campus. Right behind me is a Valley Ponderosa
Pine. We've got California black oak, Oregon
white oak, white alder, and Oregon ash.
And today I'm going to introduce Eric Burke of Friends of Trees who's going to
go around with us today and talk about these
amazing trees that we have right here on our campus. Today we're standing next to
this Valley ponderosa pine as Anna mentioned.
It's Pinus ponderosa, subspecies willamettensis. Some people put it in a
different subspecies. It's a variety of the ponderosa pines so
many of us are familiar with that's adapted to the wetter
climates of the Willamette Valley, so it's different than the ones on the east
side of the Cascades. It is very tolerant of poorly drained
soils. iIt's very drought tolerant. It
grows really well. It's one of the trees that
does better than most other trees in our area.
So now we're standing in a little mini grove
that Mountain Rose staff volunteers planted here of these California black
oaks, which is Quercus kelloggii. California black oak
is really neat. It's one of our two native
oaks to the Eugene Springfield area and it's kind of
special because most people think we only have
the Oregon white oak that's native here. Oregon white oak goes from Mexico
up to Canada and to Vancouver island. And California black oak comes from
Mexico just to about 10 miles north of Eugene and
that's as far north as it goes. And all the oaks in the world are
divided into two groups: the white oaks and the red oaks. California black oak
is in the red oak group and they're a little
shorter lived. They still live 200-300 years
compared to 400 or 500 years for a white oak.
And they produce acorns that are phenomenal food sources.
California black oak was a major food source for Californian
indigenous people and for Oregon indigenous people. The Kalapuya here
in Eugene continue to use California black oak acorns. They have
really pretty leaves. Oregon white oak leaves turn kind of
brown with a little red and rust color in the fall.
California black oaks leaves turn pretty red.
Sometimes they're almost a bright red in the fall.
These guys have pointed tips on the lobes of their leaves; it is one of the
differences between red oaks and black oaks.
And California black oaks do well mostly on the hillsides of South Eugene,
is where you see them. But they also surprisingly come down
into the wetlands into the poorly drained soils and grow there too in some
situations. So now we're going to take a look at
what the classic tree of the West Eugene wetlands: the Oregon
ash. Its scientific name is variously
Fraxinus latifolia or Fraxinus oregana. It's our only native member of the olive
family here in the Willamette Valley. It's in
the Oleaceae or the olive family. And
ashes are interesting in one way in that they are
dioecious, in that they have separate male and female trees
in almost all the ash species except one I believe.
And so here we can see that this tree right here these are the
remains of the female flowers that have mostly fallen off so
this is a female ash tree. I don't know, I can't really tell if this
is a male or female one. In the very early spring they start developing their
flowers. Ash have opposite leaves
and pinnately compound leaves, so this is one leaf with many leaflets.
And another thing that's interesting about
different ash species is they turn different colors
in the fall and that's one way to identify them. So the American ash
turns red for the most part in the fall. Pennsylvania ash turns yellow.
Oregon ash like many of our trees turn a combination of brown,
yellow, orange, and red along with a modeled-ness from a fungal foliar
disease that gets these guys a lot called anthracnose. And you can see some
of the contortions and speckling on the leaves
from that. They grow right through it. They have really stunningly beautiful
buds. I love the buds on ash trees and the
flowers. They belong here. They grow
better in the wetland soils than any other tree, except probably for willows.
And before Euro-American settlement of this area
Douglas firs, without fire, would have taken over the entire landscape
except the active flood plain, southwest facing hillsides, and then these wetlands
which were too poorly drained for Douglas fir to really thrive in.
And so ash can live in standing water where there's almost
no oxygen for its roots. So if you are like are me and you we're
a little kid walking around neighborhoods in Eugene,
you'd see these growing up in cracks in the sidewalk in what we call the Clay
Belt of Eugene, the parts of Southwest Eugene that
are built on wetlands like this, and ash just love it here.
They do really really well and it's a
tree that we're planting in restoration projects, but we're also
trying to bring it into the city as a street tree.
Now we're going to look at white alder. The scientific name is
Alnus rhombifolia. The two most common
alders around Eugene and western Oregon
are the white alder and the red alder. Alnus rubra is the red alder and you
can tell them apart in a few different ways:
by the tooths on the edge of the leaves and also in the red alder
the edges of the leaves are slightly curled under.
White alder is a little more common on the edges of oak savannas and on
drier landscapes than the the red alder, which is more common in
the Coast Range. It's the tree that you see
logging companies spray after clear cuts because it competes with the trees that
they want to grow. The thing that's amazing about these
guys to me is that they're the only tree that I
know of that is has a relationship with
Rhizobium bacteria that fixes nitrogen from the air that isn't in the legume
family. So it's a pretty unusual characteristic of
these trees. When they come in after a big forest
fire, classically in the Coast Range or the Cascades,
they fix about as much nitrogen as logging companies add
with helicopter fertilization now. So if you just left these guys
they would fertilize the soil. And they're very short-lived, they live about
40 years, typically 40 to 80 years. And
typically they come in after a big fire re-fertilize, and cover,
and protect the soil. They grow really fast
and then they die and are replaced by Douglas firs and other conifers in our
forests in the Cascades and Coast range.
I love planting these around the city. I planted one
in the house that I am just moving from over by the
fairgrounds in Eugene and in eight years it was about 30 feet
tall and about this big in diameter. Very fast
growing, really strong wood useful for a lot of
different things. I've made atlatls out of
alder and they have beautiful wood. You can't quite see because this is so dense
below but their bark is
gray, skin-like bark that's really attractive. It has
lots and lots of lichens and liverworts that grow on
it in the forest. One thing that's interesting here is
these four white alders in the grass
here were all planted on the same day, and this one's really big, and growing
super fast, and thriving and the other ones are
not establishing quite as fast and so you can see
that there can be huge microsite differences that these guys respond to. It's a
really great tree in restoration projects.
They tend not to like super poorly drained soils.
And so the other thing is along the Willamette River in Eugene
these guys line the river in many places
in Eugene and most people think they're red alders but almost all of them are
white alders. So a really nice tree for a lot of
different uses.