While Trees Count was my introduction to volunteering with NYC Parks, I wanted to do more. I found out about the Super Steward Program and was excited to get involved. There are four different tracks and I chose to be a NAVigator because I particularly enjoy working in the forested natural areas of our parks.
Super Stewards typically choose one park as their home park where they can work independently. I settled on Highbridge because it’s relatively close to my current apartment by bike or subway and because the people I talked with at the parks department said it could really use more volunteers.
My work in Highbridge involves managing introduced plant species in a few assigned areas of the park. I cut back multiflora rose, oriental bittersweet, wineberry, honeysuckle, and a few other species to give native plants space to grow. Highbridge in particular has a ton of invasive vines and when they get out of control, they pull on the trees, girdle their branches, and sometimes even snap the young tree trunks in half! By cutting back these introduced/invasive plants, I give the native saplings a better chance of survival. I find it particularly rewarding when I start to work on a huge tangle of invasive plants only to uncover a small hickory or oak sapling that I couldn’t even see under the vines at first.
Invasive plant management can be complicated because different species require different methods of management at different times of their lifecycle. Through this program I’ve learned a lot about plant ID and how to manage different species effectively. For example, some species like tree of heaven could become even more of a problem if you just cut them back once without a plan and other species like wineberry can re-root really easily if you do not elevate the cuttings to dry out. Even if you can identify that a species is invasive, it’s not always helpful to cut it back or pull it out whenever you see it, so it’s important to get proper training in your local area before you do anything.
If you’d like to learn more or get involved, the NYC Parks page is here.
Also, it’s hard to get good before and after pics because it all just looks like a mass of green on camera but here’s an area I worked in that had a mass of multiflora rose:
and a few weeks after cutting back the rose you can see a wider variety of species popping up:
