Preserving the green path

From the gentle rustling of branches, to the falling brown leaves and barking dogs, the Northaven

Trail is a popular destination for people of all ages. Teenagers race down the trail while couples walk with their children or pets down the path, but due to a combination of climate change, invasive species and increases in littering, the natural beauty of the trail is slowly diminishing. A group of students are volunteering to ensure the preservation and restoration of trails and prairies in the greater Dallas area, saving them slowly withering away.

 

Led by senior Akash Munshi, members of the Gardening Club partnered with the Friends of the Northaven Trail, a non-profit board of directors that manage and keep the trail in shape.

“Volunteers are very important to our organization because we have no paid staff members, meaning we do heavily depend on volunteers,” said board member Cary Fitzgerald. “Recently we’ve had a large crowd helping us clean up the trails and teach different activities. There’s always something that we can find people to do.”

Along with St. Mark’s, the members of the Northaven Trail Board have partnered with Hockaday and the Dallas Girl Scout Troop.

“We also partner with organizations like the Texas Conservation Alliance, who will help provide flaps and volunteers to assist us on planting day,” Fitzgerald said.

Students from the Gardening Club assist in multiple ways. For example, volunteers may have to assist in events they might hold with the YMCA or the nearby church. But mainly, students help maintain nature projects ran by board, these include their pollinator gardens and wildflower programs.

“They make sure all the plants are watered, and more importantly, they help to fend off and make sure invasive plants do not make their way into the trails ecosystem,”  board member Dorothy Beuchal said. “These are the main ways they contribute.”

Although the partnership with the Northaven Trail has been much of the focus of the Gardening Club’s work to help the environment, they also help out at local prairies around the DFW area.

“In terms of the prairie side of things, one area we frequent is the prairie area down by Harry Moss Park,” senior and Gardening Club member Thomas Goglia said. “That is one of the places a lot of Gardening Club members spent time at this summer.”

Not only are members of the club working to help preserve the prairies and trails, but they are also encouraging students at others to do the same. Working with the Flow Project, a non-profit organization that promotes environmental education at public schools around DFW, members of the club hope to spread awareness to high schools across the city.

“If you check on the Flow Project’s website, you can see that their partnership with us is actually a chapter of the organization,” Goglia said. “Through this connection we have been able to work with students from schools in Plano as well as DISD.”

The main issue the Northaven Trail and different prairies are facing are the invasive species that are not suitable to grow in Texas’s climate, but they also take resources away from the plants that should be growing in these locations.

“We’ve mainly seen different species of grass find their way into places like White Rock Lake, where they tend to spread more and more aggressively, winning the battle over the native species,” Beuchal said. “This has been an ongoing problem for us.”

Members of the Gardening Club and Northaven Trail Board also feel spreading awareness of these issues is crucial due to the extreme weather Texas has seen from throughout the year.

“We’ve noticed that these more aggressive invasive plants tend to be much less drought-resistant, meaning they might be able to take over the native plants but will simple wither away come drought season, something we’ve been experiencing more and more frequently,” Beuchal said.

According to Beuchal, the demand for awareness, education, and volunteers, is at an all-time high, not only because of the extreme weather but also because of the plans the board members have for the future.

“We’re always taking on more and more projects to make the trail a more inviting place,” Beuchal said. “One thing we are trying to do at the moment is plant more milkweed along the trail, a plant that attracts Monarch butterflies, hopefully giving the trail a brighter and more natural feel.”

With more projects to come in the future, more awareness to spread, and more work to do, the Gardening Club have been effective not only in applying their knowledge, but also sharing it, in the hopes that more and more people will help to combat the very same issues they’re dealing with.

“We can always find someone to do something, we need all the volunteers we can get,” Fitzgerald said. “So it meant a lot when the club took the initiative to reach out to us.”