For two years, Woodgrove’s Environmental Club has worked to plan their tree-planting event. As the tree planting event has many working parts, the planning is still in process.
Planting trees on Woodgrove’s campus has an important purpose. Mason Grove, a senior at Woodgrove and Co-President of the club explained, “There’s been a lot of construction around Woodgrove, and we want to counteract the development of the land and give some life and some nature back to the campus.”
One of the hardest parts of planning the event was getting the event itself approved. Ms. Amber Bartling, biology and AP Environmental Science teacher and club co-sponsor with chemistry teacher Ms. Linda Palmisano, stated, “The LCPS Planning Board wants to know if there’s any, for instance, utilities. Are there any water or power or gas lines that are running underneath the locations where we’re planting? Other things like are these tree species native? Are they tree species that are campus friendly? For instance, they don’t want things that have any thorns or stickers or nuts that are too large, like black walnuts, things like that.”
Due to their price, trees are not something that can just be bought on a club budget. Grove talked about the process the club went through to get the club’s trees, saying, “We reached out to three organizations. Our main organizations that we are getting trees from is Abernathy and Spencer. We reached out to the Loudon Nature Conservancy as well to try and get trees, but we did land a great deal with Abernathy. They ended up donating about 50 trees, which is tons of money worth of trees.”
The trees’ location has been decided, and Grove explained where and why the club chose these spots, “Mr. Grove, he’s an art teacher, and he for many years has said that he would love some shade and more beauty out in front of the art cage. Right now, it’s just open grass,” They’re also thinking of putting some of them “back behind the tennis courts. There’s just so much land out there… and there’s trees already growing back there, so it’s obviously a good environment for the trees,” he added.
However, just planting a tree in the ground will not ensure its lifelong longevity. Brody Russell, a junior and next year’s Environmental Club President, explained, “We will have mulch, and check them every other day or so. Depending on the temperature and conditions, we will see how much moisture they have, and when the soil is nearly dry, we will come back and fill the water tank at the school, then come back and water the trees.” With this amount of planning going into this tree planting, it is almost certain that the trees will be a lively and long-lasting addition to the Woodgrove campus.