Around 20 people gathered at the picnic area of Hendricks Park at 9 a.m. on Dec. 7 to pull invasive ivy from the surrounding forest at the monthly Friends of Hendricks Park Saturday Morning Work Party. It’s a tradition that the Friends have been working to build since 2001, and even in the chilly winter months people still came to help restore the park.
The nonprofit Friends of Hendricks Park foundation was founded in 2001 as a way to maintain sections of the park and educate the community on its plant life. Erik Fisher, president of the board of the Friends of Hendricks Park, says that its mission is the “education, restoration and stewardship of Hendricks Park.”
“The organization began at first for the sake of the forest. There had been — back in the late ‘90s — a study done on the status of the forest,” Fisher said. “At that time it was pretty degraded, very much overrun with ivy.”
The Friends organized volunteers and hired contractors to restore portions of the park with help from the city. They dug ditches and pulled ivy, getting rid of invasive species that have taken over much of the northwest.
After the recession hit in 2008, much of the funding to the park was cut, Fisher said. Because of this, the Friends also brought the Rhododendron Garden under their wing, funding an analysis of its condition and starting a volunteer group there.
Today, the Friends of Hendricks Park host education programs to teach students about native Northwestern plant life and bring in volunteers from the community and organizations of Eugene to help restore the forest.
A group of about 20 people gathered to pull ivy and dig up blackberries from the forest pathways last Saturday. Despite the covering of fog and the intermittent rain, the volunteers worked on the side of the hill for three hours. Some were from organizations like Rotaract and the Holden Center, and others were just members of the community.
Sydney Katz, Community Service Chair for Rotaract UO, attended the event and said she has been working with the Friends for a year. She’s an environmental science major and says that the event gives her real world experience, but it’s more about a connection to a community.
“A lot of people use that park to go on their morning runs or take their kids for a picnic in the afternoon,” Katz said. “It was really great to have that kind of connection with a place like that. So I hope that if you go and work for a place like that you’ll become more attached to it and want to help it more.”
She said that during the warmer months she’s seen 20 to 30 people at the event, mostly students and young people, but many mornings it’s been people who are retired and families.
After the event the members of volunteers stuck around and made wreaths out of the removed ivy.
“We figure it’s always fun to chill out and make some fun crafts afterwards,” Katz said.
Fisher said he was glad to see something being done with the ivy. He said that after 30 acres of it being removed, it’s not easy to find the space to dispose of it.
“Finding something to do with the ivy has been a search — a labor,” Fisher said.
The collected ivy is usually put into piles on top of branches in a way it can’t re-root and left to compost, Fisher said.
After 20 years of work and 30 acres removed, Fisher estimates three to five years until all the ivy is removed.
Volunteering is open to the public and meeting times can be found on the Friends of Hendricks Park website.
