Summer comes, Grants finished!

Oceanspray and mock orange in Madrona Woods

Decorate for the Holidays. Then add a tree to the Woods

Friends of Madrona Woods will be selling living holiday trees this December to raise funds for long-term maintenance and also to provide more trees for ongoing restoration. After the holidays you can either plant the tree you’ve purchased at home or donate it for planting in Madrona Woods. You can plant it with us or we’ll plant it for you.

We’ll have grand firs in 5-gallon pots for $30 and in 7-gallon pots for $45, and this includes delivery December 1 or later. Trees can be decorated and displayed indoors or out, though keeping them indoors for more than two weeks is not recommended. Sample trees will be on display at the Halloween party and other neighborhood events. Contact Peter Mason, if you don’t see him there, at 388-6490 or peterma5@msn.com to order and arrange for delivery. Care instructions will be provided with each tree.

Good News: We’re on our way

We’ve received three of the grants we applied for, and this will allow us to move forward with clearing, planting, and maintenance in the last piece of the restoration of the entire Madrona Woods—the 1.5 acres in the southeast corner. King County has awarded Friends of Madrona Woods $10,000 through its Wild Places in City Spaces program, the Washington Native plant Society will contribute $500 for plants, and A Department of Neighborhoods Small and Simple grant will kick in $19,440.

A new partnership with Friends of the Cedar River Watershed is another key factor that makes it possible to tackle this last remaining section. Our first joint work party will take place on Friday, June 8th from 9:00 to 3:30 (or any part of this) with employees from Deloitte Consulting LLP. A presentation on the connections of Madrona Woods to the Cedar River salmon migrations will also be provided. As City of Seattle residents we rely on the Cedar River for our clean drinking water, to keep our Lake Washington floating bridges afloat, and to operate the Ballard Chittenden locks. Cedar River salmon also rely on migrating through this watershed. Anyone interested in joining in is encouraged to email nisa@cedarriver.org to register.

We’ll be having a big planting push in the fall, and we hope to gather lots of laborers on Green Seattle Day November 3 to give us a boost. Put it on your calendar so you can start adding up your hours for volunteer match on grants.

The Car is Back

We had a rare nice day, so Robbie and I went to check out the car, which is in our proposed SE Woods project area. The car is a 1940s era Ford. It has been in the Woods for a very long time – see how it is kind of buried? It had been covered by blackberries in recent years. We ran into Penelope and her son Julian, who were exploring the Woods. We all worked together to clip away for a couple of hours, and the car is visible again. The car is in a pretty soggy place; note the skunk cabbage in the foreground. Check out the gallery for more pictures. Look west from the lower part of the stairway to heaven to see the car.

Donate through the Seattle Parks Foundation

The Seattle Parks Foundation is FOMW’s fiscal sponsor for our SE Woods restoration project. To make a tax-deductible gift to this project online, click here, and select Madrona Woods from the donation designation drop down list halfway down the page. If you want to give by check, designate Madrona Woods in the memo line and mail the check to:

Seattle Parks Foundation

105 South Main St #235

Seattle, WA 98104

Students Lend Welcome Hands

Students from the University of Washington and Garfield High School will be helping us clear new areas now that the creek daylighting project is finished except for more planting and continuing maintenance.

A team from the University of Washington’s Restoration Ecology Network Capstone Program has chosen to work with Friends of Madrona Woods to clear invasives and revegetate the east edge of Madrona Woods along Lake Washington Boulevard during the 2009-2010 academic year. They have been working on design and preparation during the fall and will begin supervising work parties to clear and plant during the next two quarters. They are looking into the possibility of redirecting the spring water that often collects on the Boulevard and connecting it to the daylighted stream.

Students from the Garfield High School after school Earth Service Corps will be coming the second Sunday afternoon each month during the school year to clear and plant along the sidewalk connecting Spring/Grand to the Boulevard. Students from other area high schools may be joining them. Community residents are also welcome. They gather at 1:00 at the tool box at Spring and Grand.

Glad and sad tidings

First the good news. We’re grateful for the welcome help we’ve gotten from several groups this fall, including Washington Mutual on the Day of Caring; Seattle Pacific City Quest, a service project designed by SPU to help incoming freshmen get to know each other while they help others; and the UW Accounting Fraternity, Beta Alpha Psi, Delta Chapter. Their hard work has given us a big boost in the clearing and mulching we need to do along the Spring Street section of the ravine in conjunction with the creek daylighting. And six students from Seattle Girls School will be working weekly in the woods this fall as part of the school’s internship program.

We’ve started soliciting bids from possible contractors so we can start culvert and cove construction for the daylighting in March. We’ve recently purchased the plastic lumber and other lumber we’ll need for the three bridges and railings in that project with a $20,000 grant we got from the King County Council for 2006.

The sad news is that Ann Lennartz, one of the founders of our Friends of Madrona Woods group ten years ago, died September 6, 2006. Without her continuing dedication and support, we would certainly not have achieved nearly as much as we have in our restoration and education efforts. The Starflower Foundation, which she started after she left the Madrona Woods Board, gave us grants to purchase plants and cover landscape architect planning and provided naturalists to help us plan and staff our environmental education program during the formative years. She went on to start Seattle Urban Nature, which has surveyed habitat on Seattle’s public lands so the city and citizens can now better manage our open spaces.

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• Mission Statement

  The Friends of Madrona Woods strive to restore the Woods to a healthy, natural state by removing non-native invasive plants and revegetating with diverse native plants and to make the Woods safe and accessible through an environmentally friendly trail system.