A tree-planting bonanza on the Winooski River

DENIZ DUTTON Community News Service

The soil breaks apart like cake as I carve a pit about as wide and deep as my shovel on a stretch of earth along the Winooski River. I hover a silver maple sapling above the pit, lowering it until the root collar appears level with the edge.

Then I shovel the soil back in, tamp down the squishy dirt around the stem and shimmy on the 4-foot-tall, opaque piping that entombs the sapling and protects it from deer browsing and vole girdling. I finish with the satisfying sound of a wooden stake being jettisoned into the earth with a mallet and zip-tie it to the piping — voila, one tree planted.

That was the experience of about 20 volunteers who came out to a 100-foot-wide strip of land at the Ethan Allen Homestead in Burlington in April for One Tree Planted Day, an event hosted by the Intervale Center, Winooski Valley Park District and the nonprofit One Tree Planted.

In about two and a half hours, the volunteers had planted 200 trees in an effort to expand a buffer strip along the river.

“It’s important because — I mean, you can hear the birds, right? — it provides habitat, carbon sequestration and also bank stabilization so the bank doesn’t keep eroding,” said Duncan Murdoch, the Intervale Center’s natural areas stewardship coordinator, who led the planting.

“Eighty percent of Vermont was clear-cut right up to the rivers for sheep,” he said. “There was no vegetation, no trees or anything to hold the soil, so the soil would just drain off of the hills and the land, and it would clog the rivers.”

“Planting all these trees prevents all that from happening,” he added.

Shelburne-based One Tree Planted, which oversees reforestation and forest restoration projects in 18 countries across six continents, provided $860 for the trees. On June 20, the group was set to celebrate its 100 millionth tree milestone. The organization says it planted 52.8 million trees last year, and while the 200 saplings now in the ground at the Ethan Allen Homestead sound like a drop in the bucket, the group sees community-scale projects as some of its most important.