Today marks the four year anniversary of Swamp Creek Habitat Restoration Project.
We do this work on the ancestral land of the first peoples of this region — the Coast Salish, the Muckleshoot, the Duwamish, the Snoqualmie, the Sammamish, the Stillaguamish, the Suquamish — peoples who have stewarded this land since time immemorial and who are very much alive and present as good stewards of the land to this day. It is with gratitude to and because of them that we have the honor of tending to this land with the hope of restoring it to a healthy ecosystem where native insects, fish, birds, and mammals, including humans, can be sustained and thrive for generations to come.
We grew into ourselves this year as we welcomed more of you into the fold. We fell in love all over again with the root slayer and the weed wrench. We found cutleaf blackberry hiding in Western sworn ferns, pushed into new fields of arching Himalayan blackberry canes thicker than a thumb, and made wrenching out English hawthorn its own mini project. We worked alongside goats, found a nest of baby birds in the brambles, rescued trees from plastic wrap, all of this and more witnessed by deer, salamanders, herons, eagles, and hawks. We held our first official planting party in the spring at Wallace Swamp Creek Park, then two more in late fall — one at Wallace and one at the 175th St/Swamp Creek South site. We spent the better part of the year combing over active restoration areas again and again to ferret out persistent blackberry, thistle, and knotweed at the same time as we pushed into new tangles of weeds to create space for the earth to breathe and new native plants to thrive. We were in community, planted love, grew hope. We were accountable to the earth and to each other.
My gratitude to project co-founders Deputy Mayor Melanie O’Cain and Kenmore resident Linda Phillips for seeing the possibility in this project when it was just an idea; to the City of Kenmore for permission to work on City land; to City Staff Stephanie Brown, Maurita Colburn, Quinn Proffitt, and Jennifer Gordon for their behind-the-scenes support and to Gary and Darren for reliably ferrying the tool trailer to the right place; to City Manager Rob Karlinsey for loving Western hemlocks and all conifers so deeply; and to Sno-King Watershed Council, this project’s non-profit heart and home, with special gratitude to Eric Adman and Jeremy Jones for their mentorship and support. My gratitude also to my mother and my child — they’ve either been out digging in the dirt with me or home together so I could be clipping and digging myself.
If not for the individuals of all ages who have volunteered their time, we would not have built what we have over these past four years — a place of community and belonging, where we are embraced just as we are, where we learn and grow together, where we are healing ourselves as much as we are healing the land. We are all so needed in this work and everyone who has ever volunteered these past four years is permanently etched in my heart.
The earth needs you, I need you, we need each other. Here’s to another wonderful, connecting, healing year.
With love and gratitude,
Tracy Banaszynski