• December 13 2025 Work Party

    Hide and seek with emerging Himalayan blackberry, digging a carpet of creeping buttercup, mulch newly blanketing a transect of earth where cut canes marked the spot of our latest root ball excavation. We use the first aid kit for the first time on a conifer, gently wrapping its snapped young trunk with a splint, an act of tender absurdity given the severity of the injury, but equally one of stubborn hope. Every being deserves care. We will not give up on this tree, this community, this land. The creek rushes by with news of the atmospheric river just passed. Hawks cry. I feel myself.

  • November 8 2025 Work Party

    Thank you to the City of Kenmore’s Climate Action Advisory Committee for partnering with Sno-King Watershed Council on our first planting of fall 2025! Community volunteers planted 120 native trees, shrubs, and ferns in an area we had cleared of Himalayan blackberry and other weeds. We saw two deer, unbound roots, climbed on logs. We dug holes, hauled mulch. Exchanged numbers. In common with everything.

  • June 21 2025 Work Party

    A Green Thought by Katharine Towers Say instead it was an evening in head-highbracken with its smell of dark and medicine.Thinking green of the infecting fern where you may crouch and not be known,lodging your feet for good amid the stalks.A bower is a dwelling place or once it was a cage for pent-up singing birds. Look down to see the warp and weft of root.All the world is in these clutches.                         Look up to clock the fern’s drab underneathblotched with spores you mustn’t breathe.Breathe in deep. There’s nowhere else to live.

  • June 14 2025 Work Party

    A duckling worked with us for a time, nibbling on plants while we weeded. A heron perched on a nearby log. Some of us dug into a thick stand of reed canary grass, others of us combed over an area we had worked before, clipping and pulling reed canary grass from among native rushes and sedges. We ferreted out thistle, blackberry, and mullein, lifted bags of plant clippings up to the bridge, pushed them across the boardwalk, drove them across the street to be composted. A perfect day of quiet resistance.

  • June 7 2025 Work Party

    Boisterous clipping and digging of canes, pulling up a carpet of ivy, young people have brought their older humans along. We add our blackberry and ivy to the raft, ferry more to the field for pick up, get stung by nettles five times. A black-tailed deer grazes across the way. Hard rain starts to fall, scattering some of us, the rest of us carry on. The underground infrastructure of a very old Himalayan blackberry is exhumed, some concrete detritus moved. We leave with so much distance travelled in just three hours.