A small army of volunteers descended on two local waterways on Sunday afternoon. Equipped with an assortment of supplies — shovels, rubber boots, potted plants and willow whips — and fueled with a tractor load of good intentions, they spent the day repairing the earth.

Where Whelpton and Tuttyens Road meet, teenagers stabbed the willow whips into the ditch embankment.

"You can sometimes find a spot where it will go in easier," Detmar Schwichtenberg tells one of them. As part of Fraser Harrison Smart Growth, he’s done this before. The teen continues along the base of the ditch, poking the soggy ground hard until the long stems decide to stay put.

About 1,000 willow whips were being put in place, along with about 100 native trees and shrubs: Sitka spruce, Western red cedar, big leaf maples, for example. Across the ditch, Schwichtenberg points out a line of cedars that are just starting to poke above the bushes.

They were planted by many of the same people a few years ago, again as a way to enhance the waterway, and make the ecosystem more friendly to the creatures who call it home. The Salish sucker, an endangered species, is one of them.

"But they are amazingly resilient," he says.

The shade that will be provided by the trees, eventually, will cut down on the reed canary grass.

And shade is key, especially where fish are trying to live. Restoring the waterways is a continuous job. But Schwichtenberg says the hope is one day, the ecosystems will be operating well, without human intervention.

While the group knows their work is important, each treeplanting is just one small step to rebuilding these little ecosystems. But in the larger picture, those ecosystems are connected. And the benefits are long term.

At a property off McCallum road, an entire pond has been created that now is home to hundreds of fish.

"This is an important refuge area over the summer," says Dr. Mike Pearson. He’s an aquatic ecologist, and chair of the Fraser Valley Regional Watershed Coalition; Detmar Schwichtenberg is vice-chair of the same coalition.

And on Sunday, the majority of the volunteers worked at the McCallum Road property, tractored in by Pearson, and put to work planting a thick line of native species along the pond and the creeks that connect it to Miami River at one end, and into McCallum at the other end.

Young children, their parents, and a spattering of others all dug into the ground and lovingly placed young vine maples along the pond edge. They found spots for red flowering currant and snowberry bushes, willow trees and more native plants.

Gone are the blackberry bushes. They hog nutrients, cause soil to slip into waterways with their shallow root systems, and generally aren’t good plants for a healthy ecosystem.

Both of Sunday’s project are part of a compensation program, in which the District of Kent pays for the trees and bushes to be planted. They are required to do so by law, as a way of compensating for their own maintenance of the waterways, including ditch cleaning.

But who is paying for what matters little to the planters. They’re just volunteering to be a part of the community, and a part of the movement to make our human footprint a little less heavy.

Anne Staiger brought three of her four children out for the day.

The Staigers have a hobby farm on Tuttyens, and were introduced to the groups when they came and cleared their blackberries for them.

"I like it for the kids," she says, sitting on a tractor’s flatbed and being pulled to the McCallum site. "You can watch the development of what you invested in the community. They are taking part of this big experiment. You can be a part of the experiment."

If you missed out on volunteering this time, there will be more in the future.

The next plantings will be out of the area; November 7 at Gordon’s Brook in Langley, November 14 on Chilliwack River Rioad and November 28 at an undecided location in Chilliwack.

For more information on these plantings, phone Rachel Drennan at

604-791-2235