Restoration at Wilkes Park

Hidden in the outskirts of East Portland, in a neighborhood almost nobody who doesn't live there knows about, there is a small treasure. Located on a small overgrown plot of land about the size of two city parcels, a creek emerges from an underground culvert and flows freely through a charming wood for about 200 feet before diving back underground, beneath a block of modern tract houses, to eventually outlet as a tributary to the Columbia Slough. This is Wilkes Creek.

Wilkes Creek emerging from its culvert

Several months ago I helped with planting native plants upstream at the Wilkes Creek headwaters on the site of an old farm that had once been in the distant countryside, but has gradually been engulfed by the growing city. The farm has recently been acquired by the City of Portland Parks Department, and the human-facilitated conversion from fields to wildnerness area is underway. The water emerges from springs on the former farmland, and the newborn creek flows behind a quiet subdivision and into its culvert, where it runs beneath Wilkes City Park before emerging into the north end of the newly-minted Wilkes Creek Natural Area, the little wooded plot I worked at on Saturday.

I arrived ten minutes late due to mistakenly driving first to the wrong end of the park (oops!) but I was quickly filled in and set to work watering plantings. There was a truck with a tank, but since the pump wouldn't work we got the water flowing using gravity to siphon it to the plants. Each plant needed a full minute of watering, so I found myself in a zen state of observing my surroundings. This is my kind of volunteer work!

The water truck

Other workers busied themselves with cleaning up garbage (and boy howdy, there was plenty of it!) and hauling mulch for the new seedlings, and after chatting a bit with the organizer I lost myself in the interior of the little woods. There was a large red elderberry, and nearby were delicate blue eggshells from a nearby robin's nest.

Red elderberry

A snowberry seedling in its mulch cradle

I took a lot of pictures. Blogger kind of organizes photos however it wants, so please forgive the seemingly random layout! I finished the day up by mulching a lot of baby shrubs and trees, and managed to work up a sweat. I am completely envious of the residents of the neighborhood around Wilkes Creek for the beautiful little jewel they have running through their midst, and I wish I had one in my neighborhood too, but all the creeks near the city's center have been sent to languish underground, sadly.

Robin's egg shells

The view from on top of the culvert

A colony of aphids, thriving on goldenrod

A young Cascara

Red-flowering currant

Looking through the culvert... can you see
the rectangle of green light at the other end? 

Looking downstream from the culvert

The interior of the lot, with a silver birch