Native seedlings

Local gardener takes initiative as 600 trees are planted County-wide

As a well-known figure in the Prince Edward County gardening community, Lise Bois is a gardener, horticulturist, beekeeper, climate change activist and so much more. She cares about the land, the environment and what the climate is doing, and she loves pollinators. On the 10-acre patch of land she has worked for seven years on County Road 8, where there were no gardens previously, Bios is planting lots of little tree seedlings this fall.

Trees are important to Bois. Back in the spring, having ordered some 600 tree seedlings from Quinte Conservation, COVID-19 meant the order got cancelled. However, earlier this fall she was able to reorder the trees, all 600 of them. While Quinte Conservation doesn’t usually deal with individuals for tree orders, dealing primarily with local authorities, they do take big orders from groups. As past president, and current director of the Prince Edward County Horticultural Society, Bois placed an order under the organization’s banner and found a few dozen gardening friends to share them with.

“About 20 individuals so far have planted those trees on their own properties and the individuals are from as far away as Consecon, Demorestville, Mountain View and Black River, so a nice demographic in terms of where the trees are being planted,” says Bois. All the tree seedlings she ordered are native, except the blue spruce, and include white oak, sugar maple, paper birch, black cherry, elderberry, white pine and white cedar. “For those taking part, they are showing how some community members are doing their part to mitigate climate change,” she says. “Future generations will benefit, and even in five years from now, we will see something; these will grow a foot to 18 inches a year.” She says people tend to think of the Horticultural Society as just pretty flowers and tea roses, but it is evolving. “It’s moving into a different direction and it’s realizing that to stay viable it has to be current, and being current means being aware of climate change, being aware of what needs to be done.”

Bois’s 10-acre parcel of land consists of a five-acre grassy field at the back of the property that she hopes to turn into a wild meadow. The other five acres consists of different garden areas with a smaller field she hopes will become a little forest, and this is where she is planting her new tree seedlings. “We’ve planted red oak, sugar maple and black cherry, white cedar, white pine and white spruce, and we will have probably planted a couple of hundred trees by the time we have finished on just part of the property, and we will have quite a diversity of trees.”

She is also planting a number of shrubs, such as serviceberry, ninebark, chokecherry and pagoda dogwood as complementary understorey plantings.

“Quinte Conservation were wonderful in terms of making sure we were able to get those trees at a really decent price,” says Bois. Prices range from 85 cents to $1.50 for the larger-than-plug-sized tree seedlings. “For people who want to do lots of planting, that’s really good.” She has already had interest for an order for next year, something she says she doesn’t mind coordinating again. “Even as a small gardener, you can plant a tree, you can plant a couple of plants, and you’ve done something.”

While she was initially expecting to receive bare-root tree seedlings in the spring, she found out they would get plugs, which are generally tiny in size, but to her surprise, the order came with large plugs. “The trees we got were very healthy and they weren’t plugs, except for the evergreens, they were sizeable plugs and healthy specimens.”

Consecon area resident and environmentalist Gerry Jenkison received 22 tree seedlings this week for planting. “Don and I are big advocates for trees and have planted literally thousands of seedlings on our farm,” says Jenkison. “Watching them grow gives us great pleasure for their beauty and also for the benefits they provide to the environment.” She says, they filter out particulates from the air, help drain flood water through their root systems in the spring, and provide welcome shade in the summer. “Lise’s efforts have given people all over the County access to seedlings.” She says it’s an excellent time to plant right now because roots have many months to establish themselves before facing the challenges of a hot, dry summer.

While Bois faces the challenges of extremely stony soil (more stones than soil), she has an auger tractor attachment that makes drilling holes in very rocky soil a much easier task. “We grow a lot of rocks here,” laughs Bois. “Having the tractor definitely makes a difference and we couldn’t have done any of this without it.” The process is an efficient one and takes just about a minute or two to complete. Bois has planted 40 of the tree seedlings on her property so far. “We’ll probably end up planting about 125 in total, but we’ve got the property to do it, and it is still time-consuming, but we can at least get it done relatively quickly and it will take us a couple of days to do that.”

Another challenge she faces in her rural garden is rabbits, so she has been experimenting with ways to protect the trees, noting that some options they tried become expensive when a lot of trees are being planted, and others didn’t work because the tree seedlings are so small. They came up with the idea of using large distilled water bottles. “We cut off the top and bottom and that becomes the collar and protector for our trees,” explains Bois. “We have to do something because the bunnies just eat, especially in winter when they are hungry, and they will really decimate,” she says. “I’ve bought some burlap hoping we can wrap the tops of the trees and they won’t nibble on those.”

“I can’t tell you how often we say how lucky we are to have made the move here,” says Bois, “We have an absolutely wonderful life after retirement. “It’s a bit more garden that I can actually manage because I keep adding,” she laughs. “It’s wonderful all these trees would be planted,” she says, noting the municipality has talked about ordering trees or thought about what they could do. “We actually did it, and it’s quite thrilling.” The Prince Edward County Horticultural Society can be reached at pechorticultural.org.