PLANTING KNOWLEDGE
Festival aims to make Islanders fall in love with forests.
P.E.I. was once a land flourishing in 95 per cent Acadian Forest.
Since the times of the European settlers, it has been cut down to about 35 or 40 per cent forest.
To help bring some education about the restoration of the Acadian Forest to fellow Islanders, the third annual Festival of Forests took place at the Macphail Woods Nature Centre in Orwell on Aug. 26.
“We’re trying to help every Islander fall in love with their forest,” said Dan McRae, environmental educator and forester.
The event provided workshops on outdoor survival skills, an owl hooting excursion, games and more.
The main attraction were the guided arboretum walks, which is a saunter through a tree garden at Macphail Woods.
Through the walk, McRae showed guests the various native species of plants and trees that can be found in the Acadian Forest and explained their purpose and importance.
For example, the tour started by explaining witch hazel, a shrub that flowers in the fall and can grow tall depending on how much sun it is getting. It provides protection and a food source to small animals.
“We only found them on about four properties on P.E.I. but we probably grow about 1,000 of these now,” said McRae.
Alan Zhong was one of roughly
20 people who took the first guided tour.
“I love this kind of activity that can add some knowledge of protection of our ecosystems because the environment to us is very important because we only have one earth,” he said.
The Macphail Woods Nature Centre is home of the Macphail Woods ecological forestry project which is a project of the environmental coalition of P.E.I.
It mostly focuses on reproducing native species of the Acadian Forest, which is the forest region in P.E.I., New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia.
“One of my favourite parts of my job is I get to wander into different swamps, bogs, fields, woods, anywhere where there’s cool native plants growing and find seed sources and then we figure out how to propagate them,” said McRae.
It is important for the forest to have multiple native species.
“If you have a beetle come through and you planted just spruce trees, especially nonnative ones, and a beetle comes through and wants to eat those then it just jumps from the next tree, to the next tree, and the next tree, you’ll have an epidemic,” he said.
If a beetle eats the trees and they’re all the same, then that will cause the trees to die.
If the forest is filled with dead wood, it is susceptible to forest fires.
Native plants have been on the Island for the last 12,000 years.
Many of the trees in the Acadian Forest were cut down to build ships when European settlers came to P.E.I.
“The Europeans came and saw masts for the tall ships they were building and that’s how the British had a navy that took over the world was a lot of Maritime trees,” said McRae, adding the facility also offers children’s camps, educational walking tours, a field course at UPE. and more.
“We’re always working towards getting people thinking about how we’re treating our woods and realize kind of how cool they are.”