Volunteers Clean Up and Restore Lone Tree Hill

By Radha Iyengar

On a sunny and cool Saturday, April 25, the Belmont Citizens Forum (BCF), in conjunction with the Judy Record Conservation Fund, held its 12th annual Lone Tree Hill Volunteer Day.

The volunteers included Girl Scout Troop 84205, Cityside Subaru employees, volunteers from Habitat, and citizens from Belmont and the surrounding communities. Many hands made light work. This year we had three different work locations.

• At the Meadow Edge Trail, volunteers planted 60 white pine saplings and five eastern red cedar saplings. These trees will eventually create shade as another way to make it harder for the buckthorn that has been removed over a multiyear process to grow back.
• Volunteers also planted 14 white pine saplings along the Pine Allee to replace either dead or downed trees. At the other end of the property along Pleasant Street, volunteers collected 14 bags of trash that included a chair, wood, cardboard, a tire jack and an iron chain.
• Along Judy’s Trail, volunteers filled two bags with garlic mustard and removed a large honeysuckle tree that was encroaching the Highland Cemetery entry gate.

BCF is grateful to David Ropes of Tree Specialists, Inc., and his amazing crew for not only supervising our efforts but also for helping plant trees, and to the Judy Record Conservation Fund for funding their work and purchasing the trees. A big shout-out goes to Joe Hibbard for suggesting this white pine and eastern red cedar planting project and for marking the planting locations ahead of Volunteer Day, to Leonard Katz (Belmont Conservation Volunteers) and Art Kreiger for supervising the pulling of garlic mustard along Judy’s Trail and for removing the honeysuckle tree and bittersweet vine, to Vincent Stanton for supervising the Cityside Subaru volunteers picking up trash, to Evanthia Malliris for signing in volunteers at the bottom of Coal Road on Pleasant Street, to Hannah Fletcher and Erika Harimoto, Habitat, for sharing some of the Habitat volunteers, notably six members of the Wayland High School Student Corps, to help with the tree planting and for lending us some gardening tools, to Jay Marcotte and Scott Mosca, DPW Highway Division, and their staff, for picking up the trash. As always, it takes a village to have a successful Volunteer Day.

Radha Iyengar is treasurer of Belmont Citizens Forum and organizer of the BCF Volunteer Day.