Eagle Landing Park
Nature and wildlife within reach in a small neighborhood park.
The land where Eagle Landing Park now sits was once old growth forest. It was logged around 1890, and Douglasfirs have grown up again that are probably over one hundred years old. The forest has not regenerated itself the way it naturally would have, though, because many introduced species have infiltrated the park and interrupted the normal cycle. Ivy is the main culprit, followed by laurel, holly, and blackberry in order of impact and disruption. The Parks Department and volunteers plan to remove as many of the invasive plants as possible, and replace them with native plants that are appropriate to the site conditions and the ecosystems present in the park. It would be difficult to replicate the original condition of the forest, since no record of it was ever made, but plants will be selected and placed in order reproduce the original conditions as much as possible. This page will track those restoration efforts.
Zone 1 photos before and after.
Zone 2 photos, 3/10/2007 work party.
In order to organize the restoration process, the park has been divided, on paper, into 18 zones, each one a manageable chunk of land about a third of an acre in size. The zones could each be adopted by a person or an organization, and each group would be responsible for restoring and maintaining a defined area. Zone 1 is the area right at the entrance, containing the driveway, parking spaces, trail, kiosk, and storm drain ditch. Before construction began, volunteers from the Washington Native Plant Society salvaged many plants such as ferns and viburnum edule and moved them to a fenced-off section safe from construction equipment. Most of the ivy, clematis, and blackberry was removed with heavy equipment. One of the three Douglasfirs was cut down to make room for the driveway, and the trunk of that tree was placed in the planting bed to provide downed wood as would happen in nature.
Zone 1 was planted, as part of the construction contract, with many native plants including, spruce, hemlock, cedar, vine maple, Indian plum, currant, serviceberry, hazelnut, sword fern, maidenhair fern, Douglas hawthorne, Oregon grape, salal, and rhododendron. Since the invasives were cleared away, some madrones have seeded themselves. Volunteers have added wild roses, devil's club, and gooseberry. Many elderberries have seeded themselves, along with some thimbleberry. In the before and after pictures, the most noticeable change is the addition of paved surfaces, but in spite of that appearance, many native plants have been added to what had previously been a tangle of natives and invasives. Some weeding remains to be done, but zone 1 is probably the closest to complete restoration.
Zone 11 restoration notes.