Oregon White Oak in Silverton

An Oak Recovery Plan for Silverton.

What happens after the icestorm?

The ancient savannah oaks, now skirted with bungalows and moldering farmhouses, and the tall oak forests that shattered onto our roofs during the February 2021 ice storm are declining. These trees are aging out: 400 years is nearing the limit of their lifetime, and there are very few that old. Two hundred and fifty is a good age but it has another century of life if it isn’t abused. When they are all lost, through age, ice, or abuse, without saplings growing up, what will replace them?

Silverton’s urban canopy since the town’s founding has been defined by Oregon white oak. It should remain a town defined by Oregon white oak. If we allow Silverton's oaks to die out, what tree takes their place? We become like any other homogenous American town if we let the canopy devolve into a collection of ornamental tree species. Pretty like a Walmart. We must remain strong in the face of this disaster and move into resiliency. This can be done now with simple planning. Rather than letting our oaks die without replacements we must plan and plant succession. The next generation starts now.

A Valley wide plan

The value of all these sites, and the trees planted all across the town, is in the unity created in this area of the Willamette Valley. In March 2020 the Willamette Partnership released a plan through its working group, Willamette Valley Oak and Prairie Cooperative (WVOPC). The group is made up of over 50 agencies and experts from across the Valley. The plan is interesting reading: Willamette Valley Strategic Action Plan, https://willamettepartnership.org/wvopc/. It covers the entire Willamette Valley and creates a template to save and recover Oregon white oaks and their habitat. As lamented to me in a recent conversation with an Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife official who works in oak recovery, there is a large void in the recovery effort in the northeast area of the Willamette Valley. Silverton centers that area and can make an important difference.

The hub and spoke plan I am championing overlays all of Silverton and is unique and ambitious. With even greater efforts it could spread to the north and include the grand open oak forests on the flank of Mount Angel. The measure of our damage is great enough to demand an in-kind response. In Silverton there are multiple community spaces representing Oregon white oak habitat. Three are critical anchor hubs. Coolidge McClaine Park has an oak woodland and the oak grove at Mark Twain includes mature savannah oaks. The open oak woodland and savannah oaks at the Oregon Garden make up the third site. These sites should remain public and preserved. They are the hubs of a Silverton-wide system of preservation and replacement. More hubs exist at Robert Frost Elementary School and the community space at Abiqua Heights. The spokes spread across the whole town and connect into nearby Mount Angel. There, a vast Oregon white oak woodland wraps around the Mount Angel Abbey and other private lands with less pressure from urbanization.  

Saplings for residents

Silverton residents should plant young oak saplings in the spaces vacated by the shattered birch, red maple, pears, and other ill-adapted ornamental trees. If a resident lost an Oregon white oak, replace it with an Oregon white oak. It doesn’t need to be in 2021. It can happen in the next few years. The anniversary of the storm is a fine time to plant Oregon white oaks. Oregon white oaks live in a different timeline than you and I. They grow slow. Planting a year-old seedling, one foot tall, will yield a head height sapling in several years. Some residents lack the patience for this. It is okay to find and plant larger trees. They can be hard to find and expensive. Seedlings are inexpensive, usually just a few dollars.

In due course maintenance and removal, almost universally neglected by tree owners, become critical to this plan. Corrective pruning of saplings – guidance of a young tree to a better and more enduring shape – is quick to accomplish. Planting young oaks into our urban gardens hardens the trees to endure irrigated conditions more than thrusting those conditions onto a century old tree. The saplings will grow up in and harden to the urban sites a little more. In 50 years, the oaks will be about 20 feet. They won’t pose threats to property or life in these first decades, but they will provide some ecological benefit. They also prepare our town to replace the ancient oaks with new 21st century oaks.

Concept proof

There are few examples of young Oregon white oaks in Silverton. In the days after the ice storm, I walked over 25 miles of Silverton’s streets, surveying, and making an inventory of the damage. I found only 75 young Oregon white oak. Of this cohort 84 percentage are undamaged and the other young oaks have modest damage. Modest level damage is easy to recover from with simple pruning. Greater than 50% of all birch, red maple and pears of similar age sustained mortal damage. Oregon white oak is a better choice. None came close to being destroyed. That isn’t bad for a storm of epic proportions. Sadly, none of these young trees were at the park or the school.

Oregon white oaks provide 100 years of growth without significant worry because their slow growth puts them on a different timeline than us. A lot will change during that time. We can prepare and develop plans for a strong and resilient urban forest canopy, one we care for. Urban forest canopy succession should not be neglected. We can prepare for the future. Now is the time we do it.

Silverton

The plan calls for Coolidge McClaine Park to remain as it is with acknowledgement of its importance to the social and historical structure of the town. But that oak woodland was heavily damaged. This gives us the opportunity to start a modest replacement program with accompanying teaching opportunities. This city doesn’t have a large number of street trees, but when appropriate Oregon white oaks should be the go-to species in preference to non-native ornamentals. Oregon white oaks should be used in all city parks when a compromise can be reached for non-irrigated sites (park irrigation by necessity will prove too heavy for Oregon white oaks).

The private park at Abiqua Heights straddles a unique position, both park and private. It holds an important grove of ancient oaks. It should be carefully managed for their continued long-term survival – stopping irrigation near and under them, removal of recently planted non-native oaks, canopy release (cutting fir trees growing in the oak canopy) and planned succession. Adding this hub to the system overlaying the town is important.

The school district

The Mark Twain Elementary School oak grove is the largest hub in the system. It needs to transition into habitat trust, moving away from school ownership. Details of that transfer need to be figured out. This grove of trees, and smaller groves at Robert Frost Elementary and Bethany Charter School, along with several young trees at the high school create a district wide opportunity to work with Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife’s schoolyard habitat program. That critical mass will build interest from other habitat and species recovery agencies. The momentum it creates is hard to ignore. Using the existing Oregon white oaks as the backbone of habitat, in time the sites will be restored to a usable habitat level. The sites are just mown grass now – a generally boring subject for everyone. The opportunities in these teaching labs abound – everything from geology, Oregon history, and biology to computer programming and modeling, weather, and hands-on opportunities are present in this kind of program. There are options for every level of interest. This is the stuff real scientists are working on every day and building this program brings them into our schools. It builds and positions, an already great district, to be an even better one.  

Oregon Garden

Strengthening the protections and support for the Oregon Garden site is equally important. As for many, 2020 has left a deep impact on the budget of the Garden. Our support of the Garden now helps to ensure the protected oaks there remain.

Steps to take now

Our collective responsibility is to create habitat that allows the next generation, our children, grandchildren and even great-great-grandchildren to look in awe at the oaks of Silverton. That will not be possible without planning, coupled with education.

Each of these four tasks is more than enough to keep us busy. We have enough work removing the branches that choke our yards. A failure to act now, though, when we can see a future without our Oregon white oaks, would be an abdication of our responsibility for a better future and an acknowledgement of our unworthiness as temporary stewards of this oak savannah we call home. Join my fledgling movement and do these things:

1.       Commit to planting an Oregon white oak in your yard.

2.       Visit the Oregon Garden now.

3.       Petition the Silverfalls School district to preserve the oak grove while its long-term survival is guaranteed.

4.       Petition the city of Silverton to plant Oregon white oaks in public spaces and add it to the street tree list, while preserving the oak woodland at Coolidge McClaine Park.

5.       Reach out to me, Eric Hammond, onlygrowinthesun@gmail.com as I build a team to accomplish these goals. I need all types – skeptics, scientists, and money people. I am confident we can do this.