Friday, May 25, 2012
Creekside Sprayground and Playground
7:30-8:30 p.m.

Click here for directions to the Creekside Sprayground and hours of operation.

 March 31, 2012

After flatly saying “no” I tried to convince Casey of snakes’ importance in the ecosystem, and express they had a right to live in this place. It didn’t faze him; he was on a mission to engage with nature in a noble, direct, and more intimate way. I respect that. I often feel the same.

We walked down the old farm road along Floyds Fork (now under construction as the Louisville Loop) to a gravel bar. Along the way we looked at exotic honeysuckle, sycamore trees, and a butterfly.

Once on the gravel bar the kids spread out and began poking around on their own. Stones, mussel shells, plants. This might be the most important part of engaging kids with nature: allowing them freedom and independence to explore, be creative, and discover unencumbered by instruction. But as the leader I felt obligated to keep them tasked.

“Who wants to learn how to skip stones?” I asked. None of them had done this before. “Everyone find a flat stone, as flat as you can find.”

The geology of The Parklands does not lend itself to perfect skipping-stones. Perfect stones are made of shale, which Floyds Fork has, but our shale is soft and breaks up easily. The local limestone, however, cleaves into thin beds, making good skippers, just not as perfect as shale. Nevertheless, there are plenty of good skippers on the Fork’s shoals and Casey and the others set out searching.

“I found an arrowhead!” he exclaimed.

“What? Let’s see!” I said with disbelief. The other littles and bigs gathered in.

Sure enough, he found a perfect projectile point (see photo). Ask a kid to find a flat stone, and he’ll find you the flattest, most storied stone in the river. Kids have particularly good search images, and Casey in particular. His desire to engage with nature on a deeper level, primarily as a snake hunter, left him acutely aware.

“Can we hunt snakes now?” Casey asked, again. Now armed, he really wanted to hunt snakes.

As Casey went scouring the gravel bar for a spear-shaft I whispered to the other adults that this was an important find, and somehow we needed to get it for the park, to learn what we can from it, add it to the collection of artifacts, and use it for education.

At this point I should mention that 21^st Century Parks has, as a condition of its construction permits, had to have a number of archeological studies conducted in The Parklands. Finding ancient artifacts is challenging—you dig up a miniscule portion of the landscape and sift through it trying to discern genuine artifacts from random occurrences, if you find anything at all. For us non-archeologists, there is definitely a “coolness” factor in these discoveries: a rock with some chips flaked out is rather unexciting and luke-warm, while a perfectly-shaped arrowhead, like the one Casey found, is really, really, cool. Our hired archeologists found mostly luke-warm material, while our snake-hunter found awesomeness.

To their credit, however, our archeologists did find awesomeness in Beckley Creek Park. There they uncovered a midden, basically an ancient trash pile. And this one happened to be made of mussel shells. Thousands of years ago, there must have been a fine mussel bed in the Fork near what is now a playground. People plucked mussels from the stream, removed the meat, and left the shells in a pile on the bank. Very, very, cool.

I sent photos of Casey’s find to our hired archeologists and they felt confident that the point was Early Archaic in age: roughly 8000 to 10,000 years old. Like I said: very, very cool.

There is no way to know exactly where the point came from, as it was in the stream and undoubtedly tumbled with floods. We’re also not sure where it was made as chert, an uncommon rock in our region. For the imaginative a number of other questions arise: did this point kill any animals? If so, what kind? How often? Who made it? And who used it? Like I said, this might be the most storied rock in the stream. (An argument can be made that fossils of Floyds Fork are equally storied, going back 450 million years to a shallow marine sea.)

This isn’t the only arrowhead found in The Parklands by nonprofessionals: I found a similar, but broken, point in a bank of Floyds Fork in Broad Run Park. You can read about that story HERE. Additionally, a number of our farmers speak of the old-days when they found “buckets of arrowheads” in their fields.

Surprisingly, Casey gave up the arrowhead without the fuss that I would have put up when I was 12. I was imagining tears. Once we left the gravel bar we were on to looking at trees, old fences, and a small waterfall.

Casey, thankfully, didn’t end up hunting snakes on our hike. Not surprisingly, we didn’t see any. But I hope he realized that his attentiveness and awareness was as strong as that of the maker of the arrowhead. And it’s attentiveness that forms the noble and intimate relationship with nature. Humans have been hunters and wanderers far longer than we have been agriculturists or suburbanites. We all have within us this ancient attentiveness that comes with being directly tied to the land. Simply put, it’s old.

This landscape, The Parklands, has had so many hunters wander through over the past 13,000 years or so. Now new ones are coming. They’ll be hunting for quiet places away from the city, or places to let their kids roam. Or, they’ll be hunting for snakes…..but let’s hope, with a camera.

Presented by

Featuring a  performance by three-time Grammy Award winner Sam Bush

Hosted by Old Louisville Meets New Louisville
Benefiting 21st Century Parks and The Parklands of Floyds Fork,
one of the largest and most ambitious public parks projects in the nation.

Saturday, June 9, 201
The Parklands Walnut Grove Plantation

5:30-7 p.m. Cocktails on the banks of Floyds Fork, provided by Brown-Forman
7-9 p.m. An elegant dinner in the Walnut Grove
9-11 p.m. Outdoor concert by Sam Bush and the Sam Bush Band in the adjacent meadow

Suggested attired is casual elegance, and heels are strongly discouraged. While we have planned an exceptional evening in a beautiful location, it is also rustic and remote. Golf carts will be provided to those who need assistance. Come prepared to walk, enjoy the natural setting, and have a great time!

$1,000 PER TABLE OF EIGHT      $150 PER INDIVIDUAL TICKET

Click here to purchase a table or individual ticket online.
Click here to download the table sponsorship form.
Click here to download the Field and Fork invitation.

]]> http://theparklands.org/upcoming-events/fieldandfork/feed/ 0 http://theparklands.org/bob-hills-journal/tree-planting-bob-hill-2/ http://theparklands.org/bob-hills-journal/tree-planting-bob-hill-2/#comments Wed, 21 Mar 2012 19:44:57 +0000 The Parklands http://theparklands.org/?p=2258 Continue reading]]> The 21^st Century Parks work crew planting the native tree seedlings in the Floyds Fork bottomland off Stout Road was dwarfed by its surroundings; the flat, muddy 45-acre field that someday will again be forest; the towering white Sycamore trees at the edge of the river.

It’s a regeneration process that includes the planting of about 31,000 skinny, one-year-old seedlings; predominately oaks, walnuts, hickories, persimmons, cherry, hazelnuts and pecans, with others to follow.

It’s a process – as with so many with 21^st Century Parks – that will bring Kentucky history full circle; the land being planted was once owned by Squire Boone, Daniel’s brother, through a 1,500-acre grant dating back to 1792.

Nearby is the historic “Stout House” – a restored stone dwelling dating back to the early 1800s that will be used as a park facility, the land around it as perhaps as a “Williamsburg” type Colonial garden.

It’s a process that began where it should – with the seeds of native trees gleaned from across Kentucky. Tim Sheehan, a forestry source branch manager for the Kentucky Division of Forestry, explained the acorns of the northern red oak were collected around Central Kentucky by the Forestry Club of the University of Kentucky. The white oak acorns came from both eastern and western Kentucky, including the Land Between the Lakes.

When the acorns begin to drop in large numbers leaf blowers are used to blow the debris off the top. Then a machine that’s a cross between a wheel mower and a golf ball picker gathers up the acorns, which are dumped onto a tarp. After awhile  the seeds are dumped in water; the bad ones float and the rest are collected for planting.

“We use inmates to collect the seeds,” Sheehan said. “We clean them and grade them and put them in long beds four feet wide and 500 feet long. We grow about 14,000 seedlings per bed.”

“And then when people like 21^st Century Parks place an order, they tell us when they want them and we try to harvest them in time.”

Overall, he said, the state tree nurseries plant about 75,000 pounds of seed and are now growing between 3.5 million and 4 million seedlings a year – which is about half of the 8 million they were growing just 10 years ago. The cost to the planters is about 25 cents a tree.

“Actually,” he said, “tree plantings dropping off a little bit. It has something to do with the economy and it has something to do with (increased) corn production.”

The seedling plantings cross all sorts of state and federal lines.  The funding is part of a $69,000 grant from the federal Natural Resources Conservation Service involving environmental quality and wildlife habitat. The planning was done with the help of Lisa Armstrong, a senior forester in the Division of Forestry’s Bardstown office, who visited the site with several 21^st Century Parks officials to check soil types, land history and drainage.

“It gives us a good idea of what to plant where,” she said.”For instance we had some concerns that white oak might grow slower so we put the swamp white oak and the red oak in separate blocks.”

In essence the plantings are all mapped out before the seedlings go in – a more finely tuned process than it might appear while watching the perhaps two-to-three foot seedlings go in the ground.

The planting device is a bright orange “Whitfield” tree planter that looks a little like a modified tobacco planter. Towed by a bright red Massey Ferguson tractor, the planter has a shank in the front that slices a two foot deep gash in the ground.

Two workers sitting on the planter feed the tiny trees into the gash; the ground closed in around the seedlings with two angled metal flanges at the rear of the planter. The seedling rows are eight feet apart – allowing space for mowing while they are young. Workers on foot will follow behind the planter to be sure all is well – and tamping down the dirt if it’s not.

“They can easily plant 3,000 to 4,000 trees a day,” said Sheehan, “and when you’ve planted several days in a row it’s not uncommon for a mechanical tree planter to get 10,000 trees in the ground in a day.”

But the planting is only the beginning of creating a new native forest in this Turkey Run section of the park, explained Sheehan.  Given the rich bottomland he estimated many of the seedlings could be 15 to 20 feet tall, or taller, in five to 10 years.

But if the 45-acre field was left alone the more invasive species of sycamore and box elder would come in from the edges – and perhaps take over. So a thinning out program would be started in a few years to eliminate the invasives – and allow the natives to get a good, upright start.

“I think their endgame is a native forest,” said Sheehan. “And in order for people in Louisville to come out here and enjoy something…and they’re going to see it 50 or 60 years instead of a 150 years. So, I mean, it’s so worthwhile.”

Gary Rzepecki, 21^st Century Parks natural areas manager, explained the Stout Road planting was just the beginning of reforestation along Floyds Fork – which could total 45,000 to 50,000 trees this year along the length of the park.

“The plan here,” he said, “is to take an area that was an agricultural area and turn it back into a forest, to recreate the riparian forest from down here all the way to Miles Lakes.”

Future plantings will include planting Sycamore, red maple, red oak, lindens, elms and pin oak around the circular Egg Lawn at Beckley Station, as well as perhaps black gums, white oak and a reborn American elm species along the nearby Promenade; a “Princeton” variety bred to be resistant to the Dutch Elm disease.

“We’re looking for the Promenade to have trees that have at least a 250-year life span,” he said.

Even further closing the loop, 21^st Century Parks volunteers will gather on the Stout Road site on March 17^th to plant the final 100 seedlings – with only 250 years to go.

Depicted are ambient, trickling waterfalls, waves of flowering teasel, stately beech trees and creeks in morning mist. In 36 captivating photographs, the sublime, rugged landscape planned to become the 4,000-acre Parklands of Floyds Fork is on display through April 27 at The Green Building Gallery in downtown Louisville.“It’s an attempt to honor the legacy of this land and property in a way that we can pay homage to the place that it was when it came into our ownership, and make it part of a story of enrichment for park visitors,” said Christen Boone, director of external relations for 21st Century Parks, the nonprofit corporation created in 2005 to spearhead development of new parkland.

Titled “The Vision of a Generation,” the photographs were culled from more than 2,000 images of 60 separate parcels acquired by 21st Century Parks, and shot over the past four years by three nationally recognized, Louisville-based photographers — Bob Hower, John Nation and Ted Wathen.

Wathen’s masterful land and waterscape work is in collections at the National Museum of American Art, the National Archives, the Kentucky Historical Society and elsewhere.

One of the Floyds Fork images he shot is called “Tobacco Barn at Turkey Run Park.” Wathen said it “was taken on the 50th birthday of David Jones (brother of 21st Century Parks CEO Dan Jones). We had been running through the woods and came to the top of a hill, and there’s this wonderful high meadow that looked down upon this tobacco barn. It was shrouded in mist, and I photographed it. I have been photographing that particular barn now for five years and … I understand that it is slated to be rehabbed for the Parklands.”Nation, a veteran Louisville Magazine staff photographer whose works have appeared in Time, Landscape Architecture and other publications, took a photo called “Father and Son Fishing at Beckley Creek Park.”“There was a boat-launch there,” he said. “I was just checking it out because it was pretty territory, and I saw this man and his son, handing him a little fish he’d caught. I walked out there and said, ‘Nice day for fishing. Mind if I take your picture?’ They said, ‘Nope.’ I don’t even know who they are.”

-Larry Muhammad

Click here to read full article.