Latest News
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FoBW advocates interviewed by Oregon Wildlife Foundation
Friends of Baltimore Woods’ new fiscal sponsor, Oregon Wildlife Foundation (OWF), recently interviewed board chair, Barbara Quinn, and Ecologist, Laura Guderyahn, about the ecology of Baltimore Woods and the origin of FoBW. The interview was conducted on Zoom and aired live online on April 15. It is now an archived episode of the OWF series, “Community Conservation.” The episode can be accessed here.
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April 21st Work Party with SOLVE
We enjoyed holding a work party today for one of our community partner groups, SoLVE. We met with their staff and board at the BW upper woodland portal, at St John for a tour followed by mulching plants just in time for summer heat. It was a good opportunity for them to get to know our site and to meet outside the office on a beautiful day. Thanks to everyone who joined us today!
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April 11th Work Party in the Meadow
Thanks everybody for planting 200 Asclepius speciosa (showy milkweed) at today’s volunteer work party at the Baltimore Woods meadow.
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Annual Native Plant Sale Rides Again
by Caroline Skinner Volunteers had fun helping at the pop up native plant sale held jointly by FoBW and Sparrowhawk Native Plants on the last weekend of March. On Thursday morning, big trucks delivered pre-ordered plants of all shapes and sizes, then workers laid them out on the ground, arranged in organized groups by type. In the afternoon, volunteers marked each and every plant with an ID tag. Yes, all 10,000 of them! For the next two days, customers came at pre-arranged time slots to pick up the myriad of native plants they had pre-ordered. The sale was a roaring success with a complete sell-out. There were about $50,000 in…
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March 13th Work Party with SOLVE
The Old Oak Tree site, below Edison Street on N Alta, is really starting to look good from a restoration standpoint. We’ve already worked there for several years, first taking out lots of trash and invasive locust trees, as well as blackberry and English Ivy. More recently, we’ve planted an assortment of native shrubs; many of them are doing well, including Osoberry and flowering red currant. We showed the site more love at our work party on March 13. While we were sad to see the site’s namesake, the old oak tree, come down in a storm this winter, sections of it’s enormous trunk remain on site, along with an…
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Conservation Easement Granted
Portland Parks and Recreation recently negotiated with a landowner to place a conservation easement on a treed Baltimore Woods’ hillside at N. New York. The site includes a small house at the top of the hill at 6816 N. New York and is zoned for multi-family development. The property is flanked on each side by city-owned land. The Friends initiated contact with Parks when the house first went on the market to point out a possible conflict if a developer bought the property. A larger structure could bisect the woods and affect the view from the future trail. To protect both Baltimore Woods and the regional npGreenway Trail, FoBW is…
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Baltimore Woods’ Old Oak Downed in Wind Storm
The largest, oldest and most remarkable oak in the Baltimore Woods corridor came down in a thunderous crash during a gust from an early September windstorm this fall. Strong winds caught the giant’s branches, some as big around as a grown man, and pushed them and the mighty trunk over taking with it a large utility pole, nearby trees and all the electrical power in the nearby condominiums. Neighbors reported what sounded like a bomb going off and a shaking of the ground. The impact has been literally shattering not just in terms of the crash, but also in the minds and hearts of all us “Friends” who work to restore Oregon oak…
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Secret woodland important to St. Johns heritage, Trail and Baltimore Woods Corridor
Check out our story in the St Johns Review Newspaper! Secret woodland important to St. Johns heritage, Trail and Baltimore Woods Corridor By Barbara Quinn When I first moved to the St. Johns neighborhood nearly 30 years ago, it was like a territory that time forgot. Not only in the sense that there was a vintage Sprouse Reitz, 88-cent store, drug stores, even one with a working soda fountain, all of which were deja vu, but also because there were hidden pockets of wilderness scattered in unexpected places. For instance, there was a field full of wild lupine on Columbia Boulevard not far from Pier Park blanketing acres between…
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Friends of Baltimore Woods Native Plant Sale a Success – With a little Help from Our Friends
Friends of Baltimore Woods Native Plant Sale a Success – With a little Help from Our Friends By Caroline Skinner OK, it was a lot more than a little help from our friends that got us through another FoBW native plant sale so smoothly on March 31st. A core group of us, including co-chairs Kelly Derr and Susan Gere, plus Mark Hill and me, spent many evenings during recent months meeting around Mark’s dining room table nailing down the event details. Thanks to a nifty “how to hold a plant sale” document done by Sylvia Allen, we seemed to hit on all the key points as our sale date…
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Newsletter – Spring 2018 Edition
Spring 2018 Newsletter Our Spring 2018 Newsletter is here! Catch up on our events & progress, learn more about our partners, and the plants & trees in the Baltimore Woods, and as a special treat for this edition–a poem written by our very own Caroline Skinner! Read the full newsletter here, or check your inbox if you’re on our newsletter list. We send this newsletter out quarterly, and always welcome submissions from the community. Please share with us your volunteer experiences, photographs from walks, observations about the flora and fauna, interesting information, and poetry! Contact us here. Our next Newsletter will be out in the summer. Contents: FoBW Annual Native…
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