The last area of Boisé Larocque that suffered damage from this year’s past wind and ice storms now has a new crop of seedlings to replace the damaged and fallen trees.
Manon Besner, director of parks and recreation for Alfred-Plantagenet Township, local university students, Géneviève Villeneuve and Danick Lamarche-Tardif spent their Saturday morning planting tree seedlings as part of a local volunteer restoration effort for the local community woodland. More than two dozen volunteers have helped with treeplanting work needed for the several sections of the Boisé Larocque that were damaged earlier this year.
“We’re lucky to have such good volunteers,” said Besner. “We’re all proud to do this.”
Both Lamarche-Tardif and Villeneuve are pursuing their post-secondary career goals at the University of Ottawa. She is the biomedicine program, with plans to become either a doctor or a dentist, while he is enrolled at the university’s teacher college. They had similar answers when asked why they chose to spend their Saturday digging holes and planting tree seedlings.
“For fun,” said Lamarche-Tardif, smiling.
“To help the community out,” said Villeneuve, also smiling.
During the late spring and early summer the township hired a contractor to remove all the trees from several small sections of the woodland that suffered the most damage from the ice and wind storms. The township received $300,000 in senior government funding aid for cleaning up Boisé Larocque, Chesser Park, and other community sites that were damaged by the storms.
About $50,000 of the funding allocation went towards treeplanting work in Boisé Larocque. About 2500 fast-growing seedlings were planted through the efforts of local volunteers. Most of the seedlings are conifers with also a mix of various deciduous trees, like black walnut and hochberry, that can provide nuts and seeds for birds and small animals like squirrels.
