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On a hot day in early July, the Charlottesville Area Tree Stewards and their teenage helpers were rolling stones at Greenleaf Park. Not Jagger or Richards but volunteers from Teens Give rolled the concrete pedestals into place to provide seating around a new fern garden. Each pedestal weighs more than 200 pounds. Another group of teen campers from the Quaker Meeting House finished mulching the last 25 feet of a trail around the garden, making the loop complete. The next step will be to paint the pedestals and use them to identify the ferns.

On June 15, the Charlottesville Area Tree Stewards offered a reprise of our hour-long tree identification walk at Pen Park. Dana Denbar and Susan Mefford helped participants learn to identify about a dozen native tree species along the park’s fitness trail, among them sugar maple (Acer saccharam), red maple (Acer rubrum), tulip tree (Liriodendron tulipifera) and sycamore (Platanus occidentalis), as well as hackberry (Celtis occidentalis), boxelder (Acer negundo) and sassafras (Sassafras albidum). Registrations are now being accepted for a tree ID walk at Darden Towe Park, scheduled for 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, July 13.

With ingenuity and hard work, a team of Tree Stewards recently moved 10 concrete pedestals from a site at Walker School to Greenleaf Park. The next step is to put them in place as seating around the park’s fern garden, an ongoing CATS project. Each pedestal weighs more than 200 pounds. Many thanks to Allen Ingling, Kathy Nepote and Camille Wilson for their heavy lifting.