On November 23, 2024, with a lot of help from the Contra Costa Resource Conservation District and the City of Concord, we Friends of Concord Creeks planted a pollinator-friendly native plant garden in Willow Pass Community Park. It’s next to the pond near Pixieland Amusement Park.

From the tiny young plants that went into the ground that day, the garden has grown into a thriving community of shrubs, herbs, and grasses. Now, narrowleaf milkweeds, California roses, and other native species offer food and shelter to butterflies like the monarch and the gray hairstreak.
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But butterflies are not the only reason we started this garden. The plants in our garden give Nature a helping hand in many ways.

The Web of Life
All the living things on Planet Earth—plants, animals, fungi, and microbes—work together in very complicated ways as part of the great Web of Life. We human beings are part of this web, and we depend on it for our lives. It gives us fertile soil, clean water, and even the air we breathe. And this whole environment is made possible by plants.

Plants take carbon dioxide from the air and “exhale” the oxygen that fuels our bodies. Combining the carbon dioxide with sunlight and water, they make their own food. Through this miraculous process, called photosynthesis, plants provide food not only for themselves, but also for all animals, including us. They give us fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains like rice, wheat, and oats. They also provide food for the animals we eat.

Plants give us wood for building, paper, and fibers like cotton to make fabric. The roots, bark, or leaves of many plants give us medicine for healing our bodies.

In short, humans can’t live without plants.

Pollinators help plants
Like every kind of living thing, plants need to produce a new generation before they die. Most plants have flowers and reproduce with the help of animal pollinators. Pollinators include insects like bees, flies, moths, and butterflies, as well as birds. As the insects and birds move among the flowers gathering nectar and pollen, they deliver tiny pollen grains from one flower to the next.

When a pollen grain combines with the seed inside a flower, the seed can start to develop. If conditions are right, the seed will eventually find its way to the soil and sprout. A new plant is born!

Plants and pollinators need our help
Flowering plants and pollinator species have evolved together over millions of years. Together, they form part of a functioning local ecosystem where everything works together so the living beings can thrive. An ecosystem is like a jigsaw puzzle; every piece contributes something to the whole picture. For example, in a forest ecosystem, oak trees give squirrels a place to build their nests, and squirrels bury acorns that will someday grow into big oak trees.

Unfortunately, we humans have done a lot of damage to Earth’s ecosystems. Here in Concord, land that used to be covered with forests and meadows is now covered with buildings and streets. And most of the trees, shrubs, and flowers that humans have planted are not native to this area; they were brought here from other parts of the world. Like pieces from a different jigsaw puzzle, they don’t contribute as much to a healthy ecosystem as native plants do.

Plants that give native insect pollinators a place to live and grow are called host plants. Some native pollinators can only use certain natives as host plants; that’s why native plants are so important. The photos below, taken during the Pixieland garden’s first year, show some of the host plants there.

You can learn much more about native California plants and insect pollinators by visiting calscape.org, a wonderful resource created by the California Native Plant Society. Select the photo of each plant below to visit its page on Calscape.

What an honor for Friends of Concord Creeks! At the April 1, 2025 Concord City Council meeting, Mayor Carlyn Obringer presented FCC chair Fareed Nabkel with a Proclamation recognizing the group’s work in stewarding our city’s natural spaces. It praises FCC’s work in creek cleanups, water quality monitoring, and planting native species. The Proclamation concludes:

"I, Carlyn S. Obringer, Mayor of the City of Concord, on behalf of the City Council, do hereby proclaim April 2025 as Earth Month in the City of Concord in recognition of Friends of Concord Creeks and urge all residents to build upon their efforts to foster a brighter future for the planet and the generations to come.”

 
​By now, just about everybody has heard about the many benefits of trees in the urban landscape. They fight climate change by storing carbon in the soil; cool and clean the air; provide critical wildlife habitat—and these are just a few of the ways trees help cities like Concord. 

Valuing our trees is not a new thing in this town. For the last 42 years, Concord has been named a Tree City USA by the National Arbor Day Foundation. 

Unfortunately, over the past several years, many mature trees have been lost due to extreme weather. Weakened by years of drought, many have fallen during severe winter storms or simply died of thirst. Of course, it’s important to replace them with young trees without delay. It’s also critically important to care for the mature trees that remain. 

If you own property with trees, you can contribute a lot to our community by caring for them properly and making sure they are pruned correctly.

In pruning mature shade trees, the number one mistake to avoid is the practice called “topping”—that is, indiscriminately cutting branches to reduce the overall size of the tree. (Pruning fruit trees is a different matter entirely; learn how to do that here.)

What’s so bad about topping? According to Craig N. Huegel in his wonderful book The Nature of Plants, trees and other plants have something called an apical meristem--apical meaning “of the apex” and meristem meaning the cells that are capable of producing new cells. Young plants’ growth centers on this area.

As plants grow, they develop meristematic tissue at the tips of branches as well as the main stem. When a branch is lopped off (pruned or chomped), the area just below the damage starts acting like an apical meristem. That’s why pruning a shrub makes it bushier. 

But trees shouldn’t be pruned like shrubs. They need to have one main trunk. When multiple branches are hacked off, the tree no longer knows where its apical meristem is. It is confused. To quote Huegel, ”'Topping' produces long-term damage to a tree as it forces the tree to continuously reconfigure its growth. Instead of a strong main trunk, multiple weaker trunks are formed and the tree will be forever perplexed as to where it should allocate its resources. The trunk below will grow normally, but the area above will never do so.”

Topping stresses a tree in other ways as well. Removing too many leaves reduces its food supply; exposing its bark to too much sun and heat damages the tissues underneath; and leaving open wounds at branch ends makes the tree vulnerable to insect and disease infestations.

Topping can even kill a tree. To find out more, click here. 

The Sacramento Tree Foundation’s website has detailed information on pruning techniques. They include step-by-step instructions for pruning a young tree—but recommend that mature trees be pruned only by a certified arborist. Although an arborist will charge more than a landscaper with a chain saw, their expertise will preserve the tree’s health and beauty—and enhance your property’s value.

In some cases, when big trees are too close to power lines or buildings, there’s no way to prune them properly. The best course of action may be to remove the tree and replace it with a different species that’s more appropriate for the location. 

If you own property, consider planting trees where possible, and be sure to choose the right kind of tree for the space. Native species are often ideal because they support the local ecosystem and generally need less maintenance. 

If you have mature trees, please care for them and help them thrive. In this time of climate crisis, every living tree is precious.

-​​Friends of Concord Creeks

​The idea of urban rewilding is catching on all over the world. Green spaces are sprouting up everywhere—in pocket parks, on rooftops, along busy roads—as more and more of us understand the need to restore all kinds of ecosystems, including the ones within our cities. 

Restoring forests is especially important. We need mature, functioning forests to draw down carbon, cool the air, restore habitat for wildlife—and for many other reasons. But when left to the process of natural succession, forests can take 150 to 200 years to reach maturity. 

Fortunately, thanks to the work of Dr. Akira Miyawaki, mature, native-like forests can be created on degraded land in just 30 to 50 years. Dr. Miyawaki’s innovation, essentially, was to plant native canopy species very densely, along with other, smaller native species. A Miyawaki mini-forest can be as small as six parking spaces—or much bigger. Weeding and watering are needed only for the first few years. 

In the last twenty years, mini-forests planted with the Miyawaki method have sprouted across the globe, including the UK, Europe, and Canada. Mini-forests are growing in Western Australia, which, like California, has suffered the climate challenges of heat, drought, and wildfire. Pocket Forests WA,  a Perth-based nonprofit, has started new mini-forests in schoolyards, where children learn about Nature by planting and tending the young trees. Their website offers this brief explanation of Dr. Miyawaki’s methods.

In the US, mini-forests are just catching on across the country, from a park on a former landfill in Cambridge, MA, to a vineyard on California’s central coast. In suburban Tucson, AZ, the Rose Community Forest will create a haven for wildlife and a peaceful place for people to enjoy Nature. Seattle’s South Park Forest is sited amid low-income communities in an industrialized, polluted part of the city. The mini-forest there will heal the land and make the air more breathable. 

And mini-forests offer other benefits: for example, they can be a screen protecting a community from freeway noise or an unsightly view—and they can provide cooling shade to combat the heat-island effect in neighborhoods that don’t have enough trees. 

A book by Hannah Lewis, Mini-Forest Revolution: Using the Miyawaki Method to Rapidly Rewild the World, is an invaluable tool for anyone wishing to create a mini-forest. It provides not only a detailed description of the method, but also many case studies of projects in a wide variety of environments. One chapter is a field guide covering the essential steps:

1. Forming a team, securing funding, and finding a site
2. Making a species list with the help of experts in local plant ecology     
3. Preparing the soil
4. Planting (Planting Day can be a celebratory occasion involving dozens of residents)
5. Maintaining the mini-forest by weeding and watering

Miyawaki-style mini-forests have been planted in five Berkeley schoolyards, but Contra Costa has yet to plant its first one. That needs to change.

The City of Concord, like many US cities and towns, is moving to plant hundreds of trees in parks and along streets. But a forest is much, much more than a group of trees, and a native-like mini-forest offers many more ecological benefits compared to trees planted in isolation. We aim to work with the City of Concord to plant a Miyawaki mini-forest on public land. 

To restore our watershed and ensure a livable future for Concord, the time for planting is now. But to make it happen, your help is needed! To learn more, please shoot an email to [email protected].

-Friends of Concord Creeks