Len Eisenhood has enjoyed Moritani Preserve since its opening, often walking the park’s winding paths with friends to slow down and chat and enjoy the wildlife. A landscape painter, the resident of nearby Grow Community has also captured the preserve’s quiet scenes and settings as part of an art-centric healing journey.
“In walks, I’ve seen pileated woodpeckers,” he recalls with a painter’s eye, “that red shock among all the green, you can’t miss it.”
Eisenhood used proceeds from the sale of his artworks to fund the gift of two new trees, a Grand fir and a Shore Pine, to the Preserve. Gifted through the Parks & Trails Foundation, the trees were installed this week during a year-end restoration event with Bainbridge Metro Parks staff and volunteers.
The trees commemorate the lives of a neighbor and a college friend whom Eisenhood recently lost, he said, a gesture “to honor lives that have passed, but also to keep life going.”
Cool weather and moist soil welcomed the Preserve’s first restoration event since strategic thinning of trees earlier this year. Harvest of the over-dense stands of Douglas fir was part of a long-term plan to bring the forests back to health and to replenish the native understory.
“You don’t just need species diversity for a forest to be healthy, you need age diversity as well,” says Morgan Houk, Natural Resources Manager for the Park District. “This is the first replanting where we can get both species and age diversity as well, with some pine and some Grand fir.”
With an auger to speed the digging, some 350 Northwest native plants went into the ground – sword ferns, snowberry, flowering currant, ocean spray and others typical of the Park District’s restoration program. Also installed: a selection of lady ferns (Athyrium filix-femina) and Douglas iris (Iris douglasiana), donated by residents of the neighboring SunDay Cove community.
Eisenhood had previously gifted several young Garry oaks for Moritani Preserve’s central meadow. His choice of trees this week supported species diversity and more innate traits he finds in them.
“The Shore Pine isn’t flashy,” he said, “but it’s substantial and enduring. Maybe I’m imagining those qualities in it, but that’s how I made the selection.”
