Martha and fellow Druids
The following was written by Martha M. Ertman:
“DC is a company town. If you don’t like the company of the Mump Administration, you can still do micro, focused good to keep the embers of democracy or basic respect for the environment alive until the political and cultural winds enable macro changes. A small group of NW women who call ourselves Druids have done just that to fend off the sense that we’re hopeless or helpless to combat climate change.
Being at or near retirement, with kids largely out of the house, we have bandwidth to meet monthly to do what we can. The spark was a 2022 New York Times article on Diana Beresford-Kroeger, a real Druid and genius octogenarian botanist and medical biochemist who for decades has climate-change adapted native trees on her 160 acres in Ontario, Canada. I read a couple of her nine books, and embraced her “bioplan” that every person on earth should plant 6 trees to buy us time to solve the climate crisis.
Neighbors joined: a journalist, educators, a few attorneys, and most importantly, a landscaper. We watched Dr. Diana’s documentary Call of the Forest – made by the people who brought us March of the Penguins — and discovered that Casey Trees was already harnessing volunteer labor and enthusiasm to planting native trees – 6000+ a year – in Washington DC.
We still meet monthly to do be a bit of the change we want to see in the world. Arbor Day dinner complete with gorgeous tree-stump shaped chocolate cake, touring the Arboretum at American University, or donning elbow-length suede gloves to remove invasive weeds from Rock Creek Park.
Three of our activities stand out:
Free a Tree: At Turtle Park, next to an AU sports field, we freed a row of about a dozen maple trees from invasive vines that were strangling them, endangering kids playing baseball nearby, and the AU athletes. With the help of Barbara Balman’s crack landscaping team, we ripped up enough English Ivy to keep all but one tree alive, and only one of us came away with poison ivy-mottled skin.
Tree planting with Casey Trees: With other Casey volunteers, we did get 6+ trees in the ground at the Old Soldier’s Home by Lincoln’s Cottage and in Mt. Olivet Cemetery. We also spent many Saturday mornings weeding invasives and planting native trees with other Rock Creek Conservancy volunteers. It’s our default activity since both Casey and the Conservancy hold events that attract lots of volunteers of all ages and backgrounds every weekend.
Circle of Life Green Burial: We toured the eco-burial Circle of Life at Congressional cemetery with its founder Sharon Metcalf, learning about how she managed to plant a “tree-henge” circle of lindens perfectly aligned with the directions, all around carved markers to honor the seasons. A couple of months later we joined in with maybe 50 others to celebrate the Fall Equinox there with the Batalá Women Drummers.
At each Druid event, we meet people we would never have met, like the middle aged man who works for the military and “just likes to dig holes,” and the gay kickball club team the Mounties who ripped up invasives as their service project. Each time I come away euphoric, from seeing the change a few dedicated people can do in just a couple of hours and maybe mostly from spending a couple of hours outdoors with others making DC better, bit by bit.
Keeping it alive in 2025. Still focused on what we can do within our own reach, we’re starting a “know your tree” initiative. Each of us will pick one tree from the hell-strip in front of our houses, locate it on the Public Tree Viewer online mapping system that allows the District’s Department of Transportation to keep trees alive, and determine its name and dimensions and report it as thirsty if appropriate. We hope to poke holes in old buckets or other containers to gradually slake our trees’ thirst. Fingers crossed that other neighbors will join, or a school classroom could adopt it as a project.
If a handful of old ladies in upper NW can stave off helplessness and hopelessness, you can too.”