PANAMA CITY BEACH — The Panama City Beach Parks and Recreation Department will plant a few thousand new trees this month in a fitting recognition of Arbor Day, a “tree-planting holiday,” according to Florida Forest Service senior forester Joe Vanderwerff.
A few dozen volunteers from Girls Inc. and Girl Scouts met at the Panama City Beach Conservation Park Saturday to plant 2,000 longleaf pine seedlings and wiregrass plants. The activity commemorated Arbor Day while helping the parks department’s effort to restore the longleaf pine and wiregrass ecosystem in the park.
“Longleaf were the trees that started up in Virginia, went to Florida, all the way to Texas — 90 million acres and we’re down to 3 million acres. We’re trying to bring him back,” said parks resource officer Dale Colby.
Part of the restoration process included thinning about 600 acres of non-native slash pines and sand pines from the park, trees planted to harvest for paper production.
“We’ll be planting about 90,000 longleafs over the next few weeks,” Colby said.
Colby said longleaf pines can live 400-500 years, “the longest-lived tree in the South.” The trees also need fire to thrive, so controlled burns are held periodically. The burns help prevent wildfires by thinning underbrush.
“It’s important that we bring fire into the woods,” Colby said.
Colby and Vanderwerff started the morning by helping several volunteers plant a dogwood tree near the park’s entrance. Colby gave a brief explanation of the importance of longleaf pines and then everybody climbed aboard the parks department’s new covered wagon to ride to the planting site.
At the site, boxes of seedlings and dibble bar tools were already set up. Colby and Vanderwerff explained how to use the dibble bars to quickly dig holes and plant the seedlings.
“You want to make sure [the seedling] is just above the ground this much,” Vanderwerff said, holding his thumb and forefinger up about a centimeter apart to demonstrate.
The volunteers, mostly young girls, got right to work, splitting into small groups led by adult volunteers.
“Whenever I found out that they were doing it again this year, I was really excited because I thought it’d be cool to come out and plant trees,” said Girl Scout Liz Newman, 13. “People cut down trees a lot and it’s really bad, so for us to come out and plant more trees I just think it’s cool that we get to do that.”
Both groups have helped with similar projects in the past.
“We love to come out to the Conservation Park and help Dale with all the stuff he’s doing because he’s doing all kinds of neat stuff and they can learn all kinds of stuff out here,” said Rebecca Nelson, program director at Girls Inc.
Colby will lead another group into the park to plant 2,000 more seedlings and wiregrass plants on Jan. 31 at 10 a.m. and invited anyone interested to join in.