Volunteers get down and dirty at Julia’s Gulch

There is gardening as a civilised endeavour aimed at enhancing the aesthetic value of one’s home in the manner of a Merchant-Ivory film.

And then there is full-body-contact gardening.

The first has ivy-covered walls as a backdrop and generally features a woman named Julia taking tea.

With the other, ivy is the alien invader, slithering up gulches, strangling native trees.

Thanks to the Green Tacoma Partnership, we’ve got the gulch. And a Julia. Together, they offer an opportunity for some gardening that makes the Super Bowl look like a board game.

Last Saturday, otherwise known as Green Tacoma Day, the partnership launched the restoration of Julia’s Gulch, which runs from Northeast Tacoma to Commencement Bay east of Norpoint Drive.

Some 120 volunteers came clean and left dirty. They had the satisfaction of knowing they were the first public work crew in the effort to tug the gulch back to its native state.

It will likely take years.

The aim is to make it resemble what Julia Staney Hughes looked up at from her home on Hylebos Creek a century ago. She saw nary a tree smothering under ivy. If she scratched herself on a sticker, it was not a Himalayan blackberry.

Hughes, whose family was of the Puyallup and Klickitat tribes, eventually sold the steep slice of watershed and moved to Fox Island.

Fast forward to 2006. The land was for sale again when word spread that it might be developed into 52 home sites. That buzz prompted an unlikely alliance to come up with the roughly $2 million asking price and preserve the 31 acres as open space.

The Port of Tacoma contributed $1.5 million. The city allocated $300,000. Metal recycler Schnitzer Steel Industries Inc. donated $320,500. The combined funds paid for the land and set up a $75,000 stewardship fund. The port owns the land now, and conservation groups will manage the cleanup.

There’s a bit of goodness here for all the constituents.

Unless deer and coyotes develop a sudden aptitude for cell phones, port industries won’t have residents on that hillside complaining about lights and noise. Critters won’t be evicted. The people of Northeast Tacoma will keep trees that filter the air, block sound and stabilize the hillside.

But buying the land isn’t enough.

This swatch needs saving from the invaders. That starts with an assessment of the damage they’ve done, and a scientific restoration plan.

That’s where the Green Tacoma Partnerships steps in. It includes the Cascade Land Conservancy, Tahoma Audubon, the City of Tacoma, Metro Parks and in this case, Friends of Julia’s Gulch.

It organized last weekend’s launch and is the contact for ongoing restoration. You can find out more, and see a slide show of the inaugural gulch party, at www.greentacoma.org.

Brian Castello came from Seattle with an EarthCorps team to demonstrate a tree rescue technique. The ivied walls and halls of the University of Washington make him want to reach for the clippers. But that would be wrong. So he brought those clippers to Julia’s Creek.

One hillside was covered in the stuff.

“That’s called an ivy desert,” he said.

The vine keeps everything else from growing there. Native shrubs can’t sprout. Trees can’t reseed.

Castello went to the aid of a tree. He reached as high as he could and clipped all the vines that had shrouded the trunk.

Then he worked outward from the trunk, grabbing chunks of vine, pulling it and rolling it away from the tree. It’s like rolling up a rug that’s fighting back because it’s bonded too closely with the living room floor.

It’s full-contact gardening. And, saving Julia’s Gulch one tree at a time, it’s a civilised endeavour.

Kathleen Merryman: 253-597-8677

kathleen.merryman@thenewstribune.com