Thursday, January 22, 2009

Our Heritage Trees

I try to incorporate my advocacy into my work. When Heritage Park was hit by Milenyo some years back, the park lost a considerable amount of trees and slowly these losses are continuously being replaced.

My pet-peeve right now is to introduce native species into the Heritage landscape. Some natives like pili (Canarium ovatum), narra (Pterocarpus indicus), banaba (Lagerstroemia speciosa), molave (Vitex parviflora), botong (Barringtonia asiatica) and balitbitan (Cynometra ramiflora) were already thrown into the landscape mix but I wanted to add more species.



My first attempt was a few months back when I asked Sterculia spp. to be planted over at an empty parking area. I collected the seeds of Sterculia comosa (banilad from Bohol) and Sterculia foetida (from namesake barrio Kalumpang in Marikina) and reared seedlings out of them. We planted 8 seedlings in all flanking the parking. Then I went on study leave for a few months.



When I returned after the work leave I was surprised and pleased to find some of the Sterculias in the brink of being trees. Some are already as tall as I am. I can't wait a few more months for them to provide a good shade to a very exposed parking area. Because of this encouragement I asled the groundskeeper to plant a third native species, lipote or Syzygium polycephalum. I hope this one follows the steps of its Sterculia predecessors. If everything goes well and if i get to find seedlings of dungon-late (Heritiera litorallis) and baraibai (Cerbera manghas) I would start to introduce them in the lagoon area of the park.

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