St. Helena's man-made redwood forest endures despite damage from voles
A secluded redwood grove tucked away south of St. Helena is both a team effort and one man's dream.
The team effort is on behalf of volunteers and donors like the St. Helena Rotary Club, whose members on Tuesday morning planted two Aptos Blue coastal redwoods along what will someday be a majestic avenue of trees.
The dream belongs to Paul Asmuth, who since 2012 has worked with the city and local environmental groups to turn a fallow field south of St. Helena's Wastewater Treatment Plant into a community forest.
"Community forestry has been going on basically since the Founding Fathers began our country," Asmuth said. "Now there are over 3,000 community forests in the U.S. The best-known one around here is in Arcata."
The grove of about 2,500 trees — mostly redwoods, but also about 100 oaks — has already attracted a thriving woodland ecosystem, from owls to hummingbirds to coyotes to at least 15 species of duck.
That's great in theory, but in reality, that means voles — hamster-like rodents that love nothing more than to gnaw the bark off the base of a young redwood. It's called girdling, and it prevents nutrients from circulating up and down the tree, ultimately killing it.
"Changing a field to a forest is not a linear equation," Asmuth said. "You have unknowns. This year we had the rodents and the cold — many nights under 20 degrees."
Voles are easy prey for the owls that roost in the most mature redwoods and a family of coyotes that lives west of the grove. But this year the predators couldn't keep up with the voles, which killed scores of trees with their girdling ways.
In addition to planting the trees on Tuesday, St. Helena Rotary donated $2,000 so Asmuth could plant 1,200 new seedlings, including ones to replace the trees that had been killed by voles and the cold.
"The redwoods will survive the voles in the long run," Asmuth said.
One of the trees planted Tuesday will be dedicated to the Rotary Club. Asmuth envisions donors sponsoring trees throughout what will become the "Founders' Redwood Avenue."
And what good is an avenue of trees without public access? That's part of Asmuth's vision too, but for now the grove remains off-limits to the public, pending operational changes at the nearby Wastewater Treatment Plant spray fields and the development of a walking route.
A group led by former City Councilmember David Knudsen has proposed a trails master plan. Asmuth said that if it's implemented — and if the area next to the spray fields is deemed safe for public access — pedestrians could reach the grove via a trail along the Napa River.
Asmuth is fascinated by the genetics of coastal redwoods, which have endured since the Jurassic period some 160 million years ago. With 27 billion base pairs of DNA, their genome is the second most complex ever sequenced next to the axolotl salamander. Human DNA is comparatively simple, with only 3 billion base pairs.
"I joke and say they're nine times smarter than us," Asmuth said. "But they really are nine times as complex."
Asmuth plans to plant the next round of trees to celebrate Arbor Day next April.
The project is a collaboration among the city of St. Helena, Asmuth, the Napa County Resource Conservation District, Natural Resources Conservation Service, and donors like St. Helena Rotary.
You can reach Jesse Duarte at 707-967-6803 or .
St. Helena Editor
