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Planting the seeds

Devin Floyd has made his knowledge of, and love for, the Piedmont into a personal vocation by working to restore it in all its ecological diversity.

Floyd is the executive director of the Center for Urban Habitats, an environmental education, research, and consulting group that he created in 2012. But its mission really began decades ago, with a young boy raised in the Blue Ridge.

When Floyd was about 6, the family moved to the mountains of northwest North Carolina, eventually settling in southwest Virginia, in a log cabin in the Mt. Rogers area. “We lived in the woods,” Floyd recalls. “My parents made a living making crafts and working with plants, and my grandmother encouraged me to engage with nature. I spent every day outside, and absorbed so much about the animals and plants.”

Floyd earned a baseball scholarship to James Madison University and a degree in prehistoric archaeology (with minors in geology and art). He got a job as an archaeologist at James Madison’s Montpelier in Orange, and then at Oatlands in Leesburg, where he also did work as a freelance technical illustrator. Archaeology, Floyd says, requires a skill at reading landscape, which came naturally to him, given his upbringing. In addition, concentrating in this one region of Virginia was deepening his knowledge of the flora, fauna, geology, and ecological niches of this area.

His environmental interests led Floyd into a collaboration with nature-lovers, hikers, educators, and scientists in the Mount Rogers area. The result was the Blue Ridge Discovery Center, near Marion, Virginia. The nonprofit, which Floyd co-founded in 2008, has a mission to combine environmental research, education, conservation, and stewardship in a multi-faceted approach to learning about and living with the natural world.

By this time, Floyd and his wife had settled in Charlottesville. Floyd was working at Monticello on a major project, a plantation survey of Tufton, one of Thomas Jefferson’s farm holdings bordering Monticello. But Floyd’s interests were evolving.

“I became increasingly aware that people saw [the landscape] as here to manipulate,” Floyd says. “But I was reading it as plants responding to the geology, the soils, all the inputs of their environment.” He began looking for the areas that were still free of modern human degradation—and he saw a whole new world.

The Piedmont, a geological area that stretches from Alabama to the Hudson River Valley, is the most populous ecosystem in North America, Floyd points out, and has been through centuries of human habitation and activity. “But even here, all over are little pieces of ground that are undisturbed, like finding a little time capsule.” He calls these pockets “remnants,” areas that have never been developed, never been sprayed or treated with herbicides, never even been plowed.

With this personal epiphany, says Floyd, “everything changed.” He started using his environmental and botanical knowledge to create landscapes using plants specific to that particular microhabitat. His first project was designing the plantings for a homeowner’s patio; instead of the usual Virginia native or rock garden plants, he selected species that fit the site’s particular geology and microhabitat—in this case, a Piedmont mafic barren (mafic referring to the underlying rock types and barren meaning that natural plant growth is sparse).

To meet the needs of clients who wanted more detailed ecological assessments of the habitats, plants, and animals across their properties, Floyd began finding and collaborating with others in the Charlottesville area who were equally devoted and knowledgeable about this area’s ecology.

In 2014, he left his Monticello job to concentrate full-time on the Center for Urban Habitats, a group of like-minded environmentalists and educators (including his wife Rachel), with specialties from plants, birds, and insects to landscape restoration, publications, and web design. The organization’s mix of environmental research, conservation, and education was like that which spurred the Blue Ridge Discovery Center, but instead of the wilder area of southwest Virginia, CUH’s focus was the more domesticated landscape of Charlottesville and its surrounding counties. If he was going to educate folks about their natural world, Floyd thought, “Let’s go to their backyard.”

Many of CUH’s first projects were as much educational as environmental. The Wildlife Garden at Clark Elementary School was designed as a hands-on way for children to learn ecological basics, using native plants specifically adapted to the site and exceptionally supportive for wildlife. Jackson-Via Elementary School’s Owl Magnet, which students helped build and now study as it evolves, created a habitat with the right mix of plants, insects, and animals to make a perfect hunting habitat for owls. A native pollinator sanctuary in Friendship Court (now Kindlewood) was part of a community garden project led by the Urban Agriculture Collective of Charlottesville and other community organizations. Most recently, CUH helped design and build an outdoor living classroom for science and art at Nelson County Middle School.

These and other projects—including a native plants garden in Court Square, pollinator plantings on the curb extensions along Hinton Avenue, and a path and meadows project still under construction at Ix Art Park—were created in cooperation with community partners and funded by local and state agencies, donations, and grants.

Armand and Bernice Thieblot turned to Devin Floyd to transform the derelict soapstone quarry on their Schuyler property into The Quarry Gardens, which now includes 14 ecozones, seven conservation areas, an education center, and walking trails. Photo by Tom Daly.

Floyd was increasingly sought out by private landowners seeking to return their property to its more native state. One of CUH’s best-known and most ambitious projects grew out of a 2014 presentation Floyd did about the Ix Art Park project for a master gardeners group, which included Bernice Thieblot who, with her husband Armand, owned a large ridgetop tract near Schuyler that included a derelict soapstone quarry. Inspired by a visit to British Columbia’s Butchart Gardens, extensive formal gardens created a century ago in a former limestone quarry, the Thieblots wanted to build an exhibition garden of native plants, and Bernice saw Floyd as “just the right person.”

“Our site is unusual,” Thieblot explains. “It’s right on the edge of both the Piedmont and the Blue Ridge [ecoregions], and the soapstone bedrock means our soil is very pH basic, which is unusual in this area. It’s also hilly, with lots of wet and dry areas. Devin came out to take a look, and was intrigued.”

Over the next year, the CUH team came out every few weeks to survey the site and its existing biota, design a plan to restore the microhabitats there, and develop a comprehensive plant list. Site work and planting began in the spring of 2016, and The Quarry Gardens opened in the spring of 2017. It now includes 14 ecozones and seven conservation areas, as well as an education center that offers exhibits on both the local ecology and the history of the soapstone industry, general and specialist tours, two miles of walking trails, and speakers on topics from native plants to geology, spiders, fungus, and moths. And because the work is never done in a garden, the CUH team leads volunteer work days every Friday morning.

The 40-acre Quarry Gardens was a massive challenge, but Floyd and CUH were willing to take on smaller, backyard projects. In 2018, a recent retiree from northern Virginia bought an Albemarle County house with a backyard that was “a disaster—the former owner had used it for doggie day care.”

Over the years, the new owner became more and more interested in native plants, and Floyd became well known in native plant circles. She invited him to take a look at her yard, and “he came out in the freezing cold, and got all excited. He told me I had the kind of soil that Jefferson and Madison had come here to farm,” she says.

CUH developed a four-zone garden plan, and preparing and planting the yard took a couple of years. At that time, the homeowner recalls, “native plants were hard to source, and expensive.” Getting a grant from a local government conservation program helped (see sidebar), but she’s still happily investing in her piece of ecological heaven. “You should see the difference. The wildflowers I have, and the birds I get here … I get hawks hunting in my yard. As they say, if you build it, they will come.”

While gardeners’ knowledge about and demand for native plants was increasing, Floyd found the ones on sale at nurseries weren’t always the same plants he was finding in unspoiled habitats. Many plants have developed specific genotypes adapted to their individual environmental microhabitats. To meet that need, CUH is creating a network of local genotype native plant growers, including Twinleaf Native Nursery, Little Bluestem Nursery, Hummingbird Hill Native Plant Nursery, and private landowners.

The challenge of restoring the environment that was here originally is not all about plants. Perhaps one of CUH’s most unusual projects is the salamander crossing under Route 29 at Polo Grounds and Rio Mills roads. In the 1990s, local nature-lovers Bess and Jim Murray had located one of the largest colonies of spotted salamanders in the state, and the amphibians needed to migrate every spring from their wooded upland habitat to their mating grounds on the floodplains across the busy highway. Working with Albemarle County, VDOT, the Virginia Safe Wildlife Corridor Collaborative, and Riverbend Development, CUH was able to get a wildlife tunnel and guide walls constructed to allow salamanders (and other creatures) to cross safely under Route 29 and fulfill their life cycle.

While the need for more research, education, restoration, and conservation are unending, Floyd is also taking on a whole new aspect of recovering ancient landscapes. Among the remnants of the prehistoric Piedmont that Floyd has been identifying are a habitat that has been ignored: grasslands. It’s a common assumption that pre-colonial Virginia was one huge expanse of forest. In fact, he says, “50 percent of the Piedmont was savanna.”
CUH has already identified more than a thousand grassland remnants in central Virginia, and is beginning to identify patterns in their distinctive biota. Many of these plants are clonal (growing vegetatively, not by sexual reproduction), which makes them literally ancient. Floyd describes finding these old-growth habitats as “coming across an abandoned cabin in the woods.”

Savanna remnants may be tiny, but they aren’t rare. CUH has found at least 300 sites on roadsides throughout our area. “You could drive by one every day, within 10 miles of your house,” Floyd says. “There are some grassland areas at Preddy Creek Trail Park, along the paths in Hilltop Meadows. Look for green milkweed.”

Grassland remnants of a size large enough to support wildlife as well as plants are particularly rich and biodiverse. CUH has already gotten two grants from the Virginia Native Plant Society to study these savanna fragments, with a goal of conserving and protecting them for further research. In one of the study proposals, Floyd wrote, “Before we can make room [for] natural grasslands, or begin to inspire others to love and steward them, we must learn how to see them.”

Learning to see has been Devin Floyd’s life work.

When your yard needs a little green

Restoring a native plant community or creating a conservation-oriented landscape takes time—and money. The Thomas Jefferson Soil and Water Conservation District has supported several CUH projects, including the Owl Magnet at Jackson-Via Elementary School and the above-mentioned backyard restoration.

Funding for the backyard restoration came through a grant from TJSWCD’s Virginia Conservation Assistance Program, a cost-share program for residential or other developed land uses. VCAP provides financial, technical, and educational assistance to property owners who adopt eligible “best management practices” in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. The Albemarle Conservation Assistance Program and Charlottesville Conservation Assistance Program are similar,
with special funding from Albemarle County and the City of Charlottesville.

Property owners and schools or places of worship at least a year old may
be eligible for assistance to treat and control stormwater runoff, control erosion, conserve water within the landscape, improve riparian buffer areas, and promote native vegetation and wildlife habitats.

For more information, go to tjswcd.org/best-management-practices-homeowners.

Ed. note: This story has been updated to better clarify the details of Devin Floyd’s early life.

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Culture

Bluebird man: Ivy volunteer builds houses for a beloved species

Building a bluebird box is a good project for a hobbyist woodworker, but most people don’t tackle quite as many boxes at once as Clark Walter. At certain times of the year, Walter’s woodworking shop in Ivy is packed nearly to the rafters with the parts and pieces that make up his bluebird box assembly line. Since 2012, he’s supplied homemade boxes to a growing contingent of naturalists and bird enthusiasts in central Virginia and well beyond.

It started when Walter took the Virginia Master Naturalist course. Based at Virginia Tech and sponsored by a raft of state agencies, the VMN program is well-known for training citizen scientists in 40-hour courses that cover everything from ecology to geology to native flora and fauna. “It’s much like taking a couple of college courses,” says Walter.

The idea is to train volunteers who can then take on projects around the state, doing conservation, education, and so on. A master naturalist must log at least 40 volunteer hours per year to remain certified, so as he went through the course, Walter was considering how to spend those hours.

A presentation by Ann Dunn, of the Virginia Bluebird Society, caught his attention. He had a background with birds: Before retiring, he’d worked with various nonprofits that did endangered- species conservation, including programs to reintroduce birds to their native habitats. “In the state of Ohio,” he says, “we built a collaboration to reintroduce trumpeter swans…that was very exciting and has shown great results.”

Bluebirds, as it happens, are a species with a fraught ecological history, having suffered a heavy blow to their population after the arrival of Europeans in North America. The introduction of invasive starlings and house sparrows means stiff competition for nesting spots; like bluebirds, they’re cavity nesters and raise young in openings like you’d find in a standing dead tree.

Meanwhile, the number of available nesting sites has declined. “As we develop more areas across Virginia, and it becomes an increasingly urbanized state, we don’t tend to leave standing dead trees in our yards,” says Michelle Prysby, director of the VMN program. Indeed, bird populations in the U.S. and Canada are suffering huge declines due to habitat loss: They’re down 29 percent since 1970.

For decades now, a coordinated conservation effort has tried to counteract these forces for bluebirds (and, along the way, their fellow native cavity nesters like chickadees and tree swallows) by providing artificial nesting sites. A relatively simple wooden box, affixed to a pole or tree in the right spot—bluebirds prefer open land to forest—can make a big difference to a nesting pair and their offspring.

Over time, thanks to individuals who put up boxes in their backyards, as well as organizations like the Bluebird Society that establish clusters of nest boxes (called “trails”) and assign volunteers to monitor what happens there, the population of bluebirds has made a real comeback.

For VMN volunteers, says Prysby, “Bluebird projects are really popular across all of our 30 chapters, because people really enjoy going to monitor the boxes, and they feel like they’re getting a tangible result when they see that a bluebird or a chickadee is using it.”

It doesn’t hurt that, as Dunn says, “Bluebirds are very attractive.”

That first year after completing the VMN course, Walter built 10 bluebird boxes for a trail he and Dunn established on the short street where he lives in Ivy. He placed them in backyards and fields, bringing his neighbors on board. “We’ve gotten a great response,” he says, “and the population density in our area seems to be growing.”

Simple enough. But that was only the beginning. “I mentioned the project to the class and took orders for another 25,” Walter says. When he delivered those, more students, and instructors, placed another 40 orders.

Clark Walter has built over 2,000 bluebird houses.

Fortunately, Walter has a woodshop and a genetic advantage: His grandfather was an inventor and industrial engineer—“a brilliant guy,” Walter says. “I sort of have his organizational thing behind me.” He figured out how to streamline the box-building process, cutting all the pieces at once, then assembling. That was a good move, because the number of orders is still blowing up.

Bird clubs and conservation groups in Charlottesville lined up to buy. Then groups in nearby counties. “A year later, VMN and the VBS were promoting it statewide, so within three years people were driving from Blacksburg and all corners of the state to pick up their orders.” Word spread to other states, from New York to Kentucky. The year the magazine of the North American Bluebird Society ran an article about Walter, he ended up building almost 700 boxes. “It got a little out of control,” he says modestly.

How did he become the go-to guy? For one thing, he sells all the boxes at cost: $35-39, including the mounting pole. For another thing, he builds the boxes to official specs—the opening just the right size to admit bluebirds but keep out starlings, plus a predator baffle to keep snakes from eating hatchlings.

“You know you’re getting a product that meets the right specs for providing a good habitat,” says Prysby. “You don’t want to be attracting animals to something that’s not a safe artificial habitat for them.”

“He’s a remarkable guy,” says Dunn. “He’s made a very big difference to the VBS.”

Having built more than 2,000 boxes, Walter has, it’s fair to say, made a difference to the bluebird population well beyond Virginia. He rattles off some stats: “Last year there were 41 official VBS trails in Albemarle and Fluvanna counties, and we had a total of 470 some nest boxes on those trails. They produced over 1,600 bluebird babies that successfully fledged and another 1,000 of other species.”

And one more number: Per year, he spends about 400 hours building boxes. No worries about staying certified with VMN: “I’ve got my quota.”

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Uncategorized

Outdoors Issue: Let’s take this outside!

Inside this year’s Outdoors Issue, you’ll learn about eight different jobs that celebrate being outside—and all the tricks of the trade that a few local workers employ. From geometry calculations to determine where to cut a tree limb to avoid hitting a window or power line  to how best to move a rattlesnake from a  much-used park path (carefully and slowly!), these workers love what they do and say being outside is the key to their happiness.