SEQUIM – This winter will be a productive one, a season when healing will begin on a grand scale.
And out here off Old Olympic Highway, it will stay warm.
That’s the forecast from a pair of Olympic National Park botanists who are about to move into two houses at Robin Hill Farm County Park.
Dave Allen and Steve Acker – and the national park itself – have waited a long time for this: construction of the 2,100-square foot greenhouse where they will grow native plants, from grasses to towering evergreens, for the Elwha River restoration project to begin in 2011.
These native plants are part of the foundation for the $308 million restoration, which includes removal of the Elwha and Glines Canyon dams and the return of the Elwha River, once known for its prodigious salmon runs, to its original free-flowing state.
The building of the greenhouse, along with the relocation of another house that will become the office and volunteer center, are the fruit of what Allen calls a “marvelous” moment of cooperation.
Some years ago, Olympic officials began looking for a place to build the greenhouse. They talked with Peninsula College, the state Department of Natural Resources and the U.S. Forest Service.
Then Kathe Smith, a longtime Port Angeles resident and lover of the Olympic wilderness, suggested Robin Hill, a county park a few miles west of Sequim.
Olympic National Park and Clallam County went to work on a deal, and now it’s done: The greenhouse is being built on a 5-acre piece of Robin Hill.
The park awarded the $358,000 contract to Northcon Construction of Hayden, Idaho, which is expected to finish by Oct. 1. Clallam County is leasing the site to Olympic National Park for $6,000 per year for the next decade.
The county found another thing to throw in: a small house it owned on the Dungeness River flood plain.
The house, whose log-cabin-style exterior happens to match many National Park Service buildings, was moved to Robin Hill a few weeks ago instead of being demolished, and now sits next door to the greenhouse on a new foundation.
Things have fallen into place, Acker and Allen agree.
They’re eager, of course, to move in and start cultivating the plants – from ocean spray to red elderberry to conifers — to be rooted on some 700 acres around the Elwha.
Plants for throughout the park
“We’ll produce thousands of plants,” Allen said, not only for the massive river restoration but also for other reaches of the park, including areas along Hurricane Ridge Road and Sol Duc Road.
Anywhere there has been damage, from road resurfacing or other human activity, “we’ll repatriate native plants, and try to help nature recover the area.”
Seeing that happen is the most satisfying part of this work, both Allen and Acker say. Allen calls it a healing process, for both the park and the people who visit and work in its more than 922,600 acres.
Volunteers are an essential part of Olympic’s native-plant projects, Allen added. They’re on the front lines of the battle against invasive species – giant knotweed, herb Robert, Scotch broom – that rush in and multiply when human activities have disturbed the ecosystem.
The park’s new greenhouse, meanwhile, provides an optimum environment for young natives, with sprawling tables where plants will be raised in comfort, with hot-water tubes beneath them and Sequim sunshine above.
“This is just a wonderful house,” Allen said. Walking inside “feels like you’re on a little vacation.”
Grand opening in October
The building, at more than twice the size of Olympic National Park’s old greenhouse off Park Avenue in Port Angeles, will have its grand opening in late October, Allen said.
“We want the public to know they’re welcome here,” he said, adding that the native plant restoration program can use more volunteers. Interested community members can learn more by phoning park volunteer coordinator Maggie Tyler at 360-565-3141.
This place won’t merely be called “the greenhouse.”
Together with the county’s relocated cabin, it will be named the Matt Albright Native Plant Center after a pioneer of Pacific Northwest native plant propagation. Albright, Olympic’s nursery manager for 19 years, died of cancer in July 2008.
Allen and Acker, who worked with Albright for many years, see the regrowth of the park’s natural plant communities as his legacy.
They hope, too, that community members will join them, as volunteers and as stewards of the park.
In learning about its wild places, Allen said, “we come away with a greater appreciation for what we have.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley reporter Diane Urbani de la Paz can be reached at 360-681-2391 or at diane.urbani@peninsuladailynews.com.