We are grateful to Maryvale Preparatory’s Class of 2025 juniors and their teachers for helping make Tollgate Wyndham Preserve safer and healthier.  Eighty Maryvale students and faculty joined NeighborSpace the morning of March 22nd for their class service day.  This is a tradition where each grade level plans a full day of service together.  Following their stewardship work at Tollgate Wyndham in the morning, the students then volunteered in the afternoon making blankets at a local church.  

The junior class enthusiastically joined NeighborSpace volunteers Barbara, Carolyn, Lance, and Marsha to support the park by cleaning up trash, removing invasive plants, and removing graffiti from trees.

Thanks to a recent and very effective clean-up effort by Tollgate area neighbors, the preserve only had a little bit of trash to start with.  Even so, students ventured up through the streambed and into the pond to remove paper and food container litter.

Another group worked on removing invasive plants, mainly multiflora rose, filling twelve trash bags full.  Removing these invasive species supports native plant growth by decreasing competition for resources like space, nutrients, and light.

Tollgate Wyndham has recently experienced vandalism, including graffiti on trees.  In addition to making the park look bad and feel unsafe for the community, paint from the graffiti hurts trees.  Like human skin, trees also have pores, called lenticels, that absorb water and nutrients and are responsible for O ₂ and CO ₂ gas exchange.  Paint can clog these pores.  Chemicals from the paint can also be absorbed through the lenticels and can damage the tree.

After asking local foresters and urban ecology practitioners for advice on best practices for graffiti removal on trees, we settled on using castile soap, water, scour pads, and grout brushes to remove the spray paint effectively without applying additionally harmful chemicals.  The Maryvale group cleaned graffiti from eight trees and made significant progress on several others.  If you are interested in learning more about this process, join us on Saturday, April 13th, 10 AM – 12 PM, for graffiti removal and a stream clean-up at Tollgate Wyndham Preserve.