Our Accomplishments

Friends of High School Park Brochure Wins Prestigious Award

ELKINS PARK, PA, June 8, 2012 -- The Garden Writer's Association (GWA) awarded The Backyard Natives Garden Guide, a Friends of High School Park (FHSP) brochure describing attributes and growing conditions of plants native to eastern Pennsylvania, its 2012 Silver Award of Achievement.

The Backyard Natives Garden Guide, said Carol Ledbetter, awards coordinator at GWA, won the award based on the "accuracy, content and organization, style and originality, and the degree to which it achieved its goal." Two hundred sixteen other entries competed for the award.

Download the Backyard Natives Garden Guide! (4MB)

Friends of High School Park is a recipient of the 2011 PHS Community Greening Award for the backyard natives garden!

FHSP Receives 2011 PHS Community Greening Award
Jo Fagan, Park Restoration and Management Committee member and Diana K. Weiner, Restoration Manager receiving the award from Drew Becher, President of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society.

Thanks to the thousands of hours accumulated over the years by hundreds of volunteers, including the Boy Scouts, school groups, members of synagogues and churches, and our Board of Directors, FHSP has accomplished much so far. We have:

• Commissioned the creation of an initial plan, by the prestigious landscape architect firm, Andropogen, for the ecological restoration and community use of the park. According to that plan, the old school building on the upper level of the site was collapsed into the ground, buried by a thin layer of soil, and transformed into a meadow. Volunteers planted this area with beautiful native perennial grasses and wildflowers.

• Cleared the tangled growth and refuse which covered the stairs leading from the meadow to the woodland, and the hillside.

• Cribbed and marked the walking trails through the park and cleared and prepared a bed for our native plant showcase garden, which will be planted in the fall of 2009.

• Removed many of the weedy invasive plants such as garlic mustard and Japanese knotweed throughout the park. This is an ongoing project, but our volunteers have made substantial progress, bringing us closer to our goal of restoring the park.

• Created a hillside meadow that borders High School Road. In 1997, volunteers planted in this hillside over a thousand native perennial plants, including numerous milkweed species that attract butterflies.

• Planted more than 200 trees, nearly 200 shrubs, countless spring ephemerals, and dozens of ferns and other herbaceous ground plants alongside the creek and the woody field and hillside that joins it. Restoration of the area that borders the creek was greatly aided by a $13,690 TreeVitalize Watershed Program grant that FHSP received to improve the plant communities that buffer Tookany Creek. The grant covered the costs of the planted vegetation, whose roots help prevent flooding and erosion by absorbing storm water and holding tight to the soil of the creek bed so it doesn't wash away during storms. In addition, the TreeVitalize grant provided money for tools and equipment, as well as for signage that explains the importance of protecting the watershed with native plants.

• Installed a shed on the park to house the tools and other equipment volunteers use to carry out the restoration work on the park, and an irrigation system to water newly planted native species in the park until they become established.

• Provided regular free educational programs in the park, such as bird walks, park tours by a naturalist, and stargazing gatherings around telescopes provided by local amateur astronomers.

Recognizing our accomplishments, the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society awarded FHSP with a Suburban Greening Award in September of 2004. This award recognizes "outstanding public plantings that improve the quality of life through horticulture." In presenting the award, the natural look of the two large meadows was praised by Blaine Bonham, Executive Vice President of the Society. The Society also was impressed with the birdhouses FHSP installed to attract birds and help with integrated pest management, and the rain barrels, which collect rainwater that can be used to water new plantings.

In the summer of 2006, to track how well our efforts at ecological restoration at the park were succeeding, High School Park became the first site in Pennsylvania to undergo a survey and assessment of its plant community, known as a Plant Stewardship Index (PSI). Developed by the Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve, the PSI is an analytical tool that assesses the status of the native plant populations at High School Park. Repeated periodically, the PSIs will reveal progress in our restoration efforts, much like a series of report card grades. Our first assessment, done in the summer of 2006, revealed that although the park is not yet a pristine natural environment, it does have a core group of native plants that are thriving. But the assessment pointed out that much more work needs to be done to replace the invasive plants in the park with native plants.