Matthew Wong shovels soil into plastic buckets from a pile taller than he is, while the home-schooled fourth-grader’s dad, Michael Wong, shovels beside him.

Eighth-grader Max McDermott pokes a neat holes in the soil of pot after pot and classmate Kaza Ansley inserts a tiny sitka spruce seedling in each.

The students work like a seasoned team – and they are.

They are part of a group of Bainbridge students who travel from West Sound Academy in Suquamish to plant native tree seedlings at Battle Point Park every Monday.

In the past, it would have been easy to walk the circumference of Battle Point Park without noticing the rows of cedars, big leaf maples, sitka spruce and other native trees behind the mound of clippings and branches south of the “pea patch” gardens.

“At the beginning, we looked at the space and thought, ‘man, how are we ever going to fill it?’” said Ansley’s mother, Jeanne Huber, who helps oversee the project.

Now, the space cleared for the project by the parks district is nearly filled with the long rows. A Washington Arbor Day Council special award, announced last week, brings the collaborative effort into focus for the community-at-large.

Since January, the 10 students – with an occasional helping hand from Bainbridge High School’s Earth Service Corps – have potted more than 2,000 native trees, donated by the National Tree Trust, that will be used for stream restoration.

Red Osier dogwood and cedar sit in one-, two- or three-gallon pots next to the sitka and other native trees.

The seedlings arrive packed 400 per cardboard box.

“We’re even planting alder, which sounds bizarre,” Huber said, “but if you’re trying to get rid of an invasive species that likes sun, like reed canary grass, you plant a fast-growing shade tree and give it a head start by letting it stay at Parks and Rec.”

Trees from seed would not thrive planted amidst the grass, Huber points out, because the tall grass would deprive the seedlings of sun.

But in two to three years, the alders will be ready to replant.

Green power

The Battle Point nursery was the brainchild of Jim Trainer, a community forester for Puget Sound Energy. PSE donated Trainer’s time and the potting soil to the Bainbridge project; the Park District, spearheaded by park planner Perry Barrett, donated mulch and extended a water line; and Huber donated the weed cloth under the rows of pots.

In just three years, Trainer has helped start 15 similar nurseries in western Washington.

The young trees, planted along deforested streams, help regulate run-off into the streams by acting like sponges to soak up excess water.

The trees help local agencies finance restoration projects, since the value of the trees may be counted as local matching money needed for grants.

Trees from a Trainer nursery saved the city of Bremerton more than $100,000 for a reforestation project along Gorst Creek.

The plants must be used for public projects and for land held in conservation easements or owned by public agencies.

Huber hopes that the future of the tree-planting project will include trees seeded from Bainbridge trees.

“It would be so cool to propagate,” Huber said. “It’s good to have native trees – but it’s even better to have to have seeds from local plants.”

Meanwhile, the first batch of seedlings will need nurturing through their first critical years so that they can survive to become mature trees along island streams.

“The continuing project is to keep them weeded and watch over them,” Huber said. “The work is far from done.”