Wildflower preserve to open to public this weekend

On Sunday, April 29, the Freshwater Land Trust will open 50 acres of property in Forest Brook to the public, for those interested in spotting salamanders or watching wildflowers bloom.

The Trust will hold its Sunday Hike Series from 2-4 p.m. at Wildwood Wildflower Preserve, located at the end of Forest Brook Circle. The hike will begin at MedHelp, 1 West Lakeshore Drive Suite 100.

The land for the preserve was originally acquired by the Land Trust in 2001, Communications Director Mary Beth Brown said, and opened as the El Paso Wildflower Preserve in 2012 for appointments and private tours.

The property includes a 1.6-mile loop trail with benches and bridges, for visitors to walk and enjoy tree coverage and an array of spring wildflowers. The Freshwater Land Trust manages about 6,000 acres of undeveloped land, including a forest preserve near Homewood High School, but the Wildwood preserve is one of a few they’ve opened to the public.

“You can be in such a beautiful, dappled-sunlight, wooded area close to a really urban environment,” Brown said. “Because it’s so beautiful, because this preserve has managed to maintain it and take care of it really well, it is a good candidate for public access.”

Stewardship Director Jeffrey Drummond noted a number of native flowers visitors can find in the preserve, such as phlox, geraniums, trout lilies, wood sorrel and jack-in-the-pulpit.

“You get a really nice diversity of plants, especially around those [Shades Creek] tributaries,” Drummond said. “Pretty much anything relatively common or somewhat uncommon in this area is found on this property.”

It’s also home to wildlife including marble, slimy and spotted salamanders, which will live near the Shades Creek tributaries and migrate to the wetlands on the property to breed each year.

“The salamanders that are the focus of the Homewood Salamander Festival, the spotted salamanders, they breed in that pond,” Drummond said.

In addition to the life in the wildflower preserve, Brown said the property is also important to the Land Trust’s goal of clean waterways, as it filters runoff from nearby Interstate 65 before it can reach Shades Creek.

To prepare for public access, Brown said the Land Trust created a parking lot on the property in March, cleaned up some of the invasive plant species and planted some new ones. This included an April 17 work day with volunteers from Protective Life Insurance.

“The fact that we’re here managing it, opening it to people to be able to enjoy it, helps preserve it and get people to care,” Drummond said. “It kind of offers them a quick place to go, to get away and recharge.”

Brown said it will be accessible from dawn to dusk.

In the future, Drummond said he would like to add a trail to the wetlands for people to see that ecosystem, and Brown said they want to be part of a larger system of trails.

“This eventually will hook up to the Shades Creek Greenway,” Brown said. “That’s a connection we really want to help push forward.”

Learn more about the Wildwood Wildflower Preserve and the work of the land trust at freshwaterlandtrust.org. Find out more about this weekend's hike here.