Volunteers Needed to Plant Trees in Baraboo Hills

BARABOO, Wis. — April 17, 2008 — The Nature Conservancy is seeking volunteers on April 26th to help plant 1,000 trees at its Hemlock Draw Preserve. The tree-planting is part of a long-term effort to restore forest cover in the Baraboo Hills region.

Volunteers are needed on Saturday, April 26 to help plant oak seedlings by hand in an area of the preserve that had previously been cleared of trees. Participants will meet at 9 a.m. at the park in Leland, Wis., about a 30-minute drive from Baraboo or a 50-minute drive from Madison.

Volunteers should wear work clothes and bring gloves, water and shovels, or better yet, spades. Tree-planting is expected to end at about 12:30 p.m.

Directions are to travel onto Highway 12 north from Madison or south from Baraboo. Look for County Highway C (across from the former Badger Army Ammunition Plant) and turn left, heading west on Highway C for about 9 miles into the village of Leland.

For more information, contact the Conservancy’s Baraboo Hills Project office at 608-356-5300.

The restoration of Hemlock Draw will continue later this spring with the planting of an additional 5,800 red and white oaks. AmeriCorps members are expected to hand plant 1,800 seedlings in May and a contractor has been hired to plant 4,000 trees.

The Nature Conservancy has been working in the Baraboo Hills area since the early 1960s and has helped protect more than 10,000 acres in the region.

The Conservancy owns 7,961 acres at 11 preserves in the Hills including the 837-acre Hemlock Draw preserve.

The Baraboo Hills of Sauk and Columbia counties are all that remain of one of the most ancient rock outcrops in North America. The Hills’ oak, maple and basswood forests constitute southern Wisconsin’s largest block of upland forest and provide habitat for more than 1,800 species of native plants and wildlife.

The Nature Conservancy is a leading conservation organization working around the world to protect ecologically important lands and waters for nature and people. In Wisconsin, the Conservancy has helped conserve more than 140,000 acres since 1960. The Conservancy has more than 21,000 members in Wisconsin and offices in Madison, Baraboo, East Troy, Minocqua and Sturgeon Bay. To date, the Conservancy and its more than one million members have been responsible for the protection of more than 15 million acres in the United States and have helped preserve more than 102 million acres in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific. Visit The Nature Conservancy on the Web at www.nature.org/wisconsin