Most teenagers probably can share a story or two about the yard work they did this summer: mowing lawns, fertilizing gardens or pulling weeds.
In DuPage County, 15 teenagers can talk quite a bit about the time they spent removing unwelcome plants, but not from their own backyards. The high school students spent four hours a week at the Morton Arboretum in Lisle participating in START (Students Teamed in Arboretum Restoration Tasks).
And some, like Jeff Meyers, 16, of Clarendon Hills, will return occasionally during the autumn to take a look at the results of their efforts.
Every Wednesday morning for two months, Meyers, a junior at Benet Academy, and other teens arrived at the Arboretum at 9 a.m. and spent the next four hours outdoors, clearing away non-indigeneous plants from a four-acre savanna.
Teenagers have been working on the area, which contains trees and low-growing plants, for the past four years, removing the non-native buckthorn, Asian honeysuckle and American elms.
“My mom works at the arboretum, and she heard about the program,” Meyers said. “At first I didn’t like the idea, but as I got involved I enjoyed it more.”
Meyers first joined the program in 1993; this year he returned because he enjoyed learning to identify plants and learning about the history of the area.
Mark Lobes, 16, of Downers Grove said he was amazed to discover that so much of the arboretum was cornfields 100 years ago. “It wasn’t all forest, but flat, rolling fields,” he said.
The students also learned about safety outdoors.
“We learned to identify poison ivy and poison oak,” Lobes said, “and to identify what is and isn’t a tick.”
“We also learned which plants can be used as remedies,” he said.
The end of the teens’ efforts is finally in sight. When all the foreign plants have been cleared, wildflowers and other native plants will be introduced.
With a crew from the arboretum itself, the work could have been done in one day. So why take four years to do it?
“Getting it done quickly wasn’t the point,” said Tom Simpson, a naturalist with the arboretum who has worked with the teens for the past four years. “The idea was to provide a learning experience for high school students, not just to harness free labor. They are at an age where they are forming opinions; they are entering their productive years.”
When teenagers become enthusiastic about nature, they take that enthusiasm into their adult years, Simpson said.
Yet, it is sometimes difficult to reach this group, he said, because there is so much going on in their lives.
Four years ago, Simpson was talking with the director of volunteers, Marilyn Halperin, about his experiences as a graduate student working with high school students. “She mentioned that she occasionally received calls but that there was no specific program for them,” he said.
The two put their heads together and came up with START. This year 15 teens entered the program. There is no charge to join, and all the work the teens do throughout the summer is strictly on a volunteer basis.
Some, like Meyers, return for a second year. Tina Cheuk, 17, of Downers Grove is also one of them. “It is nice to see the changes that have occurred since the previous year,” she said. “You don’t really see the changes while you are working on the area.”
Cheuk, who is a member of the Outdoor Environmental Club at Downers Grove North High School, hopes to return next summer if more work is found for the students. “You learn so much about the environment,” she said.
Lobes, a junior at Downers Grove South High School, said that what he learned was useful because he wants to be a landscape architect. “I liked learning to identify all the plants,” he said.
While he was excited for the program to start, he quickly learned that it’s not always pleasant to work outdoors. “When we worked outside and the temperature was in the 90s, it was hard; you sweat a lot,” he said.
Like Cheuk, he’s ready to do it again, however: “I’ll be back next year.”
