Corey Duffy, of Oak Forest, loves walking the trails at the Orland Grassland nature preserve.
Every couple of weeks she tries to make the short trip to Orland Park to take a nice hike.
“I love the scenery,” Duffy said. “There is the prairie area and the forest area. You can see a variety of different things here.”
But there is one part of the trail that is not her favorite. It’s the stretch running parallel to busy LaGrange Road.
“It’s a little distracting,” she said. “You are walking on the trail and on one side, you hear the birds and on the other side you have cars.”
Duffy joined 20 other Orland Grassland volunteers Saturday to plant native shrubs such as American plum, hazelnut and nannyberry viburnum to eventually help buffer some of the noise and pollution from the LaGrange Road traffic.
It’s the first time she ever volunteered for a project like this and admitted that she doesn’t have any special planting skills.
“I heard they were looking for volunteers and this was the first time I had time to do it,” she said.
The project is in the spirit of Earth Day, which was celebrated Wednesday.
Volunteers planted 5-gallon pots of the shrubs.
The Frankfort Rotary Club donated money for the Grassland volunteers could to buy 12 shrubs.
While some volunteers were busy creating, others were burning.
A group collected stacks of branches from invasive trees for a brush fire burn.
Longtime Orland Grassland site steward Pat Hayes figuratively directed traffic on the project while the literal traffic zoomed by.
“It’s busy and noisy,” Hayes said. “Not only that, when we had our Hike the Nite out here a month ago, the lights from the traffic looked like an amusement park.”
She was not amused.
Planting shrubs that can grow as high as two stories is a way to combat some of the strife caused by the traffic.
She said surrounding streets, such as 167th and 104th streets are OK, but not so with LaGrange Road.
“This needs a buffer,” Hayes said. “And shrubs are important to a shrub land. These shrubs will be very beneficial to the habitat for grassland birds.”
The brush fire burn is important because Hayes said some trees are harmful to the prairie.
“The only tree that should be on a prairie is a burl,” she said. “It has thick, corky bark and fire can roll right through it and it doesn’t faze it one bit.”
After thinking about it, Hayes said a white oak is good as well. But not much else.
“Elms and maples … oh God, the locusts are just awful,” she said. “Those kinds of trees, they gotta go. They are as bad as anything. They are so aggressive.
“If you don’t get rid of the source, you are going to find them everywhere, which is what we’ve been doing.”
Hayes said there were so many problems with the area when the volunteers started in 2002 that it’s been tough to catch up with everything on the 960-acre property.
She has a unique solution to many of the problems, but don’t look for her idea to come to fruition any time soon.
“If I could get a couple of buffalo, boy, that would be great,” Hayes said. “They would knock all of it down. They have a great purpose on the prairie. They would knock everything down, they would churn it up. They poop all over and fertilize the plant seeds in the process.”
While Duffy is a new volunteer, there were some veteran volunteers helping the cause Saturday.
Norman Solliday, 85, has volunteered his time for 20 years. The former Orland Park resident and retired doctor now lives in La Grange and still likes to come back to jog the trails.
“I always get this feeling when I go outdoors,” he said. “I come to this area for relaxation. It makes you feel better.”
Jeff Vorva is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
