The Wendell Misfit Prom is scheduled for today at the Deja Brew Pub at 57 Lockes Village Road. The theme is “Gods, Myth, and Legends.”
Doors open at 7 p.m.
The parade starts on Wendell Common at 6:30 p.m. Admission is $20. Children under 12 are free. The proceeds benefit the Wendell Free Library.
Athol High School students joined AmeriCorps members at Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust on June 6 to install signs on the trust’s new trail connecting Skyfields Arboretum to a trailhead on Route 32.
Earlier this spring, students in Jeff Sautter’s ecology class identified trees and measured their environmental impact using the online National Tree Benefit Calculator. The class then created durable wooden signs, describing tree benefits, to post directly onto trees on the high school’s campus and Mount Grace’s Arboretum. The “TREE-mendous” project was coordinated by Mount Grace’s MassLIFT AmeriCorps team and began this year as a collaboration between Sautter and MassLIFT Community Engagement Coordinator Maya Apfelbaum.
“We can often take our trees and woodlands for granted since they are so abundant in these parts,” says Apfelbaum. “The signs encourage us to stop and note all the services and the good that living trees provide us, from carbon sequestration to a sense of wellness.”
The brightly-colored signs along the Skyfields trail explain the various benefits of black cherry, red maple, catalpa, paper birch, and many of the other trees representative of a typical northeastern forest.
The class joined Apfelbaum, MassLIFT AmeriCorps Service Learning Coordinator Nick Atherton, and the North Quabbin Trails Association’s Bobby Curley at the Arboretum to put the finishing touches on the new trail. After installing the new signs, Sautter’s class heard from Athol Tree Warden Travis Knechtel and held a ceremonial celebration of the project with Dr. Joseph Breton before going to Harvard Forest in Petersham to see signs designed this winter at Harvard’s Re-Thinking Trails workshop.
The new trail runs from existing meadow trails at Skyfields Arboretum (1461 Old Keene Road in Athol) down a wooded slope to Route 32, where a new trailhead has been opened to the public as part of Mount Grace’s 30th Anniversary celebrations. Skyfields Arboretum was bequeathed to Mount Grace by Margaret Power Biggs in 1999 with the understanding that Mount Grace would create a native species arboretum in the fields. The arboretum is open to the public for recreation and nature study.
For public events at the arboretum and other Mount Grace properties, visit:
mountgrace.org