Tucked into a bend on tranquil N
Willamette Drive, just south of the University of Portland, a single
tree stands on a steep green embankment, its branches reaching out
toward the railyards below. Nailed on its moss-covered trunk is a plate
reading, “Portland Heritage Tree, Oregon White Oak.” But this is no
shield against the creeping encroachment of developers and the nearby
university—emboldened by relaxed city zoning codes.
Friends of Overlook Bluff is the collective name of the 15 volunteers who are
stepping up to preserve the oak, and convince the city of Portland to
acquire the land from its private owner. In a city with about 19 trees
per acre, the quest to save a single tree may seem odd, but the lone oak
extends its roots into one of the city’s last undeveloped, privately
owned properties east of the Willamette River. Before 1850, oak savannas
like Overlook Bluff formed a corridor and migratory pathway stretching
from British Columbia to California. Today, only 20 percent of this
original riparian land in Oregon’s Willamette River Basin remains
forested. And that percentage is shrinking fast. In 2010, with the
city’s blessing, UP bought up 55,000 square feet of previously protected
land on the bluffs to build a parking lot.
“I think the focus at first is
this one tree, this one acre,” says Friends founder and neighborhood
resident Ruth Oclander, “but all of a sudden the significance is so far
reaching.”
Oclander, a descendant of
landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, the father of Boston’s
greenbelt (and uncle to the author of Portland’s 1903 parks plan),
believes that saving the tiny outcropping will be the first step to
building a network of urban wilderness trails from the bluff to St.
Johns. The single acre of untouched land is a stitch in the larger
ecological fabric that supports deer, coyotes, red-tailed hawks, and
great-horned owls.
“We have to think that if we
preserve this land,” Oclander says, “there will be something there one
hundred years from now, and it won’t be just houses.”
