The non-profit freeing ferns along a little-known trail network in Champlain Heights

The change in scenery is immediately apparent as you walk southward down the network of trails in Champlain Heights. 

Where most of the trails are bordered by dense thickets of Himalayan blackberries and crawling carpets of English ivy, the flora suddenly flips further down the path, with a thriving strawberry patch, young cedars, and a variety of ferns taking the place of the nearby invasive plants. 

I’m out in the southeastern edge of the city with Grace Nombrado, the executive director of Free the Fern Stewardship Society, who spontaneously started a community-led effort to improve the ecology of the trail network in early 2021. 

“I was out here after a windstorm, and there were branches down on the ground. I was raking up branches and I looked around, and I saw that there was all this ivy that was progressing in this area that climbs and kills the trees,” Nombrado told Vancity Lookout on a muggy May day, gesturing around the clearing where she began her work more than four years ago. 

“I decided to go in and start taking [the ivy] out, mostly on my own, with a neighbour's help,” Nombrado said, noting that previous experience volunteering to remove invasive plants in nearby Everett Crowley Park meant she knew what the ivy was. 

“Then people walking by the trail were like, ‘what are you doing? Can we help? Can we be part of this?’ So we formed our own community group,” Nombrado described.

It marked the beginning of a total career change for Nombrado, a former elementary school teacher who learned all about environmental stewardship and now works full-time running the society.

“I was taking out a Himalayan blackberry bush, and I was cutting it back, and I saw there was a fern in the middle. And I said, ‘free the fern!’ Nombrado said, recalling the inspiration for the group’s moniker. 

Free the Fern is now a registered non-profit that receives funding and support from national organizations like the Park People and the David Suzuki Foundation. Through the efforts of Nombrado, their Board of Directors, and hundreds of neighbourhood volunteers, Free the Fern organized dozens of invasive removal and native planting sessions, established a teaching garden, pollinator garden, and a food forest full of edible native plants. 

The group also hosts all sorts of events like native plant sales, bird and plant walks, and an upcoming eco-art festival. 

Last year, they also created a healing space in the teaching garden for families and survivors of Residential Schools as part of the National Healing Forests Initiative – the only one in all of Vancouver. 

Free the Fern has planted over 3,500 plants since 2021. While they do receive some support and funding from community sources like local businesses and nearby housing co-ops, as well as from other non-profits and city programs, neither the city nor the park board provide operational funding to the organization. 

The Champlain Heights trail network exists in a bit of strange limbo. Not designated as a park, the trail system is managed by the city’s engineering department. That situation allowed neighbours, and then Free the Fern, the leeway to step in and start managing portions of the trail, which the city had previously considered a “hazard area.”

At first, their communications with the city were just about liability, but by 2022, Nombrado said Free the Fern had support from the engineering department, who were impressed when they came out to see the work the group had been doing. “It had been this long process of finally getting verbal support [for our stewardship],” she said. 

“The gap here is still funding,” Nombrado explained, saying the city has started to support them with some materials, like bright vests, and extra plants occasionally, but Free the Fern doesn’t receive any regular operational funding.  

“There's no precedent for giving a [non-profit] group operational funding and handing it to them. So I think there's that's still a gap [the city needs] to work on but we're going to keep advocating for that in the future,” Nombardo said, adding that without the funding Free the Fern received from Park People over the past two years she wouldn’t have been able to work full-time for the non-profit.  

While they struggle with a lack of consistent funding, the group did receive a shocking one-time injection of money to their plant-buying budget, which poetically came to them during an invasive removal session.

“We were rolling up the ivy like a carpet. I commented out loud, ‘wouldn't it be amazing if we found some money on the trail, because we'd literally use it to buy plants’. Five minutes later, I heard this ‘whoa’ and half buried in the ground was a stack of money,” Nombrado described. 

It ended up being about $1,400 in cash, buried between two trails, in the middle of a thicket of invasive plants, with no identification aside from a fork beside the money, according to Nombrado. 

Nombrado relayed an unconfirmed theory about how such a large amount of money came to be hidden away, seemingly forgotten, until Free the Fern volunteers started rolling up the ivy.

According to Nombrado, one of the volunteers there that day said “that’s my fork from my house!” identifying it based on the pattern that matched her set, and the volunteer went on to share that her stepdaughter had dated a drug dealer in the neighbourhood, who died in a car accident, and the couple had hung out in that forest.

The windfall discovery in 2022 came at a time when the group was just starting out and had no major funding. “Because of that $1,400 we were able to buy the amount of plants you see here, which couldn't have happened without that,” Nombrado said.

After spending an afternoon in the Champlain Heights, it’s clear there’s so much more to say about this neighbourhood. 

The network of trails connect to nearby Everett Crowley Park – on what was a city dumpsite until 1967 – was made a park “because it wasn’t really useful for anything else,” a former park board commissioner told The Tyee in a delightful history of the site and the scofflaw for whom it was named. 

That’s all part of the neighbourhood’s novel development on city-owned land, where gentle density, co-ops, and lots of trees are the norm. But new city-wide development policies have residents concerned about towers and a lack of protection for their trail system. 

We’ll get into all that and more soon in our continuing neighbourhood coverage in Champlain Heights.