Project Buckthorn
About Project Buckthorn
Don’t Mess with the Don is teaming up with Toronto Nature Stewards and the City of Toronto to tackle the copious amounts of buckthorn in Sunnybrook Park.
At Don’t Mess with the Don we have already removed thousands of the trees from our Sun Valley stewardship site and now with this new partnership we will expand our impact, taking further steps towards restoring the Don Valley to a thriving native ecosystem.
Project Buckthorn will return in in May 2024!
Dates: Mondays in May, May 6th - May 27th
Time: Meet at 4:30pm, each session will run for approximately two hours
Location: Meet at the Sunnybrook Park Parking Lot #3 Click to view map
All tools and equipment will be provided as well as drinks and snacks. Please dress appropriately for the weather, bring layers, sunscreen, a reusable water bottle, and wear sturdy closed-toe shoes.
Why Buckthorn?
Our Progress
We launched Project Buckthorn in fall 2023 for just six weeks of hard work and pulling together. In this short time we removed over 4000 invasive trees and bagged 75 large garbage bags of berries! This is a great start to the project and we couldn’t have done it without the many volunteers who came to help us and of course to our partners Toronto Nature Stewards and City of Toronto Parks and Forestry.
Common Buckthorn, also known as European Buckthorn, is one of the most invasive plants in the Don Valley and there are tens of thousands of trees in Sunnybrook Park alone.
The shrub leafs very early in the year blocking sunlight to native trees, causing them to die off. It spreads voraciously thanks to birds eating its berries and buckthorn’s ability to change the nitrogen levels in the soil to create a better habitat for it grow. This creates dense thickets that crowd out native plants leaving a monoculture ecosystem void of life.
