Don’t call Derek Stoner Johnny Appleseed, but the two have more in common than meets the eye.
Stoner, a Hockessin resident, has helped plant a few thousand trees in Pike Creek’s Middle Run Natural Area over the past decade and oversees a massive reforestation project at the 110-acre county park.
“Reforestation helps to protect Middle Run, which is a healthy stream that is a tributary of the White Clay Creek,” he said.
The Delaware Nature Society plants about 1,000 trees a year there, Stoner said, and has reforested at least 20 acres with 33,000 trees since the project began in 1991.
The trees help prevent erosion, provide a wildlife habitat and prevent chemicals from running into the stream, he said, which benefits the Newark area residents whose drinking water is pumped from the White Clay Creek.
More than a hundred volunteers typically come to the spring and fall plantings, Stoner said, and teaching them the finer points of tree installation is rewarding and, sometimes, messy.
“Kids seem to have a natural attraction to playing in the dirt,” he said.
Stoner’s interest in the outdoors began when he was a child. Growing up in Lancaster County, Pa., he spent a lot of time playing in the park behind his house or on his family’s farm, he said.
An avid outdoorsmen, Stoner enjoys birding, photographing nature, hiking and fishing, he said, which are many of the same activities he teaches children at the Delaware Nature Society.
“That way, work never seems like work,” he said.
He helps conceive environmental programs for kids and families at DNS, leads field trips and helps plan the organization’s more than 100 summer camps.
Helping youth understand the importance of nature, from the tiniest bug to the most majestic tree, goes a long way toward educating the next generation of stewards, he said.
“I enjoy seeing how excited they get, whether it’s seeing a pretty butterfly or catching a fish,” he said.
But building a generation of environmental stewards is far from an instant project, he said, much like the work at Middle Run.
In nature, less than 1 percent of trees that germinate survive into maturity, he said, but they are working hard to beat nature’s odds.
And even though there may be little instant gratification to reforestation, Stoner is buoyed by the knowledge that he and the DNS are making the environment better for tomorrow.
“We’re planting these trees to live 100 years,” he said. “It’s important to think of the big picture.”
