EDINBURG, Va. — At the Shenandoah County Landfill recently, local educator Hannah Bement was overjoyed to see a monarch butterfly.
“It gives me chills,” she said, watching as the orange-and-black insect fluttered over the plot of native wildflowers to land on a milkweed plant.
Monarchs, which make an approximately 1,000-mile flight each year from Mexico to the United States, rely on milkweed to provide a place for them to lay their eggs and for their caterpillars to have a source of food before they eventually make their flight to Mexico.
Without milkweed, there is no monarch butterfly.
Bement was joined by three other volunteers from the local nonprofit organization Sustainability Matters to identify and catalog how well the pollinator gardens, maintained through the Making Trash Bloom initiative, are doing.
The volunteers are part of an eight-member science team that is driving out to the landfill all summer to continue the work that Bement’s ecology students at Mountain Vista Governor’s School in Warrenton started. When the students return to class in the fall, they will resume recording which plants are growing at each of the landfill’s three pollinator gardens and how many of the plants are thriving.
Not all the plants growing there are native, Bement said, since some plants might have already had seeds in the soil or could have spread from the surrounding landscape. There is a ton of native purple bee balm at the moment, but there are also the large purple blooms of the invasive spotted knapweed.
That’s OK, though, as long as the native plants are growing and thriving as well, Bement said.
“We aren’t aiming for perfection,” she said. “We’re aiming for better.”
The Making Trash Bloom initiative aims to cap off landfills with natural barriers that not only protect the surrounding environment from the contents of the landfill but also encourage pollinators to an area that would otherwise be dead space.
The Shenandoah landfill already had an area of various native grasses on a hill covering a section that’s no longer used, Bement said. This is its control plot.
Sustainability Matters then partnered on a pilot plot of wildflowers on an unused section of the landfill’s property to test out how a collection of diverse plants might grow there.
Then this spring, the organization in partnership with the landfill, seeded a large area of the landfill with a third pollinator plot — the phytocapping plot — with a slightly different mixture of wildflower seeds based on what was growing well at the pilot plot.
Though guests to the pollinator plots will enter the landfill along Landfill Road, the same as everyone else, they’ll find the pilot plot a world unto itself.
The wildflower garden on a hill of freshly mowed grass with views of Great North Mountain and Massanutten Mountain is an unexpected destination that easily encourages visitors to sit and stay awhile.
This summer, the volunteers are studying a small section of each plot during their visits to get a sample of what’s growing there.
They use the iNaturalist app to take pictures of and identify plants that they don’t recognize. The app also allows them to upload photos of plants that aren’t in the global database, so other users from anywhere in the world can help identify them.
“It connects you to this global network of scientists,” Bement said. “It’s all a giant experiment.”
It also makes it easy for volunteers to be part of the Making Trash Bloom science team, she said.
With a phone and an app, she said, “Really, anybody can do it.”
The team uses a random number generator to get coordinates for which 20-by-20-inch quadrant they’ll study, and they use the same coordinates in the three plots to keep things consistent. So far this season, they’ve studied about 12 quadrants.
Because the phytocapping plot has more biodiversity, or “relative abundance,” Bement said it takes longer to record the species during each of their sessions. Each session takes about 30 to 40 minutes to identify about 16 plants at the phytocapping plot. The control plot takes them closer to 10 minutes to identify three to five plants.
But as the plots fill out, Bement said they should see more plants.
“There’s no perfect … and sometimes we have to settle for good enough and baby steps,” she said.
The sight of the monarch butterfly was so exciting for Bement because it’s another indicator of how important the gardens are.
Monarchs are “not doing great,” Bement said.
Deforestation and natural disasters around North America have destroyed many of the butterfly’s habitats. As fewer and fewer milkweed sources become available, the monarchs have nowhere to lay their eggs.
These challenges also affect the butterflies’ journey, Bement said, since butterflies need enough nectar from other flowers to fuel them on their journey.
Justin Schwartz, of Aldie, was there for the first time on Friday training to identify and catalog plants through the rest of the summer.
Saying he believes in “this type of work,” he was also glad to be outdoors.
By learning about the native plants, he said, “I have a deeper sense of connection.”
Coe Sherrard, of Edinburg, was also there to see what was growing as well as what was working well.
“We’re just doing the grunt work,” he said.
Glad to be part of the summer effort, Susie Hertzler, of Frederick County, said she’s been enjoying the challenge.
“It’s a good education,” she said.
It’s also great to know she’s doing her part to save the earth.
“We need this kind of biodiversity,” she said. Without the right kinds of plants, she said, there won’t be the right kinds of bugs to feed the birds that area residents love to see in their yards.
In short, she said, there would be “fewer everything.”
Going forward, the volunteers and Bement’s ecology students will also study which times of the year will be best for landfills to mow pollinator gardens to maximize the benefits of the various species of bees and butterflies while also not letting the area get overgrown.
Initially, they will have the landfill staff mow the areas in strips, Bement said, so they won’t wipe out all the plants at once.
On Aug. 18, Sustainability Matters, based in Edinburg, will partner with Blandy Experimental Farm in Clarke County and the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal on Bug Bioblitz Day, which will welcome guests to the plots at the landfill to sweep through and catalog bugs that benefit from the pollinator gardens.
