Maple Leaves Forever

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Maple Leaves Forever Foundation

The following article about Ken Jewett and Maple Leaves Forever is from the 2008 autumn issue of Watershed: Life in Northumberland, Prince Edward County and Quinte.

You wouldn’t put a polar bear in your swimming pool, and some people might express misgivings about beaver in their wetlands, but there’s no doubt about the iconic status and desirability of the all-Canadian maple.

Rural Ontario residents can claim a particularly special relationship with the symbol of all things Canadian, including our national flag and sweet tasting syrup for our breakfast pancakes.

For many of us, the rural drives of our youth were lined with thousands of open-grown roadside maples providing shade on muggy hot Ontario summer afternoons and points of brilliant colour during the fall.

Anyone going out on that same drive today would notice the roadside maples are not as glorious, nor as numerous, as they were even a few decades ago. We thought those maples would last forever but alas, they are in decline.

A tree that could live 300 to 400 years in the protected conditions of a forest - assuming clean air and minimal human interference - has trouble reaching the century mark when exposed to pollution, sun and wind of a roadside planting.

Many of our roadside sugar maples are now over 100 years old and most owe their existence to Ontario’s early reforestation efforts. Following the great clear-cut of Southern Ontario during the 1800s, farming thrived for awhile but in parts of the province where the soil was thin, farm profits ped as soil eroded.

As a way to boost incomes and put more trees on the landscape, farmers received financial incentives to transplant maple saplings from their woodlots to roadsides and to tend them until they were established. Proof of the success of their efforts came in the forms of rows of maples lining thousands of kilometers of Ontario roadside, a heritage enjoyed for decades by rural dwellers and urban visitors alike.

Ken Jewett, a Toronto-area resident and entrepreneur, wants to see that heritage perpetuated. “I’m a million years old,” he jokes. “When I approached 65 I didn’t want to retire.” Instead he has used the fruits of what he terms a ‘modest success’ in the food industry to launch ‘Maple Leaves Forever’, a non-profit foundation dedicated to increasing the number of native maples planted in Ontario, particularly in roadside and fence row sites.

“I provide 99.9% of the funding,” says Jewett, whose foundation began its activities by offering free maples to residents of Mulmur Township, about an hour northwest of Toronto. It now works with schools, municipalities and stewardship councils across south-central Ontario to plant five-foot native maple seedlings, contributing half the cost of each tree - about five dollars.

Maple Leaves Forever supports the planting of native Canadian maples, which are purchased from commercial nurseries. “Ideally,” says Ken Jewett, “the seed source, nursery, and planting location are located in the same climate zone.”

Northumberland Stewardship coordinator Glenn McLeod heard Maple Leaves Forever pitch its program at the Ontario Forestry Association meeting earlier this year. His stewardship council opted to get on board by matching the Maple Leaves Forever funding to purchase and plant 100 trees this spring. “This is something we believe in,” says McLeod.

That commitment means that Northumberland landowners need only contribute their labour to plant and tend to the trees and the materials required to stake, mulch and protect them. Glenn McLeod also suggests that those who plant trees on municipal road allowances rather than their own properties consult with their local works superintendent to make sure their work doesn’t fall victim to brush clearing machinery.

Fifteen Northumberland land owners, including a school and an inn, stepped forward to plant trees and successfully launched the program this spring. Among them were Baltimore-area residents Bart and Nancy Nelson who accepted five Maple Leaves Forever trees to add to the roadside saplings they had already transplanted from their woodlot. Their hope is that their efforts will replace the older and now declining maples lining the road by their farm.

“We had a bunch of maples along the road,” says Bart Nelson. “They were a beautiful row of trees.”

Ken Jewett hopes the Nelsons’ efforts will be replicated thousands of times by landowners across southern Ontario. Typically, he’s modest about his ambitions for Maple Leaves Forever. “It’s not humongous. It’s not Trees Ontario,” he says, referring to the program which is implementing the province’s commitment to plant 50 million new trees by 2020. “But,” he continues “we’re making a dent.”

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