Nature's Cathedral
Nature’s Cathedral
How the MacLeod Family and the Nature Trust preserved ‘fern gully’ for future generations
WRITTEN BY JON MACNEILL, COMMUNICATIONS MANAGER
It’s a rugged hike up a steep slope, stepping over snags and weaving around maidenhair fern as we make way to our destination on John and Verna MacLeod's Tracey Mills property: a 100-metre bowl carved into the landscape, the late afternoon sun cascading through a canopy of sugar maples lining the curved upper ridge, like sentinels standing guard over what we'd come to see—the vast carpet of deep-green ferns below.
“We call it ‘fern gully’” Cedric MacLeod, the eldest of John and Verna's five children, told me earlier, drawing a deep breath and exhaling slowly as he leaned back in his front-end loader, picturing the space in his mind. “And it’s just, I don’t know—it’s spiritual. It really is.”
From the top of the ridge, it feels like an amphitheater overlooking a showcase of idyllic Appalachian Hardwood Forest. From the bottom of the bowl, with the stillness of this day—silent save for the silvery glade ferns brushing softly against your shins—the space lives up to the family's estimation: nature’s cathedral.
Through the Nature Trust’s Conservation Partners Program (CPP), John and Verna are setting aside the roughly 20-acre ‘fern gully’—a patch of pristine, untouched Appalachian Hardwood Forest among the family’s 250-acre working woodlot—for conservation.
“It was easy,” he says of the family decision. “What’s half a load of lumber, saw logs, worth? 600 bucks? Why would I give that up for 600 bucks?”
“Every tree that we can keep standing, every single one, counts”
Cedric began working with the Nature Trust on his family's behalf in 2018 when a member of our Conservation team, Aaron Dowding, contacted him out of the blue. Aaron had been poring over aerial photography and satellite data looking for rich sites of AHF—a forest type unique to Carleton, Victoria and York counties characterized by exceptional biodiversity, yet one of the most endangered in the province, with less than one per cent of its original area remaining.
The timing couldn’t have been better. The MacLeods had long used the woodlot to cut lumber or firewood and had just commissioned a forest management plan that recommended a new round of harvesting by strip cut. After some correspondence, Cedric invited the Nature Trust to come out and tour the property.
“We had built a relationship, and he (Aaron) was like, ‘Man, you’ve got something special out here. So we went out one Saturday afternoon—it might have even been a Sunday,” Cedric recalls with reverence. “Mom and dad, some of my siblings, and my wife, and he was the one who showed fern gully to us. And we were all like, ‘Wow. Yeah. This is spectacular.’
“So, when the loggers came, I said, ‘Aaron, you go out with your ribbon, talk to the loggers and you tell ‘em where you don’t want them to go.’ And he did.”
Cedric MacLeod at his homestead, just down the road from the family woodlot and 'fern gully.'
Cedric gives the Nature Trust and its Conservation Partners Program full credit for ensuring fern gully stayed pristine and untouched.
“I’m a soil scientist,” he says, gesturing to his farmland, a roughly 10-minute drive from the family woodlot. “I know there’s orchard grass there, alfalfa there—I mean, I can take you all across this farm and tell you exactly what’s happening. But I manage it. That’s my gig.”
The woodlot? That’s another story. And prior to the Nature Trust, no one in the family realized how unique of a habitat it sheltered. “Unless you’ve got somebody to point it out, how would you know?”
That’s one of the core ideas behind the CPP: helping landholders discover the distinct or ecologically-significant features and species on their property, and offering help and advice through up-to-date best management practices.
“We're never looking to tell people what to do with their land,” says Aiden Pluta, with the Nature Trust’s Conservation team, “because a lot of the time, people are very experienced and knowledgeable about their land. What we really like to do is work with them to provide accurate information and land stewardship recommendations.”
Aiden says some partners join the CPP simply to learn more about the species on their land, using the Nature Trust’s guides on local birds, plants, and wildlife. Others, who actively harvest parts of their woodlots, seek guidance to restore degraded areas and strike a balance between conservation and resource use.
“The MacLeod family are a bit of both. They're doing a lot of important things on their land, whether they be agricultural or forestry related, while at the same time taking really good care of it,” Aiden says, noting that through the CPP, Cedric has opened the property to a series of ‘AHF Walks’ the Nature Trust has held, inviting representatives of local, provincial and federal governments, and woodlot and marketing board associations, to learn more about this forest type and the work being done to protect and restore it.
This summer Cedric also made the woodlot available to our team and Madison White, a master's in forestry candidate from the University of New Brunswick, who is studying AHF with an eye toward what it will take to restore the forest type.
Madison has surveyed 18 properties so far, and the visit to the MacLeod's revealed two rare AHF species she’d never encountered before, bottlebrush grass (Elymus hystrix) and the endangered showy orchis/orchid (Galearis spectabilis), native to New Brunswick and known at only a handful of sites in the province—now including fern gully.
“It’s rare for a reason," Madison says. “Showy orchis can’t establish populations very well. So in order for it to be there, and persisting, I would think it’s a very rich AHF site where there has been very little disturbance for a while.”
Disturbance has been on Cedric’s mind of late. Now having hosted two AHF walks and two survey visits, he’s developing plans with our team to further safeguard fern gully.
“I saw it after the first tour: impact,” he says. “We’re following the same trail. You can see the impact it’s having. I said to myself then: ‘there’s gotta be a better way.’ I want people to experience this thing without wrecking it.”
The family now envisions a trail leading to the top of the ridge overlooking fern gully, where fencing, interpretive signage and a QR code to a close-up virtual tour of the ferns will let people take the space and serenity in, without putting it at risk.
When asked where his passion for conservation comes from, Cedric leans forward, folding thick forearms over the steering wheel, and looks off in the distance, beyond the hay bales he’d just stacked.
“First year university, Intro to Agriculture, it was a brand-new course, and the boys—(instructors) Drs. Alan Fredeen and Ralph Martin, God bless’em, they talked about sustainability. They talked about the sustainability of agriculture and its role in a sustainable society and the importance of maintaining the precious soil resource.
“Halfway through the semester, I went to Ralph, and I said, ‘I want to tackle this.’ He said, ‘well, you better change your major to soils and go to work.’ So, I did—that afternoon.”
He graduated from Dalhousie University in 1999 and completed a master’s degree in soil science from the University of Manitoba in 2002. In the two decades since, he’s become a recognized name in the agricultural community not only in New Brunswick (ever had the MacLeod Burger from the James Joyce restaurant in Fredericton? It’s named after him and made with he and his wife's Local Valley Beef), but also as a champion of sustainable agriculture across Canada, having served as the executive director of the Canadian Forage & Grassland Association since 2015.
Right now, on top of his company MacLeod Agronomics Ltd., an agri-environmental consulting firm that helps farmers incorporate sustainable practices into their operations, he’s also project manager for the New Brunswick Living Lab, a $5-million research project with 25 commercial farming sites across the province trying to advance climate smart best management practices.
Cedric’s involvement with the Nature Trust and the discovery of fern gully, has his sights set not just on sustainable agriculture, but sustainable forestry and land conservation.
“I’m really interested in advancing the idea that, I know there are more landowners, my colleagues and peers in the AG sector, that if they knew what was on their land, and somebody like the Nature Trust said, ‘hey, we could conserve this patch of pristine habitat,’ they’d take the leap,” he says.
“I want fern gully to be an example for the community. I need it for my son and his cousins to know that it’s important, that we have a responsibility to steward these places. Something created this. And it’s absolutely mystifying, magical, beautiful—how can we not feel a sense of responsibility to maintain that? And when you start looking at carbon balances and the impact we’re having with our land use—boy, every tree that we can keep standing, every single one, counts.”
This story is featured in our 2023-24 Gratitude Report, our annual report. You can read the digital version here. Members and donors receive a hard copy in the mail each December—donate here to join the mailing list. Curious about our Conservation Partner Program and what it means to be a voluntary land steward? Learn more about the program here and read a fascinating story about rare lichen made possible by this partnership here.