Whether you’re a landowner, someone who works in conservation, or a forest lover, taking care of woodlands can sometimes be a lonely job.
One program in Vermont creates spaces where women can come together to share successes, frustrations and memories from their land stewardship.
Women and Our Woods Vermont was established in 2019, modeled originally after the national Women Owning Woodlands Network. Now it’s run by nine steering committee members and has expanded to include woodland enthusiasts, or anyone who is interested in learning more about stewardship and conservation.
The program includes landowners like Melita Bass, who owns a lakeside property in Shoreham that has historically been a summer camp, a farm and an apple orchard.
Bass turned to Women and Our Woods for financial assistance in 2022 as she worked to restore part of the property to clayplain forest — the original forest variety in much of the Champlain Valley.
She applied for a cost-sharing program, which helped pay for a Vermont Youth Conservation Corps crew to plant trees and shrubs along the lakeshore.
Bass said she could not have done the work alone.
Beyond that financial support, she also began to host workshops on her land with Women and Our Woods, where she spoke about her conservation efforts and her journey to land stewardship.
In this network, Bass has traded both technical and emotional knowledge.
Through the years, she has noticed a common thread in many of the stories shared by women in this group: grief.
“Some folks have lost partners, spouses, some folks have lost parents or gone through some other major life change to get to this point of being single woman landowners. Not that we’re all single, but some of us definitely are,” Bass said.
She said that programs like Women and Our Woods bring a sense of community to her land stewardship.
“It can be a pretty lonely position to be in, especially for someone my age, kind of mid-life,” she said.
Women and Our Woods hosts 15 to 20 events yearly — all across Vermont, with some online workshops.
Caitlin Cusack, a member of the organization’s steering committee, said that the network’s inclusion of woodland enthusiasts opened programming up to people who have never been to any kind of forestry event before.
“We’re reaching beyond the chorus,” Cusack said.
She added that many of these new attendees are drawn to the women-focused nature of the program. (Anyone is welcome at the events.)
This fall, at Meach Cove Farms in Shelburne, about 20 people gathered for a tree walk workshop hosted by Women and Our Woods.
The group learned from Lynn Wolfe, associate manager, about her land management strategy.
These workshops are peer to peer learning networks, where people can share their own observations and approaches. Conversations this evening ranged from grapevine management to seed-collecting.
Sam Bower, who works at a large-scale organic maple farm and at a tree nursery, attended the Shelburne workshop. She has lived in Vermont for three years and has been impressed by the availability of forestry education in Vermont, especially women-focused education.
“The two jobs I currently have are incredibly inclusive work environments, but it’s still not a female-dominant field,” Bower said.
She said that events like this tree walk are important for building connections in the forestry world.
“You’re not going to do that when you’re in the woods by yourself every day or with your small work crew, but you’re going to do it going to community events like this,” she said.
Before Melita Bass bought her property in Shoreham, she sat down with a notebook and a pen and made some goals.
“Those goals were a safe place to live, and a source of income that could meet my abilities, and then I was also interested in some sort of conservation legacy,” she said.
She plans to lay the foundations for a small, diversified farm on the property.
Today, seven years after coming to this land, her conservation legacy is still often on her mind.
“I don’t have children, so that’s sort of the thing that I see myself as passing along,” she said.
