Community Volunteers Joined Miami-Dade Parks for Inaugural “Salute to Service Volunteer Project”

MIAMI  — On Saturday, November 2, 2019, the Miami-Dade Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces Department, together with The Mission Continues 1st Platoon Miami, United Way of Miami-Dade, and community partners, pitched in for the inaugural “Salute to Service Volunteer Day” at Miami-Dade Parks’ Seminole Wayside Park. The event is a preserve revitalization project for the park and an inaugural signature celebration for National Veterans & Military Families Month and kick-off the November Veterans Day festivities.

More than 30 community volunteers showed up to lend their time and brawn to help remove hundreds of pounds of invasive plant species from the park’s pine rockland preserve and plant more than a hundred new native plants at the site.  As part of the day’s activities, the volunteers were each gifted a firebush plant, a native species known for attracting pollinators and butterflies. Participants were given the option to either plant in their home garden or at the preserve.  They also had the opportunity to tour the preserve with a Miami-Dade Parks naturalists to learn more about its’ significance to the local environment and be part of a rain barrel painting project led by University of Florida (UF)/IFAS Miami-Dade Extension representatives, who offered up tips on water conservation in the process. Three painted rain barrels will be donated to area schools in support of UF/IFAS water conservation education.

View photos from the event here.

The preserve at Seminole Wayside Park is one of many preserves managed by Miami-Dade Parks’ Natural Areas Management Division. Among the diverse plant community in the pine rockland at Seminole Wayside Park are two federally listed endangered plant species, and 24 state-listed threatened or endangered species.  The natural area is surrounded by a low coral rock wall, originally built in the late 1930s by the Works Progress Administration program.  Miami-Dade Parks acquired Seminole Wayside Park in May 1936.

For directions and more information about the park, visit the web page.