Volunteer Of The Month: Brian Gugerty Protects Trees From Invasive Vines

Brian Gugerty has a long history of preserving trees, starting when he was 19 years old and working in the Young Adult Conservation Corps program started under President Jimmy Carter.

“I was embedded in a forest service crew in Boulder, Colorado, and we went up into the mountains every day and cut down mountain pine beetle-infested trees and piled them up into slash piles,” Gugerty said.

In the wintertime, they would burn the slash piles to manage beetle outbreaks.

After his time in the Young Adult Conservation Corps, he started a career in nursing on the advice of his mother because of an emergency medical technician class in Colorado that he enjoyed. He now works for the federal government in medical informatics.

In 2021, Gugerty saw a flier at Quiet Waters Park for volunteer events, including invasive weed removal, an opportunity to reconnect with the work he enjoyed as a teenager.

“It’s interesting and natural for me to fall back to this,” Gugerty said.

He soon started to connect with other organizations. Save Our Trees was started in the spring of 2022 and is a program within the Anne Arundel Watershed Stewards Academy. It joins other Anne Arundel County programs and organizations that Gugerty organizes events for, including Anne Arundel Weed Resistance and the Cape Conservation Corps.

In 2023, Gugerty asked the founders of Save Our Trees to come to Broadneck Park. The founders agreed that if he organized the event, they would help him.

“I knew Broadneck Park,” Gugerty said. “It is a park that I frequent, and I knew that it was badly infected by invasive vines.”

Over 30 people attended that first event, including five founders of Save Our Trees. Gugerty has since held nine events in 2023 and seven in 2024, with three more planned. Anywhere from five to 35 people attend these events.

Attendees learn how to safely remove vines and how to identify invasive vines, including English Ivy and oriental bittersweet.

“These vines don’t seem to be hurting the tree,” Gugerty said. “The tree looks healthy. The vine is taking moisture, taking a lot of moisture, leaving less for the tree. They’re taking nutrients, leaving less for the tree. They’re setting the tree up for disease.”

When the vines get into the canopy, they can also block sunlight from the tree.

Gugerty works for organizations that host events most of the year.

“Our season is, essentially, from September through June the following year,” Gugerty said. “We take July and August off because it’s just too hot and there’s too much poison ivy and ticks to deal with in those hot months.”

For Anne Arundel County Recreation and Parks properties, Gugerty works closely with park rangers.

“They walk through with us and make sure we’re hitting the priority areas that they want us to work on,” Gugerty said. “They give us tips. Sometimes, they help us coordinate removal of the debris that we cut.”

A few times, local homeowners’ associations, including one for Colchester on the Severn, have invited Gugerty to hold events on their land to remove invasive vines.

Each event begins with a safety orientation. Tools including snippers and loppers are provided through Anne Arundel Weed Resistance, which also sends volunteer coordinators to most of the events Gugerty organizes.

“We go to the tree and cut the vines all around the tree, at ankle height, knee height or waist height, and we try to pull the vines one to three feet away from the base of the tree, so that the invasive vines are cut away from the tree, and the roots, to the extent possible, are pulled back from the tree,” Gugerty said.

Volunteers should not pull down from their cuts above their heads.

“The vine might be wrapped around a dead branch, and if we pull down, it can hurt us,” Gugerty said. “Or we can pull the bark off the tree and damage the tree.”

Volunteers come from a wide range of backgrounds and knowledge levels, all looking to do something tangible for their local environment.

“You feel good about that experience,” Gugerty said. “It helps with the anxiety and the worry about what’s happening to our planet.”