Through a suburban Springfield neighborhood and past manicured athletics fields lies a wild plant nursery in full bloom. Katie Danner, a parishioner of Nativity Catholic Church in Burke, kneels by a bed of light purple woodland phlox flowers, delicately pulling out the plants that don’t belong. “I love weeding,” she said with a sincere smile.
Danner works as the operations coordinator for Earth Sangha, a nonprofit that sells trees, shrubs and vines native to Northern Virginia, and works to remove invasive plants and restore native ones to local parks. Though she’s always loved the great outdoors, for many years she didn’t expect to end up working in it. “I always want to be doing God’s will. I’ve been trusting him all through my career, from one thing to the next,” she said. “I know he brought me here and that this work matters. Being concerned about the environment is for all of us.”
Danner grew up in Wisconsin before her family moved to Northern Virginia when she started high school at Robinson Secondary School in Fairfax. She earned a degree in art history from the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg and a master’s in elementary education. Studying in the United Kingdom during college convinced her she wanted to live abroad after graduation, so she spent four years teaching in Japan, becoming conversant in Japanese in the process.
When Danner returned to Virginia, she taught kindergarten in Fairfax County. But after a few years, she decided to make a change. Through a friend she learned about an internship at Earth Sangha, and after being accepted, she was immersed quickly in a world of greenery. She found she loved getting her hands dirty, learning the scientific names of the plants, hearing the birdsong and smelling the fragrant breezes waft through the nursery.
The more she learned, the more passionate she became about the ethos of Earth Sangha. They collect the seeds from within about 40 miles of the nursery, then clean and sow them in the greenhouse. “We sow seed and divide our plants by hand, we weed by hand, we don’t use any chemicals or pesticides, and then we watch each plant leave for their final destination to be planted at a restoration site or a homeowner’s garden or a school or a church,” she said. “It feels like really honest work — it’s all the work of our hands.”
Danner also appreciates the mission of removing invasive plants, though it can seem like a near insurmountable task at times. “There’s so much alien invasive plant pressure here that when left unchecked, they take over natural areas and crowd out the native plant communities,” she said. “This wreaks all kinds of havoc, including a tremendous loss of biodiversity. Things like English ivy — we’ve seen it bring down mature trees. Porcelain berry vines, oriental bittersweet, Japanese honeysuckle — there aren’t any natural controls for them here in our landscape.
“They compete for limited natural resources and the attention of pollinating insects, support populations of destructive invasive insects, and our wildlife and insects aren’t adapted to be nourished by any of these things,” she said. “I think they call it plant blindness, when you’re not recognizing the plants in your environment and the role each plays in the ecosystem. Our now-degraded ecosystems were originally balanced and perfectly designed by God, given to us to responsibly steward.”
Whether she’s hiking in the woods or driving in her car, Danner spots invasive species everywhere. It’s daunting to think about, she said. “But doing this work gives me hope — meeting so many people who are interested in restoring and conserving natural areas,” said Danner, who got engaged to her fiancé, Chris, this spring and hopes to be married at Nativity later this year.
Besides relying on hope, working at the nursery has required her to cultivate other virtues. She has to trust each spring that despite the harsh winter conditions the plants will bloom again. She patiently waits, sometimes for years, as the seeds they harvest grow into plants ready for customers to take home. She has to accept that sometimes the plants she nurtures end up dying.
“In this culture of instant gratification, we do our work differently, cooperating with the natural process and not rushing or compromising our integrity in order to fulfill our desires for fast or perfect results,” she said. “Living that philosophy out through this work really does help me to remember to be patient with God’s timing and designs, to be patient with the way he works in the world and in our own lives — that doing it his way is the best way.”
