What Comes Next for Morven East
Now that the pine harvest at Morven East is underway, we find ourselves at an extraordinary threshold — one that asks us to think carefully about what a thousand acres of land can become when purpose, curiosity, and care are brought to bear on it together.
Morven East is located across the James Monroe Parkway/Rte. 795 from Morven’s historic core. These lands were purchased by Morven’s owners in the late 1940s. About 750 acres of the uplands on these parcels are planted in loblolly pine. The remaining lands in the stream valleys are hardwoods. For a century, Morven East has been managed as a loblolly pine monoculture for timbering. The lands may have been in pine even longer — Thomas Jefferson mentions pine forests in this area in a letter to William Short in the 1790s. But the history runs deeper still. Eighteenth-century explorers of the Piedmont describe Indigenous practices of land care including controlled burns, used to create savanna for wildlife habitat and clear land for agriculture. Surveyors hired by Jefferson in the early 1800s labeled one of the two spring-fed creeks "Indian Camp Branch" and called the land "Indian Camp." UVA-sponsored archaeological excavations around 2010 confirmed Monacan presence on these lands until the late eighteenth century — decades after it had been claimed through a royal land grant.
These lands have been co-created through human and more-than-human practices and processes for millennia. They have been disturbed by commercial forestry for over a century. Our work now is not to restore them to a single, fixed historic state — that would be too simple an ambition, and perhaps an impossible one. Instead, our work is to create new forest types and ecosystems, observe their growth, test their viability and resilience, and adapt our land management practices in responsive, collaborative, and caring ways.
The necessity of harvesting the entire pine stand within a short period gives the Morven Sustainability Lab a rare opportunity: to expand this forest's function from a species and functional monoculture into a biodiverse landscape with a research mission. The scale of the site, as well as its layered socio-environmental history, affords faculty, students, and collaborators the chance to create several large and varied tracts of experimental and demonstration forest — with different regeneration cycles, research aims, community uses, and degrees of public access.
We intend to plant, observe, and develop care practices for future forest types that are genuinely multi-functional: regenerating soil health, protecting water quality, supporting species biodiversity and wildlife habitat, enabling food foraging, sustaining circular material economies, and creating nature-centered experiences that foster individual well-being and a sense of community belonging. This month, UVA faculty in Environmental Sciences and Landscape Architecture hosted a workshop to launch a Morven land regeneration research grant that was recently funded by the UVA Environment Institute. The grant PIs, Assistant Professor Fred Cheng and Assistant Professor Meghan Blumstein, invited local land conservation and management experts from several non-profits and government agencies to launch the workshop with a discussion of key land management issues in the Virginia Piedmont—increasing species biodiversity and, adapting to a changing climate, integrating agricultural production with wildlife habitat, sequestering carbon, etc. The findings and recommendations from that workshop are guiding the final details of our post-harvest plans which will include a three modes of managing loblolly pine plantations for sustainable timbering, a short-leaf pine plantation which will be managed with prescribed burns to create a Piedmont oak and pine savanna/quail habitat, and a mixed pine plantation which will be thinned to observe ecological succession into a hardwood forest.
Perhaps most importantly, we want Morven East to be a place where the public can experience and appreciate a forest's many values — as wildlife habitat, food forest, microclimate modifier, sustainable timber source, and immersive aesthetic experience. We envision seasonal events such as dark-sky stargazing, bird counts, prescribed burns, bioblitzes and quail hunting. We hope these activities can be developed in collaboration with community members and organizations who have already inspired our thinking about what a working, living, regenerative landscape can be.
This is a long project. The trees we plant this year will outlast all of us. But that is precisely the point — and precisely why it matters to begin thoughtfully, together.
