Origin story – From forgotten potato farm to research and conservation forest preserve

A city councilor’s email kicked off McMaster’s year-long, shovel-breaking Battle of the Buckthorn in the Dundas Valley.

In April 2012, councilor Brian McHattie emailed Wayne Terryberry and asked about the university’s plans for its 127-acre property on Lower Lions Road in Ancaster.

Terryberry was the right person to ask – he was McMaster’s Coordinator of Outdoor Recreation and Natural Lands and the university’s representative on the Cootes to Escarpment EcoPark System.

He knew about the property but had no idea what the university planned to do with it. It had been sitting unused for decades. McMaster had purchased the one-time potato farm in two parcels – the first in 1964 from a developer and the second from the Corporation of the County of Wentworth in 1969. There were tentative plans to build a satellite campus for 4,000 students with a private road running alongside Ancaster Creek back to the main campus. That idea proved to be financial and environmental non-starter.

In 1996, the Hamilton Conservation Authority bought a slice of the property plus other land that McMaster owned in the Ancaster Creek and Sulphur Springs Creek valleys. The university kept the remaining property that prompted the councilor’s email 16 years later.

Terryberry swung by the property and found the former potato fields overrun with European Buckthorn, a noxious plant that chokes out native species and ruins wildlife habitat. The invasive species was everywhere, ranging in size from shrubs to trees – buckthorn can grow up to six metres tall. Terryberry couldn’t see the property’s forest for the buckthorn.

Getting rid of buckthorn isn’t easy – it’s not something you attack with a weed wacker. The plant’s branches are topped with thorns, the stalks are woody, the central taproot runs deep and every plant’s loaded with seeds primed for reproduction. Eradicating acres of thickets would take many hands chopping, digging and burning over many months.

Even with the buckhorn thickets cleared, the property would prove near impossible to develop because of its hard-packed clay soil and poor drainage. For Terryberry, that was very good news. The property may have been worthless real estate but it was an invaluable ecological gem, with everything from old growth and deciduous forests to a mineral marsh meadow. Studies would later confirm what Terryberry suspected – the 127 acres teemed with life.  Over the years, researchers and citizen conservationists have recorded more than 400 plant species, over 200 species of bees, 120 bird species, 75 species of fungi, 17 fish species, 16 mammal species, 12 amphibian and reptile species and more than 60 species of trees and shrubs.

Terryberry went back to campus and pitched McMaster President Patrick Deane on keeping the property and leaving it undeveloped. It was an easy sell – Deane agreed immediately with one condition – the property needed to tie into McMaster’s mission and mandate as a research-intensive university.

And so began the long-term environmental restoration project of turning the forgotten potato farm into a permanently protected conservation and research forest for faculty, students and the community.

In 2012, Biology professors Susan Dudley and Chad Harvey were tapped to create a research space at the property. Together with Terryberry, they secured funding from the President’s Forward with Integrity initiative, the Faculty of Science and the W. Garfield Weston Foundation to replace the buckthorn thickets with a tallgrass prairie (the largest of its kind in Hamilton), create a Smithsonian Dynamic Forest Research Plot and revamp the existing network of trails running through the property.

The yearlong Battle of the Buckthorn was now in full swing. Crews of students, faculty, staff and community members pitched in. Their resolve would be tested. Many shovels would break. Thorns would tear clothes and scratch arms.

So did Terryberry at any point wish he’d ignored McHattie’s email and steered clear of the buckthorn thickets? Never, says Terryberry. “The forest’s been a huge benefit for both the university and for conservation in our community. And it’s not like I had to do all of the clearing myself.”

In 2015, the University Senate and Board of Governors officially designated the property as an area of environmentally significant natural land. That designation gave the property permanent protection under McMaster’s watch – it could only be used for ecologically sensitive teaching, research and recreation. With the designation came an official name – the McMaster Forest.

The Senate and Board of Governors would later approve a name change to the McMaster Forest Nature Preserve, with onsite signage in Cayuga, Ojibwe and English. Indigenous peoples have inhabited the Hamilton area for at least 11,000 years according to archaeological and historical records. In the late 1700s, the British Crown bought large swaths of land from the Mississauga people to give to British Loyalists following the American Revolutionary War. In 1798, Lots 51 and 52 on Concession 1 in the Township of Ancaster – the future site of the McMaster Forest Nature Preserve – were deeded to Michael Showers Jr. His family is believed to be among the first to settle in Upper Canada.

In 2021, local conservationists Mark Tamminga and Bill Walker wanted to donate a hectare of their adjacent property to the preserve. Their property is now home to the McMaster Carbon Sink Forest led by Professor Altaf Arain. It’s a local forest that’ll have a global impact. The model forest is sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide and helping mitigate the effects of climate change. The health and growth of each of the 1,000 trees in the forest are monitored by Arain and the students in his lab, with their data shared with scientists around the world who are growing similar carbon sink forests. The data will show which trees do the best job of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and for how long.

Research begat more research. In 2025, the university’s Planetary Health Seed Grant Initiative announced funding to create an interdisciplinary living lab in the McMaster Forest Nature Preserve. That lab will feature a bird observatory run by Assistant Professor Emily Choy and her students to monitor the health of migratory songbirds. There will also be an Indigenous teaching garden and a story map of the forest’s history.

Terryberry says the 14 years he’s spent working on the McMaster Forest Nature Preserve have added up to a wonderful journey. “It’s one of the best things I’ve done in my career and I hope everyone who’s been involved feels the same way. We’ve protected a special, one-of-a-kind place for learning, research and recreation. You couldn’t ask for a better legacy.”