Stumped for gift ideas? Why not plant a tree, adopt an acre or support water quality protection right here in the Rideau Valley?

The Rideau Valley Conservation Foundation works hard to conserve our local wetlands and forests, support tree planting and promote pristine water quality. You can keep the momentum going when you shop for green gifts for everyone on your nice list this holiday! Complete your Christmas shopping from the comfort of your couch and get a tax receipt, to boot. 

Check out these five green gift ideas:

Living an unexpected life in a public park

Foley Mountain is home to so many creatures: the chipmunks and beavers, the dragonflies and salamanders, the famous grey rat snakes, the red-tailed hawks.

It's home for the Forest School students who, after just a few weeks, feel like part of the ecosystem. It's home for the locals who routinely traverse the same old trails, somehow always finding something new.

But for Peri McQuay, Foley Mountain has been more than a home, more than the place she lived for 30 years, writing and raising her children.

For Peri McQuay, Foley Mountain has been an unexpected and miraculous gift.

It's not very often a 50-acre swath of provincially-significant wetland becomes available in the City of Ottawa – but when it does, the Rideau Valley Conservation Foundation is keen to protect it. 

The Foundation accepted the substantial section of Manion Corners Wetland this fall from siblings Paul Lackner and Colleen Green, who decided their family's natural property – lovingly referred to as "the farm" – belonged in a land trust for perpetual protection. 

Imagine: it's mid-morning on a warm spring day. You follow a trail through a sun-streaked forest. Migrating warblers send trills through the treetops and delicate blossoms decorate the forest floor. You look up to see a red squirrel peering back at you, or, if you're lucky, a shy barred owl. 

Passing through dappled sunlight and cedar-scented shadow, the trail leads to a thrumming wetland. There, the marshlands overtake your senses: cattails bowing to the gentle wind, turtles plunking off their sunbaked logs; red-winged blackbirds sending warnings from their reedy watchtowers. 

The Rideau River laps at your feet while the blossoming sun warms your chest and fills your soul. 

It's a bright sunny morning on March 22. You've woken up in Eastern Ontario to warming and lengthening days but also to soggy ground, rising creeks and rivers, swollen wetlands, and cold rain in the days before and ahead. 

What does all this water have in common? Groundwater, of course - but you knew that, at least you knew it intuitively in the depths of your watery core. 

It was a cold, crisp day in December 2019 when Rosemary (Rose) Fleguel, RVCA's resident butternut expert, pulled up in her truck to meet North Grenville woodlot owner Warren Dool at his 47-acre property. Her mission? To find any and all living and healthy butternut trees - a cause to which she has dedicated the bulk of her long career.  

You know what they say: "If you build it, they will come." But that old adage isn't just for haunted baseball fields – it also applies to wetland projects right in the heart of Ottawa's greenbelt.

Last fall, staff at the RVCA and the National Capital Commission created 10,000 square metres of new wetland habitat along Stillwater Creek, just south of the new DND headquarters off Moodie Drive and Highway 417.

Thanks to observations from the Ottawa-Carleton Wildlife Centre, which is located nearby, staff at the NCC and RVCA discovered the wetland had been suffering annually from extreme low water conditions. Most of the year the wetland was completely dry, dominated by long, reedy grasses that don't encourage much biodiversity.