News from the preserves, parks and backyards of Princeton, NJ. The website aims to acquaint Princetonians with our shared natural heritage and the benefits of restoring native diversity and beauty to the many preserved lands in and around Princeton.
Detention basins don't call attention to themselves, but this one found its way onto the front page of the Town Topics a few weeks ago. Located between the Performing Arts Center and the athletic fields at Princeton High School, its flora and fauna have become an object of study and stewardship for environmental science students.
The main purpose of a detention basin is to catch runoff, in this case from tennis courts and a parking lot, and slowly release it to reduce downstream flooding and pollution. Most basins are mowed, but they can also be turned into meadows full of diverse native plants.
Last year, the Princeton Public Schools hired the Friends of Herrontown Woods (FOHW) to oversee stewardship of native plants in two PHS basins, and to work with teachers and students. A student writeup in the Princeton Public Schools District News describes FOHW's collaboration with PHS Environmental Science students and teacher Jim Smirk to turn the basin into a native wet meadow.
Journalist Don Gilpin followed up on that with a front page article in the Town Topics about the project. During eight sessions this spring, students combined the physical and the intellectual. Along with collecting data in the basin, the students are weeding out invasive species and planting natives. Our "Iwo Jima" photo shows the students lifting a tool shed into place that will also collect rainwater for watering plants. The shed was built from scavenged materials by FOHW volunteer Robert Chong. The rainbarrels were donated by Jenny Ludmer of Sustainable Princeton.
The students divided the basin into a grid, with each student adopting one of the units. Each student then used a 3' square quadrat to study plant diversity within each unit.
The sessions provided a rare opportunity for students to focus in on the individual plants that comprise our green world and begin to distinguish one plant from another.
The cool, wet weather was perfect for planting and weeding. For some, this may have been their first encounter with a shovel, and the combination of grit and finesse required to give a plant a new home in the earth.
It was easy to identify the abundant native beardtongue blooming in the basin, harder to distinguish plants without flowers. Using the pattern of leaf veins as a clue, students learned to confidently weed out the non-native narrow-leaved plantain in their plots while leaving the beardtongue to grow.
The outdoor learning the students are getting, ranging from applied analytical skills to plant identification, including how to safely and effectively use garden tools, will serve them well in life. As I said in the Town Topics article, many of them will have their own homes and yards someday, and if they become familiar with complex native habitats on school grounds, maybe they’ll dig up some of the lawn in those yards and plant natives.
Why do gardens and nature diversify over time? Since most flowers last only a week or two, any gardener seeking a steady progression of blooms will naturally seek out new additions to fill the gaps. This spring, I noticed a different sort of steady progression: of blooming trees and shrubs in nature's garden at Herrontown Woods. No gardener put this steady progression together.
Flowering dogwood (Cornus florida) put on a show in late April.
Blackhaw viburnums (Viburnum prunifolium) dotted the understory with white pompoms for the first few days of May, their period of bloom shortened by the heat.
Alternate-leaved dogwood (Cornus alternifolia) followed in the second week of May, with scattered blooms in the shade,
and abundant blooms in the sun.
Arrowwood Viburnum (Viburnum dentatum) in the lowlands sustained flowers through cool days in the second half of May,
along with maple-leaved Viburnum (Viburnum acerifolium) up on the ridge.
In the last week of May, abundant disks of elderberry (Sambucus canadensis) flowers began an extended residency.
Still to come is silky dogwood (Cornus amomum),
which will look remarkably like its predecessors when it blooms.
There are many examples of how native plants that have co-evolved behave in an egalitarian way. Though there are exceptions, they tend to "play well with others," sharing the ground rather than bullying their way to dominance. Might this sharing have a collective advantage that benefits them all?
People trying to understand why invasive species can be detrimental will rightly point out that many invasive plants provide abundant flowers for pollinators. But if one species comes to dominate, its week or two of blooms will be preceded and followed by precious few flowers, leaving pollinators little to sustain them through the season.
An interesting experiment would be to monitor what sorts of insects pollinate the progression of blooms generated by native dogwoods and Viburnums. Have their visually similar blooms evolved to attract the same sorts of pollinators? If so, they could be thought of as a sort of tag team, collectively sustaining the needed pollinators through the season.
Springtime, and the woods is full of fresh green foliage. With such tenderness and delectability in abundance, it's not surprising that very hungry caterpillars and other insects respond by chowing down.
Earlier this spring, the tent caterpillars got busy in the Barden at Herrontown Woods defoliating the black cherry trees. In the photo are one of many new "tents," and the brown, droopy remains of the previous year's.
Last year's black cherry chow down was particularly extravagant, resulting in near total defoliation that ultimately extended to the neighboring pin oak. In the process, the caterpillars built lavish highways of silk, the better to navigate over the cherry's rough "black potato chip" bark. Once the communal caterpillars had had their way with the trees, they individually wandered off to pupate, and the trees grew a second set of leaves. This relationship seems to keep the black cherry trees perpetually stunted, but still healthy enough to grace the Barden grounds.
Another woody plant burdened by the overwrought appetites of native caterpillars is the Hearts a Bustin (Euonymus americanus). Because deer browse was preventing this native shrub from growing to maturity in the wild, we transplanted some into cages in the Barden at Herrontown Woods. For years, they thrived, but this year the webworm larvae of the American ermine moth(Yponomeuta multipunctella) showed up to chow down. As with the black cherry trees, the Hearts a'Bustin' shrubs are having to be way more generous than seems fair.
Interestingly, the Hearts 'a Bustin' we have growing in sunnier locations are thus far sustaining less damage from the insects. Perhaps the extra sunlight strengthens their defenses.
More modest in their appetites are caterpillars found on ferns. Deer tend to avoid eating ferns, and insects may find them less edible as well.
Early in the process of creating what became the Barden, we discovered a pussy willow growing there. This spring, some of its leaves were getting "windowpaned" by larvae of the imported willow leaf beetle (Plagiodera versicolora). Like kids that won't eat the crust of bread, the larvae leave the leaf veins uneaten.
Oaks sustain a tremendous variety of insects, among them the wasp Callirhytis seminator. The wasp lays its egg on the oak, simultaneously injecting a chemical that causes the oak to create a growth called a Strawberry Oak Gall, or Wooly Sower Gall. The gall conveniently provides food for the wasp larva.
These are but a few examples of the varied ways plants support the local insect population, which in turn provides sustenance for birds.
As reported in TapInto Princeton, a black bear stopped by Riverside Elementary School during school hours this past Wednesday, May 28. The school was in "lock down" mode for two hours until the bear had moved out of the neighborhood. (Photo by Syth Devoe) The school, whose mascot is the River Bear, was reportedly last visited by a real bear in August of 2022.
This PrincetonNatureNotes website serves as a diary of sorts for bear visits to Princeton. A common cause of bear visits is young males seeking new territory. For previous posts, you can do a keyword search for "bear," but "latte" works pretty well, too. "Duck in for a latte" is part of a comic but accurate description I wrote in 2012 about how a Princetonian should behave when encountering a black bear.
One thing that has limited the environmental movement's effectiveness is the striking divide between environmental advocates and those employed day to day to realize environmental ideals. The people on the front lines, those who actually do the often menial work behind high ideals, know little about the environment and are made to care even less. While recycling is considered a societal good, the custodians tasked with collecting recyclables in a building or a public space have little motivation to do the job well. Often they find it easier to simply throw the recyclables out with the trash. And rather than tend to nature, landscape crews are more like armed squadrons, deployed to simplify and subdue nature with a thundering fleet of machines.
While environmentalists may try to change these antithetical behaviors through education, precious little changes.
Case in point is volcano season, currently underway in Princeton. This is when landscape companies pile mulch against the trunks of trees in volcano-like cones, disregarding every word that has ever been written about how to mulch a tree. Type "How to mulch a tree" into google, and the answer comes back loud, clear, and unanimous.
"Avoid piling mulch against the trunk, as this can lead to moisture buildup and root rot."
Turns out it's important to let trees develop an exposed root flare over time. You can see how the trunk on this tree flares out at the base.
Bury the root flare in mulch, and you imperil the tree. Ohio State University has a particularly colorful post about this. But no matter how apoplectic horticulturists get, it's all singing to the choir. Landscapers just keep making the same mistake.
Here's a black cherry tree that recently got the volcano treatment from a landscape company. You can see that a lot of attention went into making that mound of mulch all neat and tidy. Though mulching at least protects the tree from getting girdled by the weed whipping crew. mulch against the trunk threatens the tree's longterm health.
It took considerable digging through multiple layers of mulch to reach the ground about ten inches down. Authoritative sources agree that mulch is good, but not too deep, and not right up to the trunk, so why don't landscape crews do it this way?
The aim of landscaping as typically practiced today is not to nurture a living world but instead to make the outdoors mimic the indoors. The ideal lawn is as flat and uniform as wall-to-wall carpet. Shrubs are pruned into green balls, and a tree is groomed to look like a floor lamp with a cone-shaped base. We humans have all sorts of knowledgeable people to help us thrive in all of our complexity--teachers, doctors, counselors, physical therapists. A similarly complex nature could thrive in our yards, but instead most yards are considered unworthy of anything beyond custodial care.
Here's volcano row at a church.
And here's a whole front yard full of trees, some of them planted at considerable expense, only to be improperly mulched, also at considerable expense.
The custodial role is an important one in society. I have a lot of respect for people who clean up after others. It's just unfortunate that so much of the American landscape has been stripped of nature's complexity and beauty, denaturalized and simplified, the better to serve as sterile adornment for the house.
Related video: Turf Therapy -- an original monologue portraying the lawn as a kept woman in the service of a narcissistic House. (Okay, I forgot to wear my turf hair, and look and sound like a guy, but use your imagination.)
I had an unexpected insight on Mother's Day about the advantages of having a wide variety of flowering plants growing in one's yard. It began with a few preparatory texts in rapid succession from my older daughter the day before:
"Mother's Day tomorrow"
"!"
"If you want to get flowers or something"
Responding to this imperative, my first thought was to go to the store and buy a bouquet. Then I thought again. I value the local store, and store-bought flowers can be pretty, but a little predictable, and do I really want to be supporting the transport of flowers flown all the way from Colombia, Equador, and Kenya?
So, my thoughts turned to the yard, which thus far this spring had provided a fine progression of daffodils, tulips, and lilacs. But now, with Mother's Day upon us, all those easy ornaments for the indoors had faded away. A cynical thought came to mind, that the creators of Mother's Day had timed it to coincide with a gap in local blooms, the better to spur sales of flowers.
But no, climate change has been altering the timing of blooms for a long time now. And looking back at a post I wrote entitled "Mother's Day's Complicated History With Flowers," I found that Anna Jarvis founded Mother's Day to correspond to when her mother had died, on the second Sunday of May. She campaigned for nine years to make Mother's Day official, then spent the rest of her life fighting against the commercialization of it by the florist, card, and candy industries.
My instincts were right, then, to head to the backyard for a bouquet, but what to use?
There, blooming in brilliant, lacy white along the fenceline, was a native fringe tree. That got me started. Add some Lenten Rose, daisy fleabane, and some leaves of sensitive fern, and ... Voila!
The usual plug for planting flowers in the yard is to feed the pollinators. Since different species bloom at different times, adding more species better insures there will be a steady progression of blooms to sustain pollinators throughout the growing season.
On Mother's Day, our fringetree saved the day, showing how backyard biodiversity can also feed human relationships and indoor ornament.
Various family members have brought the outdoors inside to make bouquets over the years. Most of the flowers are native, but not all. This one, from June, adds sprays of Virginia sweetspire and the yellow of sundrops and yarrow to roses.
Lenten rose mixes well with iris.
Those floppy peonies in the yard can thrive indoors in a vase, perfuming the house.
This one from early September combines boneset, purple coneflower, obedient plant, "Autumn Joy" sedum, and Indian grass with a few sunflowers.
October brings goldenrod, New England aster, frost aster, and the deepening burgundy of sedum. Some of the wildflowers drop pollen on the table, but that seems a small price to pay.
Sometimes it's good to rock out with the sheer joy of sunflowers, given some subtlety by the goldenrod. Perennial sunflowers spread like crazy in a garden, so try your best to grow them in big containers rather than letting them loose in the flower beds.
Even in November there's beauty to bring indoors. A botanist friend, Cynthie Kulstad, brought forest and prairie together for this bouquet at the 20th anniversary of a watershed association I started in Durham, NC.
For many people, perhaps most, nature's diversity seems intimidating. Thus the countless static yards simplified down to turf and nondescript shrubs.
You can see, though, that the intimidation of nature's endless creativity outdoors can be overcome, and ultimately inspire human creativity indoors. It all begins with digging up some turf and planting that first flower.
Herrontown Woods is packed with life this time of year. Frogs are hoppin' and native flowers are poppin'.
With the chance of rain diminishing to 10%, I'm going ahead with a frog and flower walk this Sunday at 11am. All are welcome. Looks like May's Cafe will add even more life to the Barden, from 9-11, with coffee and baked treats.
There's so much to see. Tadpoles are growing in the vernal pools.
Hundreds of native pinxter azalea flowers are just starting to open.
And as the flowering dogwoods begin to fade, the clustered blooms of blackhaw viburnums polka dot the understory with white.
Herrontown Woods seems an unlikely source of a big fish story.
Its multiple streams take but a few steps to cross. A sustained drought slows them to a trickle and dries some up altogether. It can feel like an event to spot a minnow while crossing the main channel on the yellow trail. How did it reach that far up, given the challenge posed by the cascades some distance downstream? When a boy named Felix found a crayfish in a stream next to the parking lot some years ago, it was a revelation.
The only big fish story told until this spring was the tall tale popularized in an article in the October, 1981 Princeton Recollector, entitled Farming Small in "Herringtown". Written by Jac Weller, who owned a farm where Smoyer Park now stands, the article states that Herrontown Road was originally called Herringtown Road, named after the herring that farmers would haul back from the shore in wagons to fertilize their crops. The soil, the story goes, was so poor up along the Princeton ridge that the laborious trip was worth the trouble.
Like many a good fish story, this one's hard to confirm. That fabulous historical research tool, the Papers of Princeton, compiling digitized newspapers dating back to the early 1800s, offers no evidence that there ever was a Herringtown or Herringtown Road. The Herringtowns that pop up in word searches prove only to be someone's misspelling of Herrontown. Still, I found appealing an explanation told to me by John Powell, longtime farm manager for Jac Weller. Long after Weller departed from this world, John lived in a house at Herrontown Road and Snowden Lane, raising two head of cattle each year on his six acres. In an email to me, John told the story this way:
"The story I have on Herrontown Road is that it was where fish wholesalers lived, on small farms on land owned originally by the Gulick farm, a very large farm. When the road became part of Princeton, its name was dressed up so as to suggest the bird."
In other words, or in the case of this particular word, Herrontown is a hybrid, part fish, part fowl. The idea that fish wholesalers would congregate along the eastern ridge makes at least a little sense, it being downwind of the town and of little value for agriculture. And might there have been a time long ago when the herring migrated upstream to Princeton each spring, saving the farmers a trip to the shore?
It was with these thoughts in mind that I arrived in Herrontown Woods to lead an ecology walk for the Princeton Adult School on April 4. I was waiting in the parking lot for the participants to arrive when I saw out of the corner of my eye a great blue heron flying up through the trees, heading away from where the red trail crosses the preserve's main stream. I had never before seen a great blue heron in Herrontown Woods, and in that brief instant thought I saw something large hanging from its beak. As it flew away, I strained for another view to confirm, but the dense canopy got in the way.
Our walk followed an arc along the red and yellow trails, with talk of Herrontown ecology soon eclipsing any thought of that curious heron seen earlier. Then, crossing the main stream on the red trail to return to the parking lot, we heard a splash and saw something incongruously large slicing the surface of the water. There, visible beneath the reflections on the water's surface, were two large fish, about a foot long. Clearly, we weren't in minnowland anymore.
We oohed and ahhed, wondering what sort of fish they might be. I wanted them to be trout, or even better, herring, to make more conceivable the story that the word Herrontown had grown out of Herringtown, just as a real life heron would grow from eating herring. A new logo for Herrontown Woods rose to mind: a heron flying with a herring sticking out of its mouth, or perhaps a chimera--a mermaid with a fish's body and a heron's head.
After finishing the walk, I headed back to explore further. That's when I took this video:
The two fish, alas, proved not to be trout, nor herring, but instead bore the far less appealing name of white sucker, named after their white belly and mouth angled down to eat from the stream bottom. Also called brook suckers, they are native to the eastern U.S. and midwest, living in lakes or streams, then swimming upstream to spawn in the spring. When they spawn, a female is often bounded on both sides by males whose semen mingles with the thousands of eggs released into the stream by the female. There's no nest, nor any followup care. The math of two males to one female would work in this case, if the great blue heron actually did carry off the other male, leaving just two fish. Herons have a remarkable ability to spot dinner in small bodies of water around Princeton. We twice lost our goldfish when a heron came to visit our backyard minipond.
A friend, Fairfax Hutter, who grew up just a quarter mile downstream of Herrontown Woods, remembers the annual migration of foot-long fish upstream to spawn. Most memorable was when a boy in the neighborhood caught a pair of fish and tried to get them to spawn in a bathtub.
Despite the lowly name, the white sucker is native, and a powerful swimmer that has a salmon-like ability to overcome myriad physical obstructions to reach its spawning grounds. Its annual journey to Herrontown Woods connects us to the romance and ecological power of the great spring migrations of the past, when shad, menhaden, and river herring swam up the Millstone River to spawn. Did these other species reach up into small streams like Harry's Brook as well?
Though the Carnegie Lake dam prevents any return of shad and other anadromous fish species to Princeton, there have been efforts to remove two smaller dams downstream on the Millstone to bring spring migrations further up the Millstone.
Shadbush is a native shrub so named because it blooms early in spring when the shad are making their journey up our eastern rivers to spawn. It grows wild in Herrontown Woods, but for decades was kept from blooming by deep shade and hungry deer. Some years back, we transplanted a few of them to the Barden, where sunlight and protection has allowed them to bloom once again.
Through land protection that began with the Veblens and Herrontown Woods, some stewardship, and the serendipity of a well-timed stream crossing on April 4, we now know that when the shadbush bloom, big fish will come a' courtin', and a great blue heron will come a' huntin', as they have for thousands of years.
Since google's AI could not answer the question this morning, it seems time to get the word out as to how Harry's Brook got its name. Harry's Brook, for those unfamiliar, drains the eastern half of Princeton, emptying into the Millstone River portion of Carnegie Lake not far from Kingston. Even a relatively small brook has many origins. The main branch originates in Palmer Square, flowing in a concrete culvert under downtown Princeton until it daylights at Harrison Street. Another branch flows east from Princeton High School and the Princeton Shopping Center.
The cleanest tributary originates high on the boulder-strewn ridge in Herrontown Woods.
It was Maine-based mapmaker and internet sleuth extraordinaire Alison Carver who figured out how Harry's Brook got its name, in a free-ranging correspondence with me back in the Covid days of 2021. My original question to her had been "who put the Herring in Herrontown"--a related question whose answer remains elusive.
Harry, it turns out, was really a Henry, as in Henry Greenland. I first learned that Harry was a nickname for Henry while researching Henry Fine, the man who did so much to build Princeton's math and science departments in the early 20th century, including bringing Oswald Veblen to Princeton in 1905. Old Fine Hall, and the newer math building as well, were named in his honor.
Alison sent me a series of maps that showed the evolution of the brook's name,
from Greenland's Brook
to a combination, in which the outlet was called Greenland's Brook with one of the branches being called Harry's Brook,
to a map that shows the whole thing getting called Harry's Brook.
How far back does the name go? The first mention of Harry's Brook in newspapers dates back to 1878, but Harry goes back much farther than that. The Municipality of Princeton has a webpage entitled Historic Princeton that states:
"In 1683 a New Englander named Henry Greenland built a house on the highway which is believed to be the first by a European within the present municipal boundaries. He opened it as a "house of accommodation" or tavern. Portions of this house survive within the Gulick House at 1082 Princeton-Kingston Road."
The tavern was strategically located halfway between New York and Philadelphia, a day's horse ride from each. Is there something of Harry in the name of the road that bordered his land, Herrontown Road?
An email from Alison shows the spirit of inquiry:
"I did a little research … Harry was the first landowner in the area. He had about 400 acres, (about 2/3 of a square mile) part of which is now the Gulick Preserve … but the cool thing is that Herrontown Road runs along the north edge of it. So, I wonder if Herrontown Woods was named after the road? And how old that road is? If it’s really old, then maybe the road was Henrytown or Harrytown, something like that, and it got changed over the years … it has a gap in the middle of it which makes me think it must have been an old road, since maybe that part was a footpath or was let to grow over …
This is the third spring that the Friends of Herrontown Woods (FOHW) has helped frogs and salamanders safely cross Herrontown Road on their way to their breeding grounds in vernal pools. The work of the Princeton Salamander Crossing Brigade is documented in a blogpost on this site from last year, and in an article this week in the Town Topics. This year the Brigade was able to collaborate with Princeton's police department, which closed the road on one of the nights when the amphibians were on the move, dramatically reducing the customary carnage from road traffic down to zero. FOHW is hoping to collaborate similarly with the police department in the future.
Along with upcoming nature walks about amphibians during FOHW's Earthday celebration on April 13, I co-led an amphibian walk this past weekend, described below. Another walk I'm leading on April 5, through the Princeton Adult School, about plant life and forest ecology at Herrontown Woods will also touch on spring amphibian behavior and still has a few spots open.
The walk at Herrontown Woods this past Saturday delved into the lives of frogs and salamanders along the ridge. We were fortunate to have two members of the Princeton Salamander Crossing Brigade with us. Inge Regan (second from left), who started the Brigade two years ago, is passionate about helping the frogs and salamanders safely migrate to their breeding grounds. This involves helping them avoid getting squashed by traffic when they cross the road on rainy nights in early spring.
Neuroscientist and Crossing Brigade member Lisa Boulanger is very knowledgeable about amphibians, and brought along a couple red-backed salamanders she had found under a log that morning. These small but numerous salamanders don't need a vernal pool to lay their eggs. Lisa brought along the two color phases: red-backed and lead-backed.
Our first stop was a small pond we had dug in the Barden a couple years ago as part of a Zen Garden. I had placed a "refugia" in the bottom of the pond. An earthen pond in our piedmont clay will hold rainwater for days or even weeks, but ultimately the water seeps into the ground. Sinking a black plastic tub into the bottom of the minipond creates a refugia to sustain frogs and other water-loving creatures through droughts. This pond hosted adult green frogs and their young through last summer, and this spring during the walk, Lisa found a white glob of salamander eggs in the pond. Very flattering that the salamander community has found our little pond to be egg-worthy. (Info on mosquitoes and miniponds in this post.)
Nearby, not far from the parking lot, we stopped by a small but mighty vernal pool that holds water longer than others in the woods. This little pond was created naturally. Years ago, a tree blew over, and where its rootball had been, the depression for a vernal pool was created. The clay under this pool is so dense that the water doesn't seep in, but instead remains to sustain hundreds of frog and salamander larvae until they can grow to maturity.
One curious observation we've made this year is that wood frog eggs, usually dominant in the vernal pools, are this year very few. No explanation for this scarcity as yet.
During the walk, Lisa was busily turning over logs in search of the most charismatic salamander in the woods, the spotted salamander. Finally, near a vernal pool deeper in the woods, she found one and showed it to all the participants.
Lisa has taken many photos of the salamanders crossing the road on rainy nights, including the one below. You can see why these wild creatures are much loved.
