One of the streams that feeds the lakes enters back where the trees meet the mud in this photo, between the two backhoes. From an old aerial photo the engineers determined that the pond used to extend further up into that valley, and I was alerted that some more mud and associated plants would be coming out.
FOPOS board member Tim Patrick-Miller agreed to help me rescue some of the wetland species before the digging started. Much to my surprise, we found 4 species to add to the list of plants growing at Mountain Lakes.
In the wheelbarrow (our manual labors contrasted comically with the big machinery of the dredging operation) is pickerel weed, which is rarely found growing in the wild in Princeton. It likes shallow standing water at pond's edge.




All four of these species only survive in locations that stay consistently wet throughout the summer. Though this continent once had abundant wetlands with much more stable hydrology, suggesting these plants were once abundant, the only places I find them now are in areas kept artificially wet, such as the edges of impoundments like Mountain Lakes, and the pump-enhanced marsh at Rogers Refuge.
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