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.
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, 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 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 …
