A Tour of My Backyard

My front and back yards were included in a Green Home and Garden Tour this past week. Organized by the Princeton Environmental Commission and Sustainable Princeton, the event packed into a Saturday tours of four gardens in town, plus tours of some very creatively designed homes.

In a 2023 video, the commission nicknamed my yard the Livestreaming Yard for all the strategies I've employed over the years to utilize stormwater runoff to feed a series of raingardens. 

I was feeling considerable trepidation in the weeks prior to the tour. Would any of the garden's late-summer glory linger through September? And there was a small matter of deferred maintenance, given that my passions and energies these days are mostly directed towards caring for Herrontown Woods. Back in 2017, my private yard had, in fact, served as the prototype for what evolved into the public Herrontown Woods Botanical Art Garden, or "Barden."

Throughout the week prior I methodically grappled with errant vines, cast truckloads of woodchip mulch over cardboard to suppress weeds, stacked firewood, reopened overgrown paths and thinned out volunteer trees--all the while feeling incredibly grateful that the fear of public humiliation was motivating me to do what should have been done long ago.

When the day of the tours arrived, the garden had regained a pleasing order, and a surprising number of wildflowers were still in bloom.

The twelve foot high Jerusalem artichokes--a native sunflower with showy flowers on top and tasty tubers underground--made good conversation pieces.

When not talking about the berms and miniponds that redirect or capture runoff to spare the house and feed the flowers, I sang the praises of stonecrop (Sedum spectabile), a nonnative whose flowerheads slowly transition from green to pink to burgundy to chocolate.

New England aster and panicled aster spoke for themselves,

while bumblebees crawled into the tubular turtlehead flowers to feed, or maybe take an early fall nap.

In late September, seedheads of ironweed, swamp mallow Hibiscus, and Joe-Pye-Weed can be nearly as ornamental as flowers.

The biggest hit, though, was the patch of pawpaws--a native fruit tree. Though in the same plant family--the Annonaceae--as tropical fruits like chirimoya and guanabana, the pawpaw is native to North America. Its custardy insides taste like a mix of mango and banana. 

What was not to be seen was as important as what could be seen. Through vigilance and early intervention, the yard has been spared the uber-weeds that plague many other yards--weeds like stiltgrass, lesser celandine, and mugwort. I've been less successful quelling creeping charlie, also known as ground ivy. 

And though there's been some toil over the years, there's been no pricetag, excepting a purchased shrub here and there. Many plants arrived in the form of seed collected from wild populations along the canal. Nature is generous, as are other gardeners one meets along the way, which was how I ended up with pawpaws.

Thanks to the organizers of the event and volunteers Mitch Jans and Per Kreipke, who helped sign people in throughout the afternoon. 

Fall Equinox Folk Festival at Herrontown Woods This Weekend

The Friends of Herrontown Woods is hosting a festival this weekend, on Sunday, Sept 21, from 3-5pm. The Chivalrous Crickets are returning, featuring the beautiful voices of sisters Fiona and Genevieve.

In addition to singing Celtic and other folk styles, they will also be leading some dancing. There will also be crafts, art, games, May's Cafe, and a raffle of an Einstein begonia. Tickets available at the link.

Check out a video of the Crickets:

Late-Summer Joys Large and Small at the Barden

The Barden is the nickname for Princeton's Botanical ARt garDEN: 160+ native plant species informally gathered along whimsical pathways next to the main parking lot at Herrontown Woods, 600 Snowden Ave. By combining the signage with a cellphone app like Seek, you can use the Barden for one-stop learning of local flora. 

One of my annual joys at the Barden is getting to show kids and adults the exploding seeds of jewelweed, which has lately been producing beautiful tubular orange flowers that segue into pods with spring-loaded seeds. Find a swollen pod, pluck it gently from the plant, put it in the palm of a kid's hand and let them touch it lightly with a finger of the other hand. Kabloosh! The seeds go flying. It is really hard not to feel surprise and delight, no matter how many times you've witnessed this.  

An unexpected opportunity to share this experience came this past Sunday morning. We showed up to host our monthly pop up May's Cafe at 9am only to find the parking lot already full. Turned out that Cub Scout Pack 98 had driven down from Kendall Park for a two mile hike in the woods. 

When they returned from the trails, I showed them the exploding seeds, 

and also introduced them to the charismatic green frog that calls a little round minipond home, near the kiosk. Though the natural vernal pools have dried up in the late summer's long drought, we have a number of frogs participating in our Barden frog-in-residence program, which consists of a few plastic lined miniponds. 

Other joys are of the botanical variety, and probably wouldn't have held the scouts' attention like the frogs, but here they are in photo form. 

Two or three years ago, friend Stan gave me some little plants he had grown from seed. Among them was showy goldenrod--a kind of goldenrod I remember from Michigan as a beautiful accent in prairies, but had not seen in NJ. It makes long spires of yellow and, most endearingly, doesn't spread aggressively underground like some of the other goldenrods. This is the first year it has bloomed in the Barden.

When late summer meets early autumn, black gum leads the way with its brilliant red leaves.

This staghorn sumac looks a bit like a painted vulture drying its outstretched wings.

Woolgrass is not a grass, so let's call it woolsedge, Scirpus cyperinus. Admire its elegant seedhead, and feel its triangular stem that, like papyrus, prompts us to proclaim "sedges have edges." 

Very thoughtful of Autumn Helenium to wait until now to bloom. 

It's been a great year for ironweed, the relatively cool weather having extended its bloom.

I think of evening primrose as blooming through the summer, but didn't notice it until now, for some reason.

Our native euonymus, Strawberry bush, is developing its fruit, which will burst open later, revealing bright orange berries.

Late-flowering thoroughwort can look elegant or weedy. This year, perhaps due to the cooler weather, it has looked elegant, attracting many pollinators and exuding a wonderful honey-like fragrance.

Pokeweed, too, combines elements of elegance and weediness. The pendulant berries and bright red stems are attractive, but the leaves are a decadent jumble.

An unexpected delight this year was a plant that decided to grow near the gazebo. 

The name, rattlesnake root, Nabalus altissimus, doesn't capture the beauty of the pendulant flowers, each opening in turn, attracting a crowd of green/gold bees. 

Thanks to my entomologist friend David Cappaert, who quickly offered a name and a detailed closeup of the little bees--"one of the 'green halictids,' a set of several genera with green-gold coloration. They can be hyper-abundant at this time of year. Image here is of one in hibernation – you can find these under logs in the winter."

The show of asters has begun with woodland aster. Summer is not done yet!

You can visit the award-winning Barden any time, by driving down the lane across Snowden Lane from the Smoyer Park entrance. Say hello to the frogs, play a game of chess, or bring a lunch to eat in the gazebo. The address is 600 Snowden Lane, and we generally host a May's Cafe from 9-11 on first Sunday's of the month. Check HerrontownWoods.org for details.

Stop Stiltgrass From Taking Over Your Yard

August is the month to try to keep the uber-invasive Japanese stiltgrass from taking over your yard. People familiar with the plant may shake their heads at such a goal, but there are still many yards that are free of its plague-like qualities, whether through luck or a combination of early intervention, vigilance, and persistence.

Have you seen it? There's usually a white line running down the middle of each leaf. It looks harmless, even graceful, but stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum for long) spreads so aggressively that it can blanket whole forests, or line roadsides for miles. Once you learn to identify it, you may start seeing it everywhere.

Michigan had until recently been spared, but here's my Ann Arbor friend Sam's backyard last year. Another friend, Victorino, who grew up in Guatamala, called it "communista." I had to laugh, if grimly, because replacing diversity and individuality with monocultural conformity and oppression is what stiltgrass does all too well.  It's a warm-season annual grass, meaning that it sprouts from seed late in the spring and matures through the summer. By late August it can grow up and over everything else, then sets zillions of seeds in September.

Because stiltgrass is an annual, the way to fight is to prevent it from successfully producing seed. 

Here's Sam's backyard after he weed-whacked the stiltgrass in July. A lot of work, but maybe effective, because I saw surprisingly little regrowth through all the resultant mulch.

Weedwhacking can also be done in mid to late August, just before the flowers form, to reduce even further the chance of resprouts that could produce seed. Do this year after year, and eventually the soil will run out of seed to sprout.

But by far the best way to keep stiltgrass from taking over is to catch it early. Even though it has blanketed many areas of Princeton, there are still substantial areas that can be saved from its smothering growth by strategic, annual action. This super plant has a big weakness: it has super weak roots, and pulls super easy.

Look closely at this photo. Do you see the stiltgrass mixed in with the other foliage? Pull those few plants, and there will be no stiltgrass to produce seed. Stiltgrass spreads into new areas of nature preserves primarily along trails, so some scouting and strategic pulling in August is an excellent way to protect large portions of preserves from incursion.

Otherwise, the trail can end up looking like in this photo.

It can even grow in a miniature form in mowed lawn.

For homeowners, where there are just too many to pull, another approach is to spot spray with a super dilute formula of systemic herbicide. You can see at the bottom of the photo how tiny the roots are compared to the plant. That's where the herbicide does its work. The Penn State Extension website offers some means of control.

Whatever combination of methods you use, it's best to start early in August. Make one pass through an area, then check back in a week or two to get any that were missed the first time through.

Though many people are intimidated by the thought of distinguishing one grass from another, it's possible to get quite good at it over time. Below are some plants that can be mistaken for stiltgrass.

Carpgrass is another nonnative annual grass, shorter, with wavy leaves, and less common than stiltgrass but similarly invasive. 

Virginia whitegrass (Leersia virginica) is a native with narrower, longer leaves. It flowers earlier and lacks the white stripe down the leaf. As with most native plants, this species "plays well with others," growing here and there without dominating.

I'm calling this one Heller's Rosettegrass, Dichanthelium oligosanthes. It's sometimes recommended for native lawns, but shows up in woods around Princeton.

Various other native Dichantheliums make life interesting. These native grasses tend to be perennials, and so better rooted and more resistant when you accidentally pull at one.

Various smartweeds can also look somewhat like stiltgrass. Smartweeds can be rambunctious, whether native or nonnative. 

Though I've despaired at the sight of stiltgrass rising in late summer like an indomitable sea in some areas, I've also been surprised and gratified to find many areas that remain free of it, and could continue to be if people act strategically year after year. 

Related posts:

Stiltgrass Reaches Michigan

Last Chance to Pull Stiltgrass -- 2023

A Video Tour of the Veblen Circle of Native Wildflowers

Here's a video tour of the circle of wildflowers we planted in honor of Oswald and Elizabeth Veblen, whose generosity and love of nature led to Princeton's first nature preserve, Herrontown Woods.

Most woods are largely silent, flower-wise, in late summer, but in the woodland opening of the Barden, where scattered trees allow sunlight to reach the ground, sun-loving native wildflowers of summer can prosper. The video was shot during a pop-up May's Cafe hosted by the Friends of Herrontown Woods.

The Barden is home to more than 150 species of native trees, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers 

The PHS Ecolab Wetland Begins its Third Life

They say that cats have nine lives. How many lives can a wetland have? The Princeton High School Ecolab Wetland is now beginning its third. Lush and verdant in June, it was stripped bare of vegetation for the second time in its 17 year history at the beginning of July. The first time this radical change happened, in the fall of 2022, took me and environmental teaching staff completely by surprise. This time, the lines of communication were open, and the reasoning fully understood.

On June 12th, the wetland--a brick-lined detention basin squeezed between the science and performing arts wings of the school on Walnut Street--looked like this. The elderberries were abloomin' along the edges of lush sweeps of sedges, rushes, and wildflowers that thrive in full sun and ground magically kept moist by sump pump water.

There were also cattails, lots of cattails--narrowleaf and broadleaf. Cattails, with their vertical hotdog-shaped stalks raised high, are the iconic wetland plant. But when I see cattails in a wetland that I'm taking care of, my reaction is "oh, oh." You may see cattails being overwhelmed by the tall invasive reed Phragmitis in the ditches along freeways, but in a sunny wetland like the high school Ecolab, cattails themselves can play the bully, spreading aggressively with the thick rhizomes they send out in all directions.

Thus, when I stopped by the Ecolab less than a month later, on July 7, and saw all that lush, beautiful native vegetation stripped bare, I grieved the loss, but I also saw a potential silver lining.

The reason for the transformation was the need to replace two of the basin's walls. The blocks originally used to make the wall had become corroded by salt used to de-ice the adjacent walkways in winter. Replacing the blocks required complete demolition and rebuilding. The large tubes in the photo conveyed the frequent discharges of sump pump water away from the work area. 

During the repair phase, I was in ongoing communication with the contractor, Patrick, and environmental science teacher Jim Smirk. I wanted to make sure that the hydraulic conditions so favorable to diverse wetland plant growth--the combination of some higher ground with a series of three pools to transport the sump pump water slowly towards the drain--would be restored. Though I was out of town on a band tour in Michigan, Patrick was very accommodating and even sent a photo to make sure he had reformed the ground the way we wanted.

It may look like a moonscape, but already some of the old vegetation is beginning to reemerge from whatever roots are still intact. We may need to do some replanting, but after 17 years, the soil should be packed with native seed ready to sprout over the coming year.

Now is a critical time for the Ecolab's future. That first stripping of vegetation in fall 2022 had been prompted by willow trees that had grown too big for the site. As vegetation rebounded, I assiduously removed the sprouts of willows and any other trees with the potential to grow too large. This time, it's the cattails that pose a danger.

What plant species are going to feed off of all that wonderful sun and cool sump pump water from the high school's basement? If we let the cattails reestablish, the Ecolab will eventually become stuffed with cattails and little else. If instead we remove all sprouting cattails and encourage native species that are less aggressive, then it will be much easier to sustain biodiversity over time. As with the growth and development of people, intervention early on in a wetland's rebirth can determine longterm fate. 

Related posts:

A Wet Meadow is Born -- We used a similar strategy of early and ongoing intervention when a detention basin was replanted with native species in Princeton's Smoyer Park 9 years ago. That wet meadow is now thriving, with very few weeds and lots of native diversity.

The Work Behind a Natural-looking Meadow--a more recent post about the Smoyer Park wet meadow.

Summer Roadside Weeds in the Midwest

Many roadside weeds common in the midwest have yet to make it in any numbers to eastern locales like Princeton, NJ. Unless differences in climate or soil are limiting these nonnative weeds' rampancy in the east, a trip to the midwest can feel like prelude for what eastern roadsides could look like decades from now. Even if they can't compete with tough customers in NJ like the nonnative mugwort and Japanese knotweed, their behavior along midwestern roadsides shows what those first few popping up in Princeton could turn into over time. 

Here's a display of roadside weeds collected on the hood of my rental car at a rest stop. This was in Ohio, though the same roadside weeds are found in Wisconsin, Michigan, and likely other midwestern states as well. The row of blue flowers on the left are chicory. The delicate white disk of Queen Anne's lace--the wild version of the carrots we eat--is in the upper right. Yellow sweet clover--there's also a white version--is in the lower right, and the pink flower in the middle is spotted knapweed.

All of these, which seem so modest when they first show up, can ultimately form dense stands along roadsides in the midwest, as can other non-natives like the tall, dramatically shaped teasel, 

and the Canada thistle whose tops become thick with fluffy seeds this time of year (see photo). 

Less common are the tall yellow spires of wooly mullein, which in most patches appear less exclusionary in their growth habit.

One super-invasive found along roadsides in both the east and the midwest is Phragmitis--the towering "common reed" with large plumes on top that forms dense stands in ditches, displacing the native cattails. Driving on I-94 around Ann Arbor, MI, I noticed dead stands of Phragmitis--evidence they have been sprayed to save the patches of cattails the Phrag was invading. That's the first evidence I've ever seen of selective use of herbicide for restorative purposes along a freeway. 

Another nonnative I keep an eye out for, both in Princeton and the midwest, is birdsfoot trefoil. Mostly it appears as small patches of yellow in a lawn or along a roadside, but I found one instance in Ohio that shows its potential to spread and dominate, coating a large area, much like crown vetch has done where it was extensively planted for erosion control along freeways in Pennsylvania. 

What grows along roadsides can spread to grasslands being actively managed for native species. We were pulling spotted knapweed out of prairies in Ann Arbor in the 1980s. I once witnessed birdsfoot trefoil being assiduously pulled before it could spread across a prairie packed with native diversity at Kishwauketoe--a nature preserve in my home town in Wisconsin. The botanist there knew that a little can quickly turn into a lot, so better to catch those weeds early. 

The vast majority of drivers are oblivious to these roadside dramas, where a pretty flower can become too much of a good thing. For me, a drive through Ohio provides useful guidance for deciding what to weed out of a meadow in Princeton. 

Related post: Stiltgrass Reaches Michigan -- While midwestern weeds are moving east, eastern uber-invasives like lesser celandine and stiltgrass are just starting to pop up in Michigan.