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 …
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.
There are places in nature that feel special in some way, places we find ourselves returning to. One special place for me is a bluff in the lower valley of Ellerbe Creek--a stream in Durham, NC for which I founded a watershed association a quarter century ago.
During a recent visit, I took a walk with naturalist Cynthie Kulstad in one of the preserves we created back then, 80 acres called Glennstone Preserve. Cynthie is the botanist/horticulturist who helped sustain many of the plantings I had nurtured in parks and nature preserves while living there. The trails and our inclinations led us down to this special spot, on adjoining Army Corps of Engineers land.
Crowned by a massive white oak, the bluff is a collection of diabase boulders and uncommon plants overlooking the creek.
One of those uncommon plants that makes this spot distinctive is resurrection fern (Pleopeltis polypodioides), all curled up and dried out on one of the boulders. Resurrection fern is an epiphyte, meaning it builds itself largely out of water and air, pluse whatever few nutrients collect on the rock it clings to from fallen leaves. Unlike most plants, this fern's leaves can dry out during droughts, then rapidly rehydrate after rains.
The only other place I've seen resurrection fern in Durham is on a similar but much larger bluff, where the Eno River just to the north encounters a mass of diabase rock and takes a sharp turn to the right, called Penny's Bend. I sense a kinship between these two bluffs, botanically and geologically. They could be called Big Bluff and Little Bluff, reflecting the respective size of the watersheds they are in.
(Up here in Princeton, NJ, with the same piedmont geology as Durham, a similar relationship can be seen between the big "Roaring Rocks" boulder field in the Sourlands and the boulder field in Princeton's Herrontown Woods, where the boulders are smaller and the water tends to chuckle and murmur rather than roar. These geologic features, too, are composed of diabase rock that resisted erosion through 200 million years.)
Looking up, I spotted another unusual native plant, eastern mistletoe (Phoradendron leucarpum), growing high on a tree branch. This one's a hemiparasite, meaning it extracts some sustenance from the tree but also has green leaves to make some of its own energy.
Other trees nearby also had dense balls of vegetation high up in the branches, but they weren't mistletoe. Those are witch's broom--a dense cluster of twiggy growth that is the tree's response to a pathogen or other irritant. Cynthie pointed out they are common on hop-hornbeam, a tree I hadn't seen in a long time and had been wanting to run into.
Turned out we were in the midst of a grove of eastern hop-hornbeam (Ostrya virginiana), growing along the edge of the bluff. (Upon returning to Princeton, I found some of these with their distinctive bark growing in Autumn Hill Reservation.)
Another tree nearby, judging from the leaves on the ground, was swamp chestnut oak (Quercus michauii). Paul Manos of Duke University calls these "sun leaves," meaning they are leaves that had been growing higher in the canopy and thus received a bigger dose of sunlight. They're smaller, thicker, and with sharper lobing than the more shaded leaves below.
I found more online about sun leaves and shade leaves, in a post by Gabriel Hemery:
"If there is some sunlight however, even a little diffuse light (see below), then a tree makes the most of it by producing shade leaves lower down in its canopy. Shade leaves are larger and thinner than normal sun leaves, and often appear a darker green (they contain more chlorophyll). They also have half as many stomata than sun leaves, or even fewer, and so have a lower respiration rate. They can react quickly to brief bursts of sunlight and dappled shade.
Shade leaves can turn into sun leaves and visa versa; providing that the change is gradual. This is something that a gardener moving a plant outside that has been grown indoors or in the greenhouse, must be aware of. When a plant is taken outdoors, place it first under shade and gradually over several days increase its exposure to bright sunlight."
It would be interesting to know if pine needles, like those high up on this shortleaf pine, also vary according to how much sun they receive.
During my eight years in Durham, plus many return visits over the years, I've found many special places along Ellerbe Creek. They could be as simple as a native azalea leaning out over the creek, or as complex and improbable as a roadside embankment packed with more than 100 native species of piedmont prairie. A few have been tragically destroyed, but it's heartening to return to those that persist, their charms sustained, their uniqueness unshattered by a rapidly changing world. These pockets of stability give my soul something to lean on.
Here's a story and a partially forgotten concept from ten years ago that a commenter on this blog helped me reconnect with. The concept has to do with actively training deer to eat invasive plants. Thanks to Mark Nowotarski of Stamford, CT for reminding me of this concept, and adding his own interesting twist.
Deer manage our landscapes with their appetites. Whether it's your unfenced yard or the local nature preserve, deer largely decide what can grow and what gets eaten down. Introduced plant species can become invasive if they are left uneaten by finicky deer, thus allowing them to proliferate rapidly and overwhelm native flora. Wouldn't it be great if we could train deer to eat invasive species, and thus restore balance to the landscape?
Ten years ago, I wrote about two ways to potentially train deer to eat invasive species. One is to cut down invasive shrubs along the deer paths and let the stumps resprout, thus presenting the deer with tender new shoots to nibble on. As the deer (hopefully) grow accustomed to the taste and texture of the invasive's new growth, perhaps they would begin eating older foliage as well.
It's also possible that the deer respond to visual cues. If we repeatedly cut back an invasive shrub, deer may assume other deer have been eating it, and chow down. Deer have reason to revisit a shrub again and again. By eating its foliage, they stimulate the shrub to replace the lost leaves with new ones, much as we do with basil and other vegetables in our gardens. Making their accustomed rounds, deer essentially farm the forest for fresh foliage.
Though we experimented with this at Herrontown Woods mostly with winged euonymus, Mark reports some success with recruiting deer to browse a patch of Japanese knotweed in his backyard:
"I've seen a similar phenomenon where I live in Stamford CT. We have a little bit of woods in the back yard where deer tend to congregate. There is a dense stand of Japanese knotweed down by a small stream. A few years ago, I started foraging the tips of the knotweed in the spring and noticed that the deer continued to browse the knotweed through the summer. Every time the knotweed would send out new shoots, the deer would browse the tips. At first they just browsed where I foraged, but in the past few years now they have expanded the browsed area and are actually beating back the knotweed. If you see any knotweed browsing in your area, I'd love to hear about it."
He sent photos and more text to illustrate:
"About 4 years ago, I noticed that the deer on our property had started browsing the spring shoots of a stand of Japanese knotweed. The knotweed grows down by a swampy stream and has been there for at least 30 years. Each year the deer have browsed the stand more intensely."
"When the knotweed throws out side shoots after the initial browsing, the deer browse the tips of the side shoots. When the side shoots throw out secondary side shoots, the deer browse the tips of those as well. This continues through the summer."
"The knotweed in the browsed area is kept to about 3 feet tall and is very sparse. Abundant sunlight falls on the forest floor and there has been a substantial increase in the plant biodiversity of the browsed areas."
"This includes the sprouting of native plants, such as Sassafras albidum (Sassafras) and Impatiens capensis (Jewel weed). I found the I. capensis particularly surprising since this is normally heavily browsed by the deer."
"The deer only browse a portion of the knotweed stand. If a knotweed shoot reaches full size, it’s not browsed. Nonetheless, each year the deer have been browsing a larger and larger area. They originally browsed just an outside edge of the stand where I used to forage knotweed shoots in the spring, but last year they started hollowing out the center of the stand."
"Based on your experience with winged Euonymus, this leads me to suspect that it might have been my initial foraging that led the deer to continue the browsing. It would be interesting to forage some unbrowsed knotweed in the spring and see if the local deer continue."
Thanks again to Mark Nowotarski for these photos and descriptive text of the interesting dynamic between deer and the patch of invasive Japanese knotweed in his backyard. In our experiment ten years ago with winged euonymus, we found that invasive shrubs ultimately grew back, likely due to our having cut so many that their myriad young shoots overwhelmed the deer's mild interest in their foliage. We also didn't think to try focusing our cutting close to deer paths.
Anyone managing a sizable nature preserve will soon grow weary of cutting invasive shrubs only to have them grow back. Treating a freshly cut stem with a thin film of systemic herbicide, using a Buckthorn Blaster, is a targeted, minimalist way of actually making progress in a woodland choked with invasive species.
But especially for the vast majority of woodlands that go unmanaged, the concept of training deer to eat invasive species has appeal. I'm looking forward to harvesting some young shoots of Japanese knotweed this spring, as an experiment. Having trained the deer in his backyard to eat this highly invasive plant, Mark may train me to eat it as well. Testimonials like this one suggest the young shoots are quite tasty. Research the how, what, where and when before giving it a try. Mark recommends sauteing with butter.
Update 1.30.25: Just came across another of my posts from ten years back, entitled Paradox Lost, or, Less Irony in the Woodland Diet, offering a third way to get deer to eat invasive plants. If there are mint-flavored sprays that discourage deer from eating ornamental plantings, maybe there's a flavor of spray that would encourage them to eat invasive plants.
Most people attentive to nature are aware that Princeton has lost nearly all of its native ash trees over the past decade, and is now poised to lose its native beech trees as well. These are only the most recent losses due to assorted introduced insects, nematodes, and diseases against which our native trees had not evolved resistance. Also gone from the canopy over the past century are American chestnuts and American elms, with bacterial leaf scorch also taking a toll on red and pin oaks. As additional organisms enter the country due to an appalling lack of biosecurity, other species are threatened.
What is there to do other than mourn, and mourn again, with each new wave of devastation?
One answer to that question may be: Keep an eye out for "lingering" trees. It would be easy to assume that all our native ash, not having co-evolved with the Emerald ash borer (EAB), would be equally defenseless as the introduced larvae eat through the cambrium, cutting off the tree's circulatory system. But an initiative in Ohio has shown this not to be entirely true. Jennifer Koch, a research biologist with the USDA Forest Service, has been leading an effort to find "lingering ash", that is, mature ash that survive while others all around them succumb. Some ash that she and others have found have natural defenses that kill 20-45% of the larvae that bore into them. A very few trees kill 100% of the invading larvae.
A very watchable video features Jennifer Koch, and also Holden Arboretum's Rachel Kappler, telling the story of ash lost, lingering ash found, and the effort to increase resistance among lingering ash through research and breeding programs.
One particularly impressive slide in the presentation showed how the resistant trees are able to stop the invading larvae before they do damage to the tree.
Here are some of my notes from the video:
Ash wood is/was used for bats and guitars
Native ash species in our area: White, green, black, pumpkin
300 million acres of black ash-dominated forest in Minnesota could be lost (apparently no other tree species can survive in those wet areas)
green ash is an important riparian buffer species in the plains states, hard to replace
The lingering ash are found individually or in clusters, e.g Swan Creek, Oak Openings Park, near Toledo, 108 out of 11,000 had healthy canopies. Two specimens had no evidence of attack. Most resistance is partial, but resistance can be increased through breeding
greenhouse tests can reduce the amount of land/labor needed for field tests
resistance is inherited, though uneven
A central point these researchers make is how very limited is the area they have surveyed for lingering ash--only a small area near the Ohio/Michigan border. They call for similar initiatives in other parts of the country.
That's where we come in, as keen or at least intermittently keen observers of the landscape through which we walk. It's important that any tree we believe to be lingering be a mature, wild tree--not a cultivar in a planted landscape--and that it be a tree that has weathered the massive wave of EAB over the past ten years, remaining green while others nearby have succumbed. Photos of lingering ash, and one story of their discovery, can be found at this link.
A brief mention of the various species of ash: I associate white ash with higher ground and grander specimens found or once found around town. Green ash are less statuesque and more associated with wetter ground. Black ash I think of as growing, or having grown, in swamps, such as at Rogers Refuge in Princeton. The Ohio initiative is apparently finding most success with resistant green ash, though the video mentions lingering white, green, and black ash having been found in NY state.
In addition to the info below, there's also anecdata.org--a platform where citizen scientists can set up reporting initiatives.
This keeping an eye out for "lingering" ash can also be applied to other imperiled species in our area. The Ohio researchers request that people report lingering American beech, hemlock, and American elm as well.
