Princeton Battlefield Landscape Returning to the 18th Century

For many years, I've been encouraging the Princeton Battlefield to extend its ethic of historical authenticity to its landscape. Not that my personal view held any sway, but with the arrival of the 250th, plans are now in place for that to happen.

For me, it began with a simple botanical observation. Why is the beautifully restored 18th century Clark House surrounded by a sprawling 20th century lawn and woodland edges choked by invasive Asian vines?

Annual volunteer days took on the bamboo and porcelainberry, but they tended to grow back. One small success was my skirmish with Mile-a-Minute vine, which was threatening to take hold along the borders.

Though a sprawling lawn worked great for flying kites, mowing such an expanse through many decades must have been quite a chore.

While George Washington's troops were victorious in 1777, the uber-invasive, nonnative porcelainberry mobbing the edges is clearly the current winner.

But change is now afoot. Centennials can stir people to action. For the Bicentennial in 1976, the Dogwood Garden Club planted dogwoods and daffodils, many of which ultimately were swallowed by the porcelainberry vines. 

The approach for the 250th is less ornamental, and geared instead towards giving visitors a real sense of the landscape as it existed during the battle. That means recreating 18th century roads and fencelines, removing some trees that block vistas, planting an orchard, and hopefully shifting towards a more authentic flora. I'm hoping they save the hican tree and the 15/16th American chestnut we planted, but at least their existence will live on in this blog. 

You can already see change in the reduced mowing.

Coming up in August will be a bioblitz, beginning 12-2 on Saturday, August 1, and continuing through the month. This means downloading the iNaturalist app to your phone, taking photos of plants you encounter at the Battlefield, and uploading them to iNaturalist. Then, over time, as 50 acres of mowed lawn will be reportedly restored to native meadow, we can track the botanical transformation. 

I feel good about having documented the Battlefield's botanical life up to now, and look forward to witnessing the exciting transformations ahead.

Barden Native Plant Tour -- 11am on Sunday, Aug 2

Along with coffee, tea, and baked treats, this month's May's Cafe includes an 11am guided tour of the Barden, now in full mid-summer bloom at Herrontown Woods. Short for Botanical Art Garden, the Barden is an award-winning destination mixing art, whimsy, frog ponds, and native plant diversity. The tour is free and open to all.

This year's upgrades include a freshly painted gazebo and shed, a new cafe hut, and attractive planters. 

The Barden hosts 160 species of native plants thriving in a forest opening. 

In 2023, the Friends of Herrontown Woods won a Land Ethics Award for Best Community Effort from Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve.

Learn more about the Barden and its history at this link. May's Cafe's typically runs from 9:30 to 11:30 on the first Sunday of each month, at 600 Snowden Lane in Princeton, NJ. 

Quiet Landscaping in Yards and Preserves

This post spent a long time in the draft folder, and surfaces now only due to an email from QuietPrinceton, an organization that successfully lobbied for a partial ban on raucous gas-powered leafblowers. They are currently seeking a year-round ban, and in the meantime offer a list of "quiet landscapers" who use electric or hand tools rather than gas-powered.

Quiet is an elusive quality in a busy town. As light pollution cheats us of the stars, sound pollution cheats us of silence. It's all unintended, of course. No one's intentionally pointing lights at the night sky, or making noise just to bother people. Like so many things that profoundly affect our lives, noise is a byproduct--part of the collateral damage of everyday life. There's traffic noise on the streets that we expend unconscious energy to block from awareness, but the racket of mowers and leaf blowers in people's yards is impossible to ignore. A gas-powered leaf blower instantly obliterates whatever peace and quiet was to be had in the neighborhood. 

That noise grows out of an attitude of suppression rather than nurturance. People are cared for by trained medical staff. Our kids are taught by knowledgeable teachers. But the landscapes around us are largely owned and tended by people who know little about nature. Nature is complex. To get to know it requires a long learning curve. Homeowners are busy, may find nature intimidating, even a little scary, and so are much relieved when a landscape crew will come each week and noisily reduce an oversized suburban yard to turf and a few trees and rounded shrubs. After the noise subsides and the dust settles, the simplicity and neatness is calming. But surely there is some alternative to this anti-nature approach to landscaping. After all, a walk in the woods, which is hardly neat and tidy, with trees dropping leaves and twigs wherever, is also said to be calming. 

Unlike most homeowners, my sister Kathy in Cleveland has always taken great interest in her yard. She has cared for her vegetables and her flower beds, and her husband mowed the minimal patch of grass. When she recently decided it was time to get some help with her beautiful garden, the challenge was finding a landscape crew knowledgeable enough to tend complex plantings.                                 

She found one, and they happened to stop by while I was visiting.

The sort of work needed to tend a garden with almost no lawn--planting, weeding, deadheading--is refreshingly quiet. 

The body language of nurturance is strikingly different from those "mow, blow, and go" brigades stalking a yard with their noisy weaponry of suppression. This crew is trained to navigate the sometimes subtle difference between a weed and an intended plant.

Back in Princeton, where the nonprofit I lead tends to 150 acres of Princeton open space at Herrontown Woods, and another 80 at Autumn Hill, we find quiet tools so much more satisfying to use. Loppers, mostly, with a battery-powered weedwhacker, chainsaw, or hedgetrimmer occasionally coming out of the shed. In a world where one conflict begets another, it is calming to quietly tend to nature, each day an opportunity to collaborate, and to better understand and value nature's complexity.

Here are notes from some shop talk with the crew leader in Cleveland: He uses Tordon for stump treatments, and Finalsan--a low-toxicity spray for weeds.

July Nature Sightings in Herrontown Woods

Here are some images lingering in my mind and camera from days spent in the field in Herrontown Woods in July.

When the sun briefly shines through the canopy, illuminating life beneath the water's surface, you can look closely and see that one of these tadpoles is turning into a frog. Recent rains have kept the little vernal pool along the red trail well watered. 

Here's a very tall victory for habitat restoration. Towering over our land steward Ninfa is a Tall Meadowrue, living up and up to its name, topped by a cloud of subtle white flowers. This part of the preserve previously was dominated by a massive three acre clone of tree-tackling wisteria that we have been steadily subduing. 

The miniature flowers attract miniature bees--an oasis of tininess in our big big world.

Always a surprise to happen upon a box turtle hidden in the grass. Can anyone decode those hieroglyphics on its back.

The delight of happening upon a box turtle would not have been had if I hadn't been out there clipping off the hundreds of wisteria sprouts that still rise from the clone's massive root structure. Consistent cutting and treating of these shoots, which once climbed seventy feet into the canopy, will ultimately exhaust the wisteria's  sprawling root system. 

In the Barden, the bottlebrush buckeye flowers have been attracting a sphinx moth that looks and flies like a miniature hummingbird. It shifts from one flower to the next, probing for nectar with extraordinary precision.

Butterfly numbers have been down, but there was the pleasure of counting seven on a large buttonbush shrub in a raingarden uphill of Veblen House. By corralling runoff before it reaches the house, the raingarden feeds pollinator plants while keeping the basement dry.

If you have a garden, you may have some weed grasses that look like these: giant foxtail and barnyard grass. Pull them out before their seeds mature.

Some weeks ago, a mysterious "crack!" was heard near the Veblen garage. A minute later, another crack, then another. What was going on? Where was the sound coming from? Then a big red oak began to tilt slightly, then some more, until "SNAP!", the trunk broke off some six feet up from the ground, and the tree crashed down into the circular stone horse run. Why would a healthy looking, 100 foot tall tree topple over on a windless day? 

These curious bits of sawdust, noticed a few days later, surely provide a clue. Could Ambrosia beetles do this to a tree?

Less unexpected are the puffballs that rise in front of Veblen House this time of year.

Root-Sprouting Ailanthus and Disappearing Spotted Lanternflies

Up at the corner of Harrison Street and Franklin Ave, a large Ailanthus tree was cut down last year. Ailanthus altissima, or tree of heaven, is a nonnative tree, sometimes loved, sometimes reviled. It was one of several trees removed at the corner, to make room for new ones. Because this particular tree was not treated with systemic herbicide to kill the roots as part of the removal, the roots live on, and on, and on.

Here are sprouts soon after the tree was cut,

along with hundreds of others in the yard, nicely delineating the 60 foot reach of the roots, far beyond the dripline.

One year later, with new trees in place, the hundreds of Ailanthus root sprouts are as robust as ever. Hard to say whether the dieback in the newly planted redbud is due to toxins released by the Ailanthus roots (see comment section).

The lawn of this rental unit is occasionally cut, so in theory the Ailanthus root sprouts will get weaker year to year, but the delayed mowing is allowing the roots to gather sustaining energy.

Last year there were still enough of the invasive Spotted Lanternflies around to show up on the sprouts, but this year, none. (I've seen a total of one lanternfly thus far this year.) Since the lanternflies thrived on Ailanthus, they provided an additional excuse to remove these nonnative trees. This particular tree, however, is having a long afterlife.

RELATED POSTS:

Where have all the spotted lanternflies gone?

Spotted Lanternflies in the Barden