Butternut Redux--A New Generation Bears its First Crop

This has been a breakthrough year for those of us working to bring back the native butternut--a species laid low by an introduced canker disease.. 

Twelve years after I helped Bill Sachs collect one of the last known harvests of native butternuts in Princeton, the new generation has finally born a crop of its own. Butternuts, also called white walnuts, or Juglans cinerea, bear nuts similar in look to black walnuts, but are oval rather than round. 

Bill continued to harvest and plant butternuts from the TRI property for a couple more years, but that pair of trees was then lost, with one blown down and the other cut down, ironically as part of an environmental remediation of contaminated soil. Most of the other known specimens, solitary so unable to bear, at Herrontown Woods and Mountain Lakes, have since been lost as well, lending all the more importance to this new generation of trees, grown by Bill and planted around town. 

We planted multiple trees, for cross pollination purposes, at Mountain Lakes, Herrontown Woods, Harrison Street Park, and at the TRI property where the seeds had originally come from. 

The saplings needed to be caged, to protect them from the deer. I made the mistake of removing a cage when a tree was tall enough that the deer could no longer reach the leaves. Bucks proceeded to rub the bark off the trunk, reducing a promising tree to root sprouts. A post from a couple years ago tells of some of the persistence required to nurse a new generation towards maturity. Along with deer, the young butternuts have been in danger of being smothered by fast-growing Japanese honeysuckle and grape vines, and trees like sweetgums and mulberries that rise quickly to fill the sunny openings the young butternuts need to grow.  Gardening, even wild gardening with native species, teaches the necessity of followup. 

This year, the butternuts had to deal not only with the 17 year cicadas' heavy pruning, but also the expanding presence of spotted lanternflies. 

Adding to the young trees' burden were some galls, which Bill said were most likely caused by walnut leaf gall mites

But despite all of that, the long awaited flowering of this new generation was spotted in July, and a few nuts collected in fall that appear to be viable, offering hope of yet another generation to come.

This fall's harvest is mostly being planted to grow more trees. Bill plants the butternut seed "in tall pots to be kept outdoors for the winter. This has worked well in the past."

Here are some additional tidbits gleaned from correspondence with Bill. The "float test" is used to determine whether a nut is viable. If it floats in water, it lacks a viable seed inside.

Dehusking walnuts and butternuts:

"I don’t really know if it’s absolutely necessary to dehusk walnuts or butternuts before a float test, though I think it is prudent. If you have a lot of nuts the best way to dehusk them is to use an old cement mixer with rocks and water… since I don’t have an old cement mixer, I use a piece of ½ inch plywood about 18 in by 6 in. I put a butternut or walnut in the driveway or street, put the plywood on top and use my foot with pressure to roll the nut under the plywood. (Use gloves to handle the nuts if you don’t want to stain your hands.) The husk comes off pretty easily. Then I put the largely dehusked nuts in a bucket of water and use a still wire brush to complete the cleaning."

Identifying butternuts: "Butternut bark is characteristically a lighter gray with broader ridges than black walnut (but not always). Easier to tell for sure from a twig with a terminal and a few lateral buds. If you slit the twig, butternut will have a dark chocolate-colored, chambered pith, and the leaf scars typically have a hairy fringe (or mustache) along the upper margin. When the leaves are still on the tree the leaf rachis will be tomentose or pubescent (hairy). Not sure if this carries over to fallen leaves on the ground in the winter. Finally, butternut trees often have poor form. In contrast, black walnut has a buff-pink chambered pith, no hairy fringes along the top edge of the leaf scars and the rachis is smooth (among other differences)."

Some additional reading recommended: 

On butternut seed propagation/germination:

https://htirc.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/SeedPropagationProtocol.pdf

 

On butternut conservation:

https://www.extension.purdue.edu/extmedia/FNR/FNR-421-W.pdf

(Mostly) Native Flowers of Late April

This post documents some of the many native flowers to be found in late April, from deep woods to front yards. 

A medium sized shrub called Fothergilla, or witch alder, is having a good year in our front yard, though it's not found growing naturally in our local forests. 

Clouds of white in the woodland understory this time of year could be flowering dogwood, 

but blackhaw viburnums, central Jersey's most common native Viburnum, have also just opened up, dotting the understory with their large congregations of small pompom-like clusters of white flowers. 

Sometimes a closer look at an assemblage of white flowers reveals a flowering crabapple tree, as in this photo. Not completely sure as yet that these flowering crabs are native. 

Providing some contrast with the predominating white is the redbud, here seen at the "barden" at Herrontown Woods, where a forest opening allows it enough light to thrive.

On the forest floor, the most common wildflower is spring beauty, 

Rue anemone is an improbably delicate and fairly numerous presence along nature trails.

Trout lily should feel welcome to bloom more than it does, but seems content to mostly form carpets of sterile single leaves, few of which mature into the two-leaved plants that bloom.

By now, the bloodroots have passed from blooming to fruiting stage. 

Nice to see some young bloodroots popping up through the leaf litter.

Some native spring ephemerals occur only in the less historically disturbed lands along the Princeton ridge, like Herrontown Woods. Wood anemone grows distinctive leaves with five leaflets. 

Update: Sadly, some plants have been removed from this post due to reports of plant theft in Herrrontown Woods. Uncommon plants tend to be adapted to particular soils and hydrology, so are unlikely to survive transplanting. Even if it were legal, it's a bad idea. 

Meanwhile, in the botanical art garden (Barden) next to the parking lot in Herrontown Woods, Rachelle planted some Virginia bluebells, which are very rarely seen growing naturally.

Wood phlox is another flower in this category, native but rarely seen in the wild. 

There are a couple nonnative wildflowers that are particularly noticeable blooming now in wild areas. This mustard, which I remember from travels in the english countryside, where whole fields were colored yellow by its blooms, was found growing along the gas pipeline right of way at Herrontown Woods. As plant lovers and dreamers, we sometimes envision a pipeline right of way becoming a corridor of native flowers and grasses. Reality tends to defeat this sort of dream, as the linear right of ways instead play host to the most tenacious of invasive plants--Phragmitis and mugwort.

Garlic mustard, a less tenacious invasive plant but worth pulling, has tasty leaves in early spring. A biennial, it blooms the second year, becoming less tasty as it matures. In this flowering stage, I pluck the flower heads, then pull the whole plant out of the ground, roots and all, the idea being to prevent it from producing seed and thus reducing future sproutings.

In a Hidden Valley, Sudden Abundance, and a White Squirrel

Some of my favorite memories in nature are of sudden abundance. Day to day, walking through a woods or stepping into the backyard, we tend to see one or two of this or that bird or flower. The dispersed, low-key nature we typically see contrasts with accounts from long ago, when endless flocks of passenger pigeons darkened the sky, and herds of bison stretched to the horizon. As a kid, I read of distant streams or lakes teaming with fish. "Where lunkers lurk just below your boat" was one memorable headline. On a few occasions I convinced my father to drive me to them, trips that repeatedly ended in disappointment. 

Serendipity, however, has served up sudden abundance a few times in my life. One fall day early on in my small Wisconsin hometown I was walking home from school when I happened to look up and saw the whole sky filled with monarch butterflies heading south for the winter. There was the small inlet we canoed into in the Quetico, where we happened to look down and saw the shallow water was thick with a school of walleye, from which we quickly caught a delicious dinner. During our time in North Carolina, there was the time when hundreds of cedar waxwings enlivened our neighborhood for a couple days with their antics. And each year in the fall, I'd hope to be around when a large flock of migratory robins, with a few scarlet tanagers mixed in, would descend upon our yard, strip the flowering dogwoods of their ripened berries in an orgy of consumption, then be gone. Even the small park behind our house here in Princeton served one evening a few years ago as a stage for sudden abundance, when winged ants began emerging from the ground, attracting hundreds of dragonflies which in turn attracted a flock of swallows, spectacular fliers all.

This summer, serendipity served up sudden abundance in the most unlikely of places: a hidden valley in Princeton Junction. One afternoon I was standing outside a strip mall with a few minutes to kill, and decided to check out the woods behind the row of businesses. In retrospect, I was just following the flow of the pavement like any self-respecting raindrop would have done, but this going with the flow was taking me away from the human mainstream into another world.

There, beyond the edge of the asphalt, the land dropped down into a woodland like no other I have ever encountered. Perhaps only a botanist would have recognized the extraordinary nature of the nature that stretched before me. Clethra as far as the eye could see. Okay, let me explain. Clethra alnifolia, summersweet, sweet pepperbush, call it what you will, is a native shrub with a fragrant flower sometimes used in landscaping. 

Now, if you're into native plants, you may start to wonder where they typically grow in the wild. Many of the more popular ones--like Clethra, or Virginia sweetspire, bottlebrush buckeye, oak-leaved hydrangia, purple coneflower--have proven rare or non-existent in the wilds I've explored over the years. This could be due to the myriad ways in which we have transformed the landscape, from development to draining to fire exclusion. Or it could be that their home habitat is remote from places I've lived. In the case of Clethra, I had never seen it in the wild save for one sorry specimen holding on next to the towpath along the banks of Lake Carnegie. 

It was a surprise, then, to step behind a pizza joint just up from the Princeton Junction train station, and find myself gazing out on a sea of Clethra, growing like a weed. 

Ostrich fern is another plant I've rarely seen in the wild, and here it too was growing in abundance, giving the woodland a tropical look. 

Returning later with a pair of rubber boots, I waded out into the mud to explore this hidden valley, several times almost losing my boots in the thick muck. 

Here are a few other sudden abundances and rarities--plant, animal, and human--that I encountered:

On the hammocks of high ground surrounded by the mucky soils, Hydrangeas were in full bloom, reaching up to 17 feet tall.

Under a canopy of black gum, red maples and oaks, there were lots of Magnolias

and highbush blueberries.

Netted chain ferns, which bear a resemblance to the much more common sensitive fern, were tucked in among the massings of ostrich ferns.

A small, bent over tree with a curious compound leaf caught my attention. It wasn't a walnut or ash or anything else I could think of. I was excited at the thought that I had discovered a very rare tree, and stumped several botanists before sending a photo to Bob Wells of Morris Arboretum. He promptly identified it as poison sumac--something I hadn't encountered since field botany days in Michigan. The ID explained the skin rash I had been dealing with since handling it.

As with the poison sumac, there was just one Styrax, which showed the remains of its pendulant flowers, and one native azalea. All of these are rarely seen in the wild.

Only towards the other side of the valley did it become clear why this habitat was so different from what can be encountered in Princeton. Most of the stormwater runoff from the strip mall is somehow channeled to the far side of the valley, where it has eroded the stream and exposed the underlying gravel and sand. Simply by crossing Route 1, I had left the piedmont clay of Princeton and entered NJ's sandy inner coastal plain. Though erosion has changed one side of the valley, the other side is fortunately bypassed by the runoff, allowing the mucky soils and hammocks to persist in something close to their pre-development state.  

I had just counted my 30th wild hydrangea blooming in the valley when I saw a man with a white beard walking down into the woods. Scampering about 30 feet ahead of him was a white squirrel. I had already encountered so many unusual plants in this valley, and now I was seeing a white squirrel for the first time in my life. It's distinct appearance lent magnificence to its every move, as if a spotlight were upon it. This photo is the best I could manage with my cell phone as the man continued down the slope. The white squirrel can be seen in the lower right corner. 

He didn't seem to notice me, so I called out to ask him something about the squirrel. He turned and began telling me about a white squirrel he had befriended some years back. It had been a true albino, with pink eyes, and he had trained it to come to him for food. It had gotten to the point where it would come inside. He said that he'd start opening the door for the squirrel to go in his house, and the squirrel would push it further open and come in. He said the true albinos supposedly can't see as well, and that's one reason why it might have allowed itself to be tamed. One day it disappeared, and a friend told him it had been hit by a car. 

The white squirrel I had just seen was one of the albino's offspring. Actually, he explained, they are called silver squirrels, because they have a little gray on their backs, but are otherwise white. Squirrels are really smart, I interjected, expecting him to marvel at how remarkable squirrels are, but my thoughts on their intelligence made him think instead of how you can't keep them out of a house, and how squirrels had gotten into an old neighbor's attic and nearly destroyed her house. He was clearly not one to romanticize animals.

I asked him if this hidden valley is protected, and he said they have had to fight to keep the developers out of it. They lost about 60 feet of it when the strip mall developers wanted to build off the back. Lots of trees lost. He later said there's no organization, just the neighbors who border the property. He had a t-shirt on that said "REAL MEN DON'T NEED INSTRUCTIONS". I asked to take a photo of the shirt, as an excuse to photograph him. He said yes, and pointed out the hammer on the shirt, accidentally cut in two by a table saw. His name was John.

We walked down to the stream, where he said there had been a bridge that got washed out. The bridge turned out to be a long timber, 8x8, which he lifted back into place with some effort, but still impressive for his age. He said the neighborhood is called Berrien City. 

I told him how amazing this valley was for a botanist like me. He said when he'd first heard about the house they bought, and heard it was in Princeton Junction, he pictured something urban. But finding this valley behind it changed his mind. He asked if I'd seen the pond, and when I said no he offered to show me. 

As we maneuvered through the woods thick with sweet pepperbush, he began telling me about his early days, living on the outskirts of Langhorne, PA. He had wanted to be off the grid back then, bought a house that hadn't been lived in for 30 years, had a hole in the roof, one bedroom, a living room and a kitchen. They had a 2 year old son. Their water came from a spring up the hill. A number of them living there dug underground pipes to direct the water to their homes. He said he was at the bottom of the line, and had 600 feet of regular garden hose that the water flowed through to get to his cisterns--one of concrete and two of stainless steel. The cisterns were always full and overflowing, and to keep the water flowing through the hose in winter he had to keep the faucet open in the kitchen. If the hoses froze, he had to gather up all 600 feet and bring them in next to his woodstove to thaw out. He heated completely with wood until their son was seven. The house had 30 amp service, and there was some sort of radiant heater he could turn on to warm the outhouse seat before he headed out there in the winter. They heated water on a stove, and bathed in a tin tub in the kitchen. They ate squirrel and raccoon. The raccoon, he said, actually tasted good. A possum they tried, though, tasted like a McDonald dumpster. He still chops wood. His son, a policeman, still heats his house with wood, even though they have a regular furnace. His son uses a woodsplitter, though. 

The subject of raccoons got him talking about how he used to pay his mortgage with roadkill. Raccoon pelts fetched $50 back in 1980, and fox $75. He'd keep them in his freezer, skinned or sometimes not, until he had enough to make a delivery. It didn't take many to come up with 300 bucks. 

John told me more stories as we stood next to the stormwater pond, in this otherworldly valley hidden behind the loading docks and clustered storefronts of a strip mall that looked like any other in America. I wished I had turned on my phone's recorder to capture his voice and more fully document his story. Much of it involved his life in the fur trade in the 1980s, driving fur traders along a circuit from NY City out to North Carolina, north to Ohio and Pennsylvania, then back to New York, sometimes with $100,000 worth of furs in the back of the truck. It sounded like an updated version of trade in the 18th century. As a line of work, it probably met its demise in the 1990s, when animal cruelty concerns came to the fore. And I doubt a mortgage could be paid off in the 21st century with roadkill. 

Heading back to my pickup afterwards, as if to bend my mind once more before emerging from the woodland, I saw another white squirrel, or perhaps the same one, racing up a tree.

The Many Blooms of June

There's a wooden heron that looks out on our backyard garden. I hope it's happy with its bay window habitat of orchids, christmas cactus and aloe vera, and pleased with all our efforts to steer the sun- and rain-drenched plant growth beyond the window pane.

The garden is a collection of mostly natives with a few non-natives mixed in. A garden and a mind are enriched, one by the other. A plant often has to first make it into the mind before it can find it's way into the garden, and the garden can surprise the mind with what pops up. Over time, both the garden and mind gain in variety.

It's been a particularly good year for the Virginia sweetspire, which along with its sweet spires has the added bonus of creating suckers near its base that can be dug and moved to new spots.

Elderberry makes up in berries and blooms what it lacks in grace. Maybe this year, being less distracted, and if the covetous catbirds cut us some slack, we'll set about harvesting the berries and making those delicious pies remembered from youth.

Most azaleas people see are evergreen and not native, but there are some wonderful deciduous native azaleas like this swamp azalea. Pinxter azaleas were once common in Princeton woodlands.

More subtle is the native Euonymus that are mostly browsed down to a few inches high in local woodlands by the deer. Their ornament comes later in the year, with the bright berries that give them the name Hearts-a-bustin. These I found locally, grew to size, and have begun placing in the "botanical garden" at Herrontown Woods, protected by cages. Otherwise they would be eaten down and never flower or make berries.

Even more subtle is winterberry--a holly that's growing in one of our miniponds. Our front and back gardens get a boost from runoff from the roof and the neighbor's yard, all directed into many shallow depressions where the water can collect and seep into the ground. Managed well, the puddles can serve as mosquito traps, luring female mosquitoes to lay their eggs, then drying out before the larvae can mature.

Sundrop flowers surround the leaves of richweed.

Fringed loosestrife seems a delicate and bashful native, with flowers pointed down, but has been a surprisingly aggressive spreader when placed in the protected, fertile environs of a garden. It may need to be planted in a shadier spot where it won't have so much energy to expand.

Beardtongue (Penstemon) blooming in a garden means it's also blooming out in the wild.

The deeper depressions we have in the backyard swale are populated by all sorts of plants that thrive in wet, sunny spots. This is royal fern, which stays in place, while sensitive fern tends to spread.

Many kinds of sedges provide a nice background texture. This one is fox sedge, which is less ornamental than fringed sedge and bladder sedge.

A personal favorite is soft rush, whose green "blooms" arise partway up the darker green leaf stems, like elaborate earrings. It's stems may be soft but it's a tough plant that can be found growing in ditches. Bring it into the garden and it achieves a graceful vase-like shape that makes for an accent that's both striking and subtle.

Botany teaches us to make distinctions, for instance between sedges and rushes--which look like grasses but aren't--and the many attractive plants that actually are grasses, like this deertongue grass, here shown next to a rising sea of jewelweed.

Fragrant Japanese honeysuckle always finds a way to survive our periodic attempts to discourage its rampancy.

Across the street, unfettered Japanese honeysuckle is overwhelming a hedge. Eventually, the hedge will die from all the competition, and the honeysuckle vine will play king of the slowly collapsing mountain as the suffocated shrub rots and buckles from the weight. Passerby will still think it's a hedge.

Coral honeysuckle--the native honeysuckle vine--grows along Nassau Street.

Meanwhile, back in the backyard, bottlebrush buckeyes are working on some spires,

and the oak-leaved hydrangias are getting ready to put on a show.

During a pandemic, it feels like such wealth to have nature close by, thriving through it all.