Showing posts with label Places To Visit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Places To Visit. Show all posts

Thursday, December 05, 2024

Touring a New Preserve in Plainsboro--Bulk Farm Nature Center

My friend James Degnen called me up recently, and with his deep baritone voice invited me to explore the Bulk Farm Nature Center--a new nature preserve in Plainsboro, NJ. A former tree nursery, the preserve has cherry blossoms in the spring, leaf color in the fall, and lovely vistas through the winter. Note: The back portion of the preserve, with trails that reach the Millstone River and a bald eagle nest high in a tree, is closed from January through July, to avoid the bald eagles' nesting activity. 

Acquired in 2008, the property took fifteen years to prepare for public use, opening in September, 2023. Some soil contamination was found, likely requiring a lengthy bureaucratic process of remediation.

Though the 80 acre preserve is easily accessed at 179 Cranbury Neck Road, you'll need to navigate past the unusual name. It's called a Nature Center, but there's no building, and "Bulk" refers not to any particular aspect of the preserve, but instead to the family that once owned the farm. Like those housing developments that are named after whatever natural feature was destroyed during the course of development, this nature preserve may ironically be named after a building demolished after the land was preserved. Similarly, the gravel road bisecting the property is called Homestead Drive, leading presumably to a homestead that no longer exists.


James explained that the soft gravel of the Homestead Drive is to be avoided in favor of the mowed trails winding back along either side. 

Though lacking any topography, the preserve's trails take you through a varied landscape with broad vistas across meadows. At first, the meadows are solid with goldenrod, but deeper in some of the native grasses--broomsedge (as in "Andropogon Trail") and purple top--become more prevalent. 

The map conveniently marks where benches can be found, built to last well into the next century. 
The groves of nursery trees prove yet again that it's easier to plant a tree than to sell it.

Most trees are small, but somewhere towards the back right of the trail system we encountered an extraordinarily large river birch.
Towards the back of the preserve, you reach a gate that will be closed and locked for the first seven months of the new year. Bald eagles nest in a tree near the river, and are not to be disturbed. 
It not being January yet, we were able to hike all the way to the back of the preserve, and see the very impressive eagle nest. The tree appears to be a red oak fighting a bad case of bacterial leaf scorch. 
Beyond the eagles' nest, the trail ends at a tranquil spot along the Millstone River. James said the water continued to flow through the long drought this fall.
On the way back, James partook of a pet pleasure--releasing milkweed seeds to the wind.
One curious plant you may encounter in the expansive meadows is this shrub with red stems. Though multiflora rose is a highly aggressive, thorny invader of our natural areas, it is sometimes slowed down by a disease that spread to NJ from the midwest. Called rose rosette disease, the disease stunts the leaves of the multiflora rose and turns the stems red, particularly in sunny locations. 
A gray birch's bark doesn't flake like the bark of a white birch. Both of these birch species are native further north.

The hike took about an hour. Thanks to James for making me aware of this new preserve a fifteen minute drive from Princeton. James' rich baritone voice, by the way, is in demand for doing voice-overs, and we collaborated back in 2019 on a film project in which we recast The King's Speech as a call for action on climate change. 

Past adventures up Plainsboro way:



And another tree nursery turned nature preserve, in Lawrence Township: 




Friday, September 20, 2024

Botanizing With Seek at Indiana Dunes National Park

Things were going our way as we pulled into Indiana Dunes National Park. Swinging around the south side of the Great Lake on our way to Michigan from Chicago, we decided Indiana Dunes would be a good spot to see the shoreline. The cheerful attendant at the gate offered different options for admission. One was a $20 yearlong pass to all national parks for a senior like me. Now, that's a major perk for what still seems pretty modest longevity. 

A visit to the Chicago area offers a chance to see some wonderful restorations of the region's native habitats--prairies, oak savannas, wetlands, dunes--achieved over decades, in part through a consortium known as Chicago Wilderness. Bur oak savannas had disappeared altogether under a sea of nonnative buckthorn, and had to be recreated through botanical research, invasive plant removal, and the reintroduction of fire. 

It was surprising to learn that the Indiana Dunes, a product of receding glaciers and fluctuating lake levels that exposed sandy beaches to the wind, is the fifth most biodiverse national park, and is called the "Birthplace of Ecology." In 1986 Professor Henry Cowles of the newly formed University of Chicago started bringing his students to the dunes to study how a plant community develops over time. The dynamic dune landscape provided a gradient of stability ideal for studying plant succession, from the raw windblown sand of the lakeshore to the complex diversity of species growing on the older, more stable dunes further inland.   

Many of the dunes were mined and carted away long ago for sand. That any survive is a long story, told on wikipedia, featuring Chicago botanists and conservationists like Henry Cowles and Jens Jenson. Some credit for preservation is also due to a woman who in 1915 abandoned city life in favor of a shack on the dunes. Drawn to the spiritual power of the landscape, Alice Mabel Gray became known as "Diana of the Dunes", and advocated for their preservation. She's featured on the interpretive signage in the park.

"Her unusual, free-spirited lifestyle fascinated local townspeople and newspaper readers here and across the country, bringing national attention to the Indiana Dunes at a critical time of early conservation efforts."

Alice Gray's story triggers memories of Thoreau, and a character who lived on the beach in one of Steinbeck's novels--Cannery Row or Sweet Thursday. Thoreau spent two years at Walden Pond; Gray lived on the dunes for nine. 


For me, it was a chance to botanize. The pleasure of learning plants--their names, their shapes--is that you'll encounter the familiar no matter where you go. If you've gained some familiarity with the plant world, you'll find a lot of New Jersey in Indiana, and vice versa.

Look! There are the three shapes a sassafras leaf can make,
and the scalloped leaves of witch hazel. 


And for those plants I didn't readily recognize, I had an ambassador in my pocket, ready to provide an introduction. The phone app I use is called SEEK--a popularized version of iNaturalist. The fun thing about it is that you can point your phone's camera at a plant and the plant's name will appear on the screen. No need to take a photo. It's as if an ID label were hung conveniently on nearly every plant you pass by. 

This shrub, with its three leaflets and distinctive seedpod, reminded me of bladdernut (Staphylea trifolia)--a large native shrub that grows in only a few locations in Princeton's nature preserves. SEEK--my "pocket botanist"--called this dune plant Common Hoptree, Ptelea trifoliata. Turns out that bladdernut and common hoptree are related, being in the same Order: Sapindales.

The pine trees perched on the dunes looked familiar, with their short, paired needles. SEEK, with infinite patience, reminded me: Jack pine. I read about them fifty years ago when first discovering the elegance of fire ecology. Jack pines have serotinous cones that only open when heated by a fire sweeping through. The seeds then fall on the mineral soil ever so conveniently left exposed and fertilized by the flames--yet another clever adaptation of plants to periodic fire. In the midwest, and even in New Jersey, the reintroduction of fire into the landscape, in the form of controlled burns, has been an important element in the restoration of habitats like prairies and oak savannas.

SEEK reassured me that this was in fact winged sumac, just like the winged sumacs that have been spontaneously popping up as we restore the habitat in the Barden at Herrontown Woods. Maybe not "just like." The characteristics of a species can vary across its range, like accents in speech. 



There's a whole long list of invasive species that supposedly grow on the Indiana Dunes, but I didn't see any. What a great feeling to visit a habitat where native plants are thriving. The one weed I saw was the native horseweed. It can cover whole farm fields, but here one was growing all by its lonesome, as if on display, in a crack in the concrete. 



Another bit of luck: a threat of rain had kept the crowds away, making us one of the few witnesses to a beautiful beach and highly swimmable Lake Michigan water. Having arrived with no expectations, the beauty and a cool swim sustained us through the rest of a day of travel.


A few observations collected on the SEEK app:

Common Hoptree, Ptelea trifoliata

Tall boneset, Eupatorium altissimum

Shining (winged) sumac. Rhus copallinum

Flowering spurge, Euphorbia corollata

False boneset, Brikellia eupatoriodes

Monday, September 02, 2024

Holden Arboretum Studies Resistant Beech and Ash Trees

Herein lies a post about the long, patient work that begins when something goes wrong with the world. With the introduction of beech leaf disease into North America, things have gone very wrong. Another noble, native tree species, towering and strong, is proving no match for a microscopic nematode. When this happens--yet another example of collateral damage from international trade--scientists mobilize to seek understanding and possible remedies.

In recent blog posts about beech leaf disease, I've mentioned Holden Arboretum. Holden happens to be located east of Cleveland, close to where the disease was first noticed back in 2012. Visiting family in Cleveland this summer during a band tour, I reached out to Holden staff to see if I could stop by to witness their research on the disease

Tucked behind some 3000 acres of gardens and ponds, forests and fields, is a research station where Holden is devoting staff and greenhouses to a collaboration with the U.S. Forest Service and others to test resistance not only beech leaf disease, but also to the introduced insects that have decimated two other native trees--ash and hemlock. 

I learned primarily about their research on beech and ash trees.

AMERICAN BEECH

Where did the nematode that causes beech leaf disease come from? According to Rachel Kappler, Holden's Forest Health Collaborative Coordinator, who generously came in on a Saturday to give me a tour, they have identified the island in Japan from which the nematode came. It was not a species from Asia's mainland. 

Holden's main endeavor is to seek out beech that show some resistance to the disease, and test that resistance. 

Rachel first grows seedlings that can be used as root stock for these tests. The root stock serves as the bottom half of a graft.

When trees are found that have lingered in the landscape while others succumb, Rachel then grafts cuttings from these "suspiciously healthy" trees onto the prepared rootstock. 



Once the grafts heal,



the trees can be tested for resistance. Measured numbers of nematodes are applied to the buds, documented with colored tags, and the tree's resistance to the nematodes is then observed.

The nematodes are small enough to enter the buds between the overlapping bud scales. The tiny worm-like creatures inhabit the leaves all summer. Then in fall, exiting the leaves through the stomata--the openings on the undersides of the leaves through which the tree breathes--the nematodes transfer to the new buds to overwinter.

Each step in the process of testing resistance takes time and consistent attention. Rachel says some promising means of speeding research are in the works. Promisingly resistant trees can be propagated using only their leaves. The leaves are cut, a particular root hormone applied, then the leaf is stuck in soil medium to grow. This approach could potentially avoid the need to grow root stock, grafting, and the time it takes for grafts to heal.

As for treatments for the disease, she says soil applications of phosphite have mostly been experimented with on smaller trees because it's easier to study at these smaller scales. Similarly, using chemical sprays on the trees' foliage requires just the right timing, and a thorough coating, which makes larger trees very difficult and expensive to spray. They are experimenting with pruning to allow better air circulation and thereby reduce the moisture that the nematodes like.

ASH TREES

Research on resistant ash trees is a little farther along. Rachel showed me a grove of young green ash--protected by a deer fence--that are being tested for resistance to the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB), which spread through Ohio nine years before Beech Leaf Disease. This is the same introduced insect that has decimated Princeton's ash trees.

Rachel explained that the ash can defend themselves from the burrowing insects in three ways. One is a blockage that prevents entry. Another is to react by building a wall around an ash borer that has gotten in under the bark. Another is to somehow deprive the ash borer of nutrition, so that it becomes stunted. 

Sticky boards are used to monitor the presence of Emerald Ash Borers at the site.


When I told her that I had only seen one adult Emerald Ash Borer in my life, despite the hundreds of millions of ash trees killed, she pulled one off of the sticky board.

In this closeup, the Emerald Ash Borer is on the left; a native ash borer, far less destructive, is on the right. Though they are similar in appearance, it's the difference in behavior of the introduced species that has proven lethal.

She said that ash trees become vulnerable to EAB attack fairly early in life, certainly under ten feet high. While some of the ash trees being tested in the grove are dying due to EAB (perhaps these are the controls in the experiment), 
many are doing well, showing some degree of resistance. 

The green ash that have proven resistant to the EAB must not only be able to survive at low EAB levels, but also when the Emerald Ash Borer is present in high numbers. Rigorous testing helps avoid later marketing an ash variety that ultimately could prove vulnerable. 

This scar is evidence of an inner struggle by the ash to fend off the borer. The tree tries to build walls around the EAB larvae. 

Rachel described an autoimmune reaction, observed in black ash up north, in which the tree is too aggressive in blocking off passages, interfering with its own circulation. 

She talked about the physical aspects of doing research on trees and their pathogens. The wooly adelgid that plagues our hemlocks is hard to study, in part because it can be hard to apply the soft insect to test trees without squashing its soft frame, so they use its eggs. Nematodes are much easier to count and apply to branches.

Expanded greenhouses suggest Holden is expanding its efforts to nurture trees resistant to imported insects and disease. 



One bonus from my visit was that Rachel took an interest in our efforts in Princeton to bring back the native butternut (Juglans cinerea), and has put us in touch with someone studying the species.

If, as beech leaf disease takes its toll on beech trees in Princeton, we see some trees that "linger" and remain "suspiciously healthy," we'll want to notify Holden Arboretum, to aid their ongoing search for resistant trees. 

A thunderstorm prevented me from exploring the many gardens at Holden that day, including a treetop walk and tower. And then there's the Cleveland Botanical Garden closer into town, with which Holden recently merged. These are some good botanical destinations in Cleveland, with a mission that extends far beyond the city, and an engaging origin story.






Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Chimney Swifts Converge on a Tower Near You

Updated 5.18: The back side of an abandoned school building doesn't seem an auspicious place to spot endangered wildlife, but check out that chimney. It changes everything.

In a recent letter to Town Topics, Princeton ecology professor Andy Dobson invited readers to witness one of nature's more remarkable annual phenomena, playing out in and above the tower of the old Valley Road School. From his letter:

In the half hour after sunset, several hundred swifts will be “turning and turning in a narrowing gyre” centered around the tower of old Valley Road School building behind Conte’s Pizza. It is quite a spectacular sight as the rapidly spinning circle of birds “know exactly where it leads, and you can watch them go ‘round and ‘round each time.” Suddenly, they will begin to drop down and disappear into the tower to roost for the night. “Wait ‘til you see half the things that haven’t happened yet.”

Andy encourages us to "come to the playing field on Valley Road and enjoy a truly remarkable local wildlife spectacle." 

"They will probably be there at dusk for the next couple of weeks while they pair up and locate nest sites on local tall buildings. The site is Princeton’s equivalent of the Serengeti wildebeest crossing the Mara River on their annual great migration."

His letter was published on May 8, and in typical fashion I didn't get myself over there to have a look until 9 days later. When I arrived, right at sundown, there was nothing to be seen--a golden opportunity for self-rebuke--but just as I began to leave, a high-pitched cheeping somewhere above pulled me back. They came, a few at first, then many, swooping down on the chimney only to veer away at the last possible moment. There is no clear choreography to their acrobatic flight, as they head off in all directions at great speed, sometimes in pairs but mostly on their own, each one's acrobatic flight describing a broad circle out across fields and rooftops, always to return to play yet again with the magnetic pull of the chimney. As the light fades, their gleeful independence ultimately yields to the collective impulse, drawing them down into the chimney's depths to spend the night.

   

Here's a link to Andy's wonderful letter. And here is a link to local writer Carolyn Jones' well researched article on our local chimney swifts and the longterm threat redevelopment of the Valley Road School site poses to their very specialized habitat. 

Andy's comparison of chimney swifts to the migration of the wildebeests that he studies in Africa has added meaning for those of us who have seen the university as often detached from the community of which it is a part. He recently began teaching a course called "Woods and Rivers of Princeton." The course gets students out exploring local nature, and has become so popular that this coming fall's course is triply over-subscribed. This valuing of the local is gratifying to see, and I like to think is part of a larger trend. 

Update, 5.31.24 Andy reports that "the swifts are still there, numbers declining as they pair up and locate nest sites. They should be back by the middle of August in even larger numbers with young of the year."




Saturday, February 17, 2024

Encountering Old (Plant) Friends at Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden

Among the many surprising encounters we had during a visit to the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden--during a holiday spent in Coconut Grove, more than a year ago now--was the opportunity to sit down and have a chat with the celebrated writer and conservationist Marjory Stoneman Douglas. She's aging well. After a brief bout with death in 1998, by which time she had reached the age of 108, she still looks to be going strong 25 years later. Sitting alone on a bench, she looked like she wanted company, perhaps to tell me about her seminal book, The Everglades: River of Grass, and how she helped found the Fairchild Gardens.

Walking the paved trails that wind through 83 acres, I felt suffused with a bloom of happiness. Maybe I was empathizing with all the happy plants. In Princeton, things can be bleak in winter, but even in summer there is evidence everywhere of trees dying back due to introduced insects and diseases. This patch of Florida is by comparison exuberantly florid. 




Or maybe it was the endearing mix of impeccable and casual, which perhaps reflects the Garden's varied founders, who range from an accountant/businessman to a worldwide explorer to environmental advocates like Douglas. The grounds are at once formal and informal. Paved trails have imprints of leaves and fruits. Encountering no clear route from the parking lot to the visitors' center, we ducked through a shrub border. The lawns are manicured, and yet the plant labels are low-key, well-aged and aging well. 

Structures range from  a sophisticated greenhouse hosting tropical plants and myriad butterflies to this authentic-looking thatched roof pavilion. 




Along the winding paths, there were old friends, like this thriving ombu. Lacking true wood, it is really an overgrown forb masquerading as a tree. I first encountered it in Argentina, where stories tell of it giving shelter to gauchos out on the pampas. Its latin name, Phytolacca dioica, shows it to be in the same genus as our pokeweed. If you saw it blooming, as I did once in a park in the Recoleta neighborhood of Buenos Aires, you might think you're looking at a pokeweed 50 feet high.
How often do we get to see a baobab tree, and a massive one at that? 

Witnessing this assemblage of plants from around the world stirred all sorts of memories of past travels. This tree reminded me of a hike up into the hills outside Medellin, Columbia, in 1974, where a patchwork of hand-cultivated onion fields gave way to small hilltop forests of tree ferns and hummingbirds. 
Petrified wood triggered memories of visiting a petrified forest during a long drive through Argentine Patagonia.
And this swollen trunk brought the name "palo borracho" to mind, a name that translates to "drunken stick", in reference to the bottle-shape of the trunk. They are common along the streets of Buenos Aires. I think this one is Ceibe speciosa, the silk floss tree, closely related to the kapok tree.

The Garden's 83 acres were donated by an accountant and businessman named Robert Montgomery, who counted among his friends the globetrotting plant collector David Fairchild, who lived next door and supplied many of the plants. The garden's website describes how Fairchild "visited every continent in the world (except Antarctica) and brought back hundreds of important plants, including mangos, alfalfa, nectarines, dates, cotton, soybeans, bamboos and the flowering cherry trees that grace Washington D.C." 

The National Tropical Botanical Garden goes even farther in describing Fairchild's legacy: 

"Avocado, mango, kale, quinoa, dates, hops, pistachios, nectarines, pomegranates, myriad citrus, Egyptian cotton, soybeans, and bamboo are just a few of the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of plants Fairchild introduced to the United States."

The desire to import plants that could prove useful for food, fiber, and other uses dates at least back to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, but gained intensity during the golden age of travel--the late 19th century when Fairchild began his career. Plants were considered so important to the economy and security of the nation that the U.S. Botanic Garden--a particular passion of George Washington's--was placed next door to the Capitol building. That's it down in the lower left of this map. 

To 21st or even 20th century eyes, the proximity of a botanical garden to the nation's center of legislative power feels odd in the extreme. Plants are more likely now to be viewed as quaint decoration to soften the edges of our hardened world. When I visited the U.S. Botanic Garden, probably in the 1990s, the conservatory looked a bit down in the mouth, largely serving as a refuge for the homeless. More respect for George Washington's dream has been shown since then. 

Those must have been heady times, early in the 20th century, when Fairchild oversaw the import of more than 100,000 species of plants from around the world. Their utility and beauty promised to enrich our country by diversifying our farms, gardens and kitchens. Few, including Fairchild, wanted to think about the downside, as some of these imports escaped gardens and ran wild over the landscape, displacing native species. A botanical enrichment has contributed over time to an ecological degradation. 

I looked into whether David Fairchild ever came to terms with the potential for introduced species to run amok, and plan to write about it in a separate post. He was aware that some nonnatives like kudzu and lebbek were spreading aggressively, but there is no verifiable evidence as yet that he sounded a warning. 

It's heartening to see that the Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden itself has evolved to take the threat of invasive species very seriously. According to multiple sources, it monitors closely its collection of exotic plants and takes action to prevent spread beyond the Garden's borders. I want very much to believe all this is true and will continue to be true, the better to enjoy the memory of my visit there, encountering so many old (plant) friends from my earlier travels around the world. 

The Lost Forest of Rogers Refuge

This past November, I received a request to look at a lost forest in Princeton. 

The request came from what may be the oldest open space organization in town--the Friends of Rogers Refuge. Dating back to 1967, FORR has been working with the town, and the water company that owns the land just down from the Institute Woods, to sustain the refuge's role as premier habitat for a tremendous diversity of birds.

Over the years, I've been able to witness and collaborate with a progression of leaders who have overseen stewardship--the Southerlands, Tom Poole, the Spars, the Varians, and most recently David Padulo. 

At annual meetings, discussions have tended to focus on the refuge's central feature, the surprisingly extensive marsh--how to keep it wet enough and protect it from the super-aggressive Phragmitis.

But this year, concern now extends to the floodplain woodlands surrounding the marsh--also vital bird habitat. One of these woodlands, thriving four years ago, has lost its trees.

This was not a forest classically lost to logging. The trees were not cut down but rather strangled over the course of several years, then left standing, each tree a monument to its past life. 
Few have seen the now ubiquitous strangler, the Emerald Ash Borer accidentally introduced to the U.S. from Asia. It's larvae work quietly under cover of bark, feasting on the ash trees' circulatory tissues. 

That a whole forest could die speaks to how common ash trees once were. The most numerous tree in Princeton up until just a few years ago, comprising more than 10% of the tree cover, the ash tree's skeletons can be found throughout the canopy of residential and open space lands. Ash were particularly good at colonizing abandoned fields, to the point of dominating one area of what is now Rogers Refuge. 

As the botanist in an organization of birders, I was asked what the longterm prognosis for this lost forest might be. Winnie Spar, Joe Melton, and I walked the red trail to have a look.
One striking feature is what I call "poison ivy trees." These are dead trees, still standing, that have been scaled by poison ivy vines, with their classic "hairy is scary" stems. In order to bloom, poison ivy must climb a tree, sending out lateral flowering shoots along the way. The branch-like laterals give the tree the look of still being alive, even though all the leaves are now poison ivy. The flowers produce berries that, birders will enthusiastically tell you, serve as important food for birds.
Another feature of a lost forest is the shrub growth that now thrives on the infusion of sunlight previously claimed by the tree canopy. Much of this shrub growth, unfortunately, is nonnative and inedible to wildlife, like this Asian Photinia. At least it can be said that the invasive shrubs are not as thick at Rogers Refuge as they are at the Institute Woods just up the hill.
A few other native tree species fill a small portion of the void. In early November, the occasional silver maple and pin oak still had many of their leaves. Mixed in were a couple elms, and a red maple. 

Used to the numerous red maples at Herrontown Woods on the other side of town, I was surprised to find instead an abundance of box elder of every size growing in this broad floodplain of the Refuge. Related to maples, box elder are not the most statuesque of trees, but their soft wood can make good bird habitat. They now stand as the main hope for rebound in this patch of former forest. 

The walk being with such knowledgeable birders, attention never strayed far from bird life. We saw a couple pileated woodpeckers, a coopers hawk and a couple other larger hawks. Winnie kept up a running monologue about the status of this or that bird. Mockingbirds have been around for a long time, but the catbirds keep them out of their territories when they are present. While a warming climate is causing many birds to extend their ranges northward, ravens, surprisingly, are moving south. She's seen some in the Refuge. Warblers love something about the spicebush flowers, whether it's the flowers themselves or an insect in them. Blue gray knatcatchers were mentioned, along with many other bird names that didn't register in my botanical brain.

There's a lot of concern that last year's fires in Canada have been very hard on migrating birds that nest up there. A woman who catches and tags migrant birds had been having very few birds coming back down from Canada, but her catch/tag/release activity, conducted on Sundays, was hampered by rains every weekend this fall. One day she got only ten birds, total. 

But then Winnie is quick to add that she saw Cape May Warblers in the Refuge for the first time, several in fact, with immatures, and they too nest in Canada. Winnie is one to accent the positive, while acknowledging that migrant bird numbers are down 50-90%. 

This lost forest, the decline in bird numbers, accelerating changes in climate, democracy under threat--in many ways, America is losing its memory of what it once was. The soil, for its part, holds memory through the seeds that remain dormant within it. Back when the seed bank--this stockpile of seeds yet to sprout--was dominated by the seeds of native species, succession as an ecological phenomenon featured an orderly and predictable progression of species, from grassland to shrubland to mature forest. But the soil under our feet has lost its memory, whether by plow, development, intense browsing, or displacement of native species. Invasive lesser celandine, poisonous to wildlife, coats the ground in the spring, followed by inedible stiltgrass and its billions of seeds in late summer. Invasive shrubs and deer combine to limit native species and thwart the once timeless process of succession. Though the tree canopy is still dominated by natives, these are under increasing attack from introduced insects and disease.

Even healthy trees can be overwhelmed by vines of porcelainberry and wisteria.

Given the circumstances, it's fair to ask what sense there is in persevering. What I find is that the native growth force, if often smothered and badly abused, remains intact. When given a chance to prosper, native plants and wildlife still can thrive. In Rogers Refuge, we've seen a tremendous rebound of spicebush since the town began culling deer to reduce browsing pressure. That in turn has improved habitat for birds. FORR has paid contractors to successfully set back the Phragmitis and porcelainberry. 


Through periodic interventions over a number of years, the Varians have virtually eliminated the one patch of invasive Japanese knotweed at Rogers Refuge. 

We pick our spots, time our interventions strategically to have the most impact for the least amount of effort, and look for opportunities. Despite the tragedy of losing ash trees, the new openings in the canopy could potentially allow native shrubs to grow, flower and bear in ways they haven't since being shaded out decades ago. 

Our inherited environmental mindset is that nature, if protected from intentional depredations like logging and draining, will heal itself. As FORR's webmaster Laurie Larson points out, "when Charles H. Rogers and the Southerlands started birding the “Water Company” in the 60s and 70s it was a landfill." The initial fight was to put an end to dumping. But now, at Rogers Refuge and many other places, the main depredations (invasive species, climate change) are unintentional, and the healing must be helped along by intentional effort. That effort could seem a sacrifice, but the primary feeling is one of gratitude, for the chance to work with nature--the greatest and most generously creative collaborator of all.