Urban Succession--Butler Apartments Turned Into Meadows

Normal urban succession proceeds from grassland to shrubland to woodland, then to a climax community of houses and lawns. Near the corner of Sycamore and South Harrison Street, a much different sort of succession took place three years ago. The Butler Apartments had stood here since they were built in 1946 in a scramble to house returning veterans, then were later turned into graduate housing. Seventy years later, they were torn down and turned into meadows--real meadows, not some development called The Meadows that names itself after what no longer exists. The scattered trees give the place a savanna-like look, and the preserved infrastructure of streets and fire hydrants serve as a deluxe means to appreciate and care for the plantings.

At the urging of my friend Kurt, I finally paid a visit. I happened to be teaching a 16 year old to ride a bike, so we parked the truck on Sycamore and explored this ultra safe biking territory.

When creating meadows, it's common to scatter "wildflower seed" with species that create a burst of color the first year, but are not native to the area. Surprisingly, this planting reflects closely the local flora, and has been flourishing with all the rain this year. A few of the usual invasive species have gotten small footholds, but the meadows are still dominated by a diversity of natives.

What follows here is a sampling of the plant diversity that can now be found there, and will help with identification for anyone who goes there. In this photo, a maple is turning color early, and doing a dance with a powerline that may or may not still carry electricity.

Korean dogwoods, leftover plantings that still adorn the streets, offer edible fruit at many of the corners.

The white clouds of late-flowering thoroughwort set off the more colorful wildflowers nicely.

Common milkweed sometimes caters to the needs of monarch caterpillars.

Rudbeckia

Oxeye sunflower, which is common in seed mixes though I've never seen it growing wild.

Grasses to be encountered are Indian grass, switchgrass, purple top, and this shorter one that matured earlier in the year, which is looking like a robust version of wild rye.

In the background is mugwort, a highly invasive species that would likely continue displacing natives if this site is kept as meadow.

I call this frost aster.

Various goldenrods.

This is looking like Japanese hops--an invasive vine, though not nearly as invasive as the kudzu-like porcelainberry, which hopefully has not gotten established here.

Mistflower (wild ageratum) is a native occasionally found in the wild. It grows low to the ground, and can survive only along the edges, given all of its tall competitors here. Eupatorium coelestinum in latin.

Crown vetch is an invasive just beginning to show up.

This is looking like a tickseed sunflower (Bidens)--an annual that can get large and showy, but also can be a bit weedy.

It's been a good year for partridge pea, another native that tends to be rare in the wild but performs really well in these meadow seedmixes.

These monarchs are fueling up at a New England aster waystation prior to making their annual journey to a mountain range in Mexico for the winter.

Pokeweed, also called inkberry for its dark berries. In springtime, there's a way to harvest and prepare "poke salad" so that it is edible, but not the berries.

Other typical wildflowers to look for are wild bergamot, mountain mint, and wild senna.

Eventually this meadow could be shaded out by trees or undone by new construction or the expansion of a few nonnative species, it is currently a great example of a meadow packed with mostly native species growing in balance. Thanks to my friend Kurt for finally getting me over there.

Attracting Pollinators With Boneset and Thoroughwort

Many people sing the praises of mountain mint and goldenrod for attracting pollinators, but my two favorites are a duo that produce large disks of small white flowers for a long stretch in mid to late summer.

This has been a banner year for boneset and its more numerous but lesser known sidekick, late-flowering thoroughwort.

With a name that spreads like the pagoda-shaped stems that carry its flowers, late-flowering thoroughwort adorns the sides of roads and railroads this time of year. I've seen it cover a whole abandoned field in Montgomery,

and there's a lone specimen blooming at the end of the track at the Dinky station.

It could be called a successful weed, and sometimes it can look a little ragged, perhaps influenced by how much rain comes. But this year it was the most elegant plant in the garden, its loose clusters of flowers like delicate hands reaching out to pollinators.

Late-flowering thoroughwort (left in this photo at the Westminster parking lot raingardens I care for) blooms just as boneset (right) is fading, which this year made for a seamless handoff between the two. Though boneset is comparatively rare in the landscape, it will make seedlings to increase its numbers when planted in a garden.

The two species can easily be told apart by checking the leaves. Boneset has pairs of leaves that are "perfoliate", which is to say they fuse to wrap around the stem. Thus the latin name Eupatorium perfoliatum.

By contrast, the leaves of late-flowering thoroughwort have petioles that extend the leaf away from the stem. The "serotinum" in its latin name, Eupatorium serotinum, means late summer. We could call it the serotinal thoroughwort, but we don't. In the common name, the word "wort" means plant, and if there's anything thorough about a thoroughwort, it's the copious blooms.

Both these wildflower species rise each year to the perfect height for viewing all the varied insect life they attract. Spend some time in that honey-scented space around the flowers and you'll discover an ecosystem in miniature, the flowers being a stage where the protagonists not only feed on nectar, but also look for mates, and sometimes put their lives on the line.

You might think it dangerous to be in proximity to the many kinds of bees and wasps that frequent this floral saloon, but I have never been stung in all my hours immersed in quiet observation.

I've even taken to petting the more docile creatures, like this "solitary" blue-winged wasp. Knowledge can cut through fear. It helps that the more aggressive insects, such as "social" wasps like yellow jackets, spend their summers elsewhere.

If anything, the pollinators are at much greater risk than I, with an occasional preying mantis showing up to snare a fly,

or a brilliantly disguised ambush bug lying in wait for a bumble bee.

Here's the ambush bug that was hiding in that previous photo.

Each plant has a time-release approach to flowering, with some clusters of flowers opening just as others are fading. Week after week in the summer, working in tandem, boneset and late-flowering thoroughwort continue to play host to a shifting cast of insect characters--each with its own traits, backstory and motivations--all the while adding ornament to the garden.

August's Peak Bloom of Native Wildflowers

It's been gratifying lately to hear testimonials from friends and acquaintances about the joy they've found in replacing some of their lawn with wildflowers. Though we have a few non-native flowers in the garden, there's a predominance of local genotypes of native wildflowers found growing wild in Princeton. The ones shown here are well adapted for wet ground, so have flourished in this summer's consistently recurrent rains. Here are some photos from the peak bloom in August, when the garden was positively rocking with flowers.

Autumn Helenium - Helenium autumnale

Front to back: Cutleaf coneflower, jewelweed, wild senna, Joe Pye Weed

Front to back: Boneset, rosemallow hibiscus, Joe Pye Weed, boneset, wild senna

Ironweed (Vernonia noveboracensis), Boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum)

A mix of Joe Pye Weed and cutleaf coneflower (Rudbeckia laciniata)

RoseMallow Hibiscus (Hibiscus moscheutos)

Wild senna (Senna hebecarpa)

Hibiscus and cutleaf coneflower

Cutleaf coneflower, Hibiscus moscheutos, Joe Pye Weed

Boneset, Hibiscus, Joe Pye Weed

Non-Native Shrubs Shade Out Spring Wildflowers

This time of year, you can tell with one glance how many non-native shrubs are growing in a local woodland. Non-natives like privet, winged euonymus, and bush honeysuckle leaf out earlier than most native shrubs, reflective of their having evolved in a different climate from our own. Many of our woodlands are now thick with these non-native shrubs, and their early leafing out has ecological consequences. The spring ephemeral wildflowers have evolved to utilize the sunlight available during that window of time in spring when the woody plants above them are still dormant. Introduce woody plants that leaf out earlier, and the wildflowers can't store up enough energy to bloom the next year.

This problem will be exacerbated as we lose the many ash trees in our woodlands, since the nonnative shrubs will likely grow all the more densely as more sunlight reaches the understory in summertime. At Herrontown Woods, we're cutting down the non-native invasive shrubs, to allow more sunlight to reach spring wildflowers, and also to allow native shrubs a chance to thrive.

September Captured in Bouquets

Bouquets from the backyard can be a good way to learn the names of plants. The two visible here are cupplant on the left, ironweed on the right.

This one shows off purple coneflower, boneset, Indian grass, a species of sunflower, turtlehead, and clusters of stonecrop--a nonnative sedum that turns color as fall progresses, from green to pink, to burgundy to rich brown.

Wildflowers and People Gather By the River

What a glorious day, this past Sunday, down along the canal in Princeton. Cool, sunny weather drew people to the canal, by boat, foot and bicycle. The sounds of laughter and conversation mixed with birdsong and a generous show of summer floodplain wildflowers.

Boys returned to their Huck Finn roots,

and insects, too, gathered by the river

or bathed in the sun.

Many different species of oak have long gathered along the section of the towpath between Harrison St and Washington Rd, planted back when the university viewed the canal as an ornamental entryway to campus.

Here's white oak, with it's rounded lobes,

and possibly a post oak, with its lobes arranged in the shape of a cross.

Swamp white oak and bur oak have similar leaves, swollen towards the tips, like the bison that used to forage in the oak savannas of the midwest and south, back when mildfire could play through and refresh the landscape.

Not sure what type of oak this is.

It was a day when nature seemed to be moving towards restoring balance. The overly aggressive multiflora rose was getting a humbling dose of rose rosette disease.

One Ailanthus, at least, was being slowed down by the munchings of the caterpillars of the Ailanthus webworm moth.

The adult is the orange patterned insect in this photo.

And a honeysuckle shrub was being hampered by some sort of witch's broom growth.

Queen Anne's Lace was being pretty without taking over.

Introduced knapweeds like spotted knapweed have spread very agressively in the midwest. I've been trying to believe that this Tyrol knapweed will be relatively benign as it spreads slowly along the canal. Here, at least, it's hosting a monarch.

True, the porcelainberry was having its way in one of the openings in the canopy,

and capitalizing on a tree's demise.

Stiltgrass still lines the nature path,

and a Norway maple's dense shade was stunting growth beneath it.

Mugwort framed concrete marker, but hasn't dominated along the canal like it sometimes does in gas line right of ways.

Signs at the Harrison Street crossing warned of hydrilla, an aquatic invasive plant. None of this, however, could break the upbeat mood of a cool, sunny Sunday in late July.

Flowers from earlier in the year were quickly turning into seeds, like buttonbush

silky dogwood,

common milkweed,

One of the ornamental cherries planted by the university long ago,

pokeweed,

and tall meadow rue.

Seeing native shrubs like this elderberry trying to grow along the banks of the canal, I long ago envisioned managing the banks for native shrubs that could beautify and provide abundant wildlife food. But the banks of the canal are managed independently of the towpaths, by a different agency. As with most landscape maintenance, the workers tend to be unselective in what they cut. To preserve the view from the towpath, the bank is cut every few years--not enough time for a shrub to do much flowering and fruiting that would benefit wildlife.

Not far down the lake from Washington Rd. bridge stands the stump of a sweetgum tree once darkened each day by roosting cormorants.

Its life may have been cut short by the excess guano, or its own precarious perch on the edge of the bank. Not sure where the cormorants have gone.

Another sweetgum, with its star-shaped leaves and protruding wings on the branches, was thriving elsewhere along the trail.

Some of the wildflowers have grown to giant size with the well-spaced rains this summer. These cutleaf coneflowers are ten feet high,

as are some of the ironweeds.

The cutleaf coneflowers were the first native wildflowers I spotted ten years ago along this section of the canal, which in turn led to the state park staff reducing the mowing to once a year so these wildflowers would have a change to mature and bloom

Hollow-stemmed Joe-Pye-Weed has really prospered in the open shade of the oaks. Each year there are more patches of these attractive flowers.

Goldenrods can be distinguished by the different shapes of their flowerheads. Some have elm shaped inflorescence,

others are flatter.

Each year, the rose mallow hibiscus bloom along the shore, with lizard's tail and yellow pond lillies extending out into the Carnegie Lake waters beyond them.

It would have been a perfect day to lead what usually is an annual nature walk along the towpath. For 2017, this account will have to do.