Tall Indigo Bush

One of the more unusually colored flowers in town is produced by the tall indigo bush (Amorpha fruticosa), which can be found growing wild next to Mountain Lakes and Lake Carnegie.

The flowers combine deep purple with orange anthers.

With this spring seeming more silent than usual when it came to pollinators, I was greatly relieved to find a large specimen of tall indigo bush, in full bloom and warmed by the afternoon sun, hosting a vibrant metropolis of insect life.

Bumble bees spiraled round and round the blooms in pollen-collecting gyres, like frenzied wind-up toys.

This may be a so-called metallic green bee.

Tall indigo bush flowers and leaves mixed with the verticals of soft rush.

Honey bees mingled with the native bees.

While a solitary ladybug,

and others among the great unknowns of the insect world

called the shrub home for an aft

This native shrub may be hard to find for sale. Along the shores of Mountain Lakes, it appears to spread underground, like sumac, but when transplanted into new locations I've also seen it remain for many years a single stemmed bush with attractive form and foliage, and a late spring feast for pollinators.

White Mulberry

It's hard to notice this blob of a tree on Hamilton Ave. just up from Linden Lane.

When the sidewalk beneath it gets littered this time of year, it looks like any other detritus a tree might shed now and then.

I've been riding a bike this way for years, but only now noticed that the tree is a white mulberry (Morus alba, native to China), which means edible berries in profusion.

If it were the native red mulberry, the berries would be black when ripe. But the white mulberry ripens without much change of color, going from light green to a slight pinkish hue.

While we're busy buying strawberries from California or grapes from Chile, the local mulberry crop rots on the ground.

Why don't mulberries get any respect? Even though they taste good, their presentation quickly triggers feelings of surfeit. The tree dares our appetite to compete against its bounty, and we know we'll lose every time.

Too, the maps in our minds associate food with the local store, not trees in the landscape. With fruits available year-round in stores, there seems no urgency to exploit the sudden and passing gift of a neighborhood tree.

The same dilemma faces anyone who considers using public transportation. Why go through the planning and uncertainty of catching a bus when the car is ever at the ready?

For now, a mulberry is a bit of serendipity on the way into town, a roadside stand, quietly spilling bounty in our path.

Note: A friend noted that birds take advantage of at least a portion of the mulberry's bounty. Researching the red mulberry (not the white mulberry in this post) I found that the Wisconsin-based Wild Ones website counts 44 bird species that eat the red mulberry's fruit. The red mulberry's role as a food source for insects, which are a vital part of birds' diet, is less impressive. The bringingnaturehome.net site has downloadable data on how many lepidoptera species were found on various plant species. For example, oaks feed 534 different butterfly/moth species, blueberry supports 288, while red mulberries support 10.

Bovinity in the Vicinity

People ask me all the time. Sure, Princeton has lots of intellectual stars, but how about cows? Is there any bovinity in the vicinity? Can Princeton do cow bells like it does Nobels?

The answer came, as most answers do, while I was doing something else, driving down the Great Road past Coventry Farm. In past years, the preserved farm had appeared to host little more than a few horses and noisy flocks of semi-wild geese. Long gone are the days when the owner successfully attracted hundreds of circling vultures by having Princeton's once copious roadkill of deer delivered to the farm.

But the other day I glanced in passing and was surprised.

There they were. Cows, or more rightly cattle, frolicking in a field, young, old, mooing, mounting, gorgeous golden brown as far as the eye could see.

This was no high brow cow pie in the sky fantasy. This was a Princeton where cows can be cows, where kids can be kids and farmers can be farmers, where intellect can take you to the stars or where a pasture on the west side of town can, at least in my case, bring back memories of a childhood visit to a farm in Kansas, dodging cowpies to get to the fishing hole and then returning at dusk to watch, on a little black and white TV, the first man step on the moon. Thank you, cattle, for that.

After such a dose of unreal reality, it was a shock to return to the road, where the machine world pounded by, in a hurry to be somewhere else than where it was a minute ago.

I clambered back up the bank for one last glance.
If this be a return of Princetons past,

Then we're no longer the type
To be stereotyped.

Step aside Texas.
We're the new nexus,

With fields tread
By grass-fed tawny reds,

And still endemic
Fodder academic

To perplex us.

Quite White

Plantings of oak-leaved hydrangia and Virginia sweetspire (narrow spires in foreground) are making long arcs of white in the courtyard at the Princeton Shopping Center. Both are native to the U.S., though mostly in the southeast. According to the USDA plant website, oak-leaved hydrangia's natural range is centered around Mississippi and Alabama, though it's a common sight in northern plant nurseries and gardens.

If you're ever curious about where a plant grows in the wild, find the plant on the USDA site, scroll down to the range map for the U.S., then click on one state or another to see in which counties the plant has been documented growing.

Light Green, Dark Green

Three weeks ago, new leaves were contrasting beautifully with last year's on evergreens around town. Photos of this have collected, aged, and if they age anymore all that new growth will have become overgrowth and then, as seems the ultimate condition, yardwaste. So without further procrastination:

a laurel (at various times called skip laurel or cherry laurel, not native but also not invasive),

spruce,

english ivy,

probably a yew bush,

a native mountain laurel.

And in an effort to make the deciduous less anonymous,

a hackberry (lining Walnut St. across from JW Middleschool, and occasionally found in the woods)

poison ivy popping up through a privet hedge, like a bandit seeking to steal away domestic tranquility,

a native blackhaw Viburnum (note tiny leaf along stems in upper left of photo--a common characteristic),

a native hazelnut, which judging from the holes in the leaves donates early and often to support-your-local-insect charities,

and last but not least, a tulip poplar pulls a new leaf out of its hat in a long-running magic trick.

A Black Bear Visits Princeton

With the spotting of a "teenage" black bear in Princeton yesterday, it's time to brush up on bear facts. Princeton township has useful info from the NJ Dept. of Environmental Protection on how to behave if you encounter a black bear. For anyone heading out west into grizzly country this summer, it's good to know that the appropriate response to a black bear is completely different from what to do when happening upon a grizzly.

A photo of the bear and more information on its stroll through town can be found at Planet Princeton. I doubt it expected to go from a life of anonymity to celebrity status in a day, with a crowd gathering to watch it over at the Princeton Cemetery while news helicopters hovered overhead.

Can-Do Bamboo Control

A photo of the offspring of the Mercer Oak at the Princeton Battlefield would be appropriate for Memorial Day, but lacking that, a post on bamboo will have to do. My understanding is that the Revolutionary War was a war of attrition. The Continental army won few battles, but managed to sap the will of the British over the course of eight years.

You may never completely win the battle against bamboo, but conducting a war of attrition can turn an advancing monster into a minor nuisance. The goal is to starve the massive root system of energy, in other words, to lay siege. Cutting down all the stems immediately shuts down any solar energy collection, forcing the root system to use its reserves to sustain normal metabolism.

The roots then commit additional energy reserves to sending up new shoots. These can reach six or more feet before they start sprouting leaves. As these bare stems grow, be patient. Keep those loppers at the ready, then cut the long, still-soft stems down just as those solar collecting leaves begin to appear. Proper timing will cheat the roots of any return on a substantial investment in new infrastructure. As the roots weaken, each new set of sprouts will be smaller than the last.

For battles waged on the property line, an alliance with the neighbor will be critical.

Expansionist Mock Strawberries

Mock strawberries look like native, edible strawberries, but their flowers are yellow and the berries are inedible. It spreads through flower beds and lawns by sending long runners across the ground, sprouting new plants along the way.

Catching it early can save a lot of time later on. The photo shows how one plant sending out three runners has already formed 18 new plants, and it's still early in the season.

Each new plant can form roots that will make pulling much harder later in the season.

The native wild strawberry can also be aggressive, quickly spreading through the garden without providing much in the way of berries.

When a Catbird Eats An Apple

When a catbird eats an apple,
the apple looks like this.

When a robin grabs at a serviceberry,
the berry looks like this.

And when they gang up on the blueberries, my harvest will look like this.

Some Native Wetland Irises

All sorts of irises are blooming in gardens around town, but this post is about native irises found on wet ground.

While some very healthy specimens of northern blue flag iris (Iris versicolor) bloom in the Princeton high school ecolab wetland on Walnut Street,

a more subtle iris blooms in out of the way places where the ground stays wet enough. It looks like a rosette of grass about a foot high, but with tiny flowers at the end. Blue-eyed grass has the scientific name Sisyrinchium (accent is on the "rink" in the middle of the word). Learning to say the name can be as pleasurable as discovering a tiny blue flower at the end of what looks like a blade of grass.

A closer look reveals that the stem is flat like an iris leaf. I've long been content to stick with the genus name, but after consulting with Newcomb's Wildflower Guide, I'd say this one's Stout Blue-Eyed Grass (S. angustifolium), because the stem is branched.

Sheddings of Honey Locust

 If the sidewalk is newly littered with brown, darkened by the recent rains,

and upon closer inspection the brown turns out to consist of thousands of tiny spent flowers,

and you look up to see fairly smooth, plated bark and a compound leaf like this,

then chances are good you're walking beneath a honey locust or two. Gleditsia triancanthus, as it is affectionately known among those with an inexplicable memory for latin, can be found occasionally in the wild, where it is typically armored with big thorns to ward off the now non-existent North American mega-fauna. The thorns can supposedly be used for nails.

A thornless variety is common along streets, such as at the township hall parking lot. In fall, the small leaflets drop onto the lawn, nestle between the grass blades and disappear without need of any raking.

Turf Pit Review

Compared to the amount of preserved woodlands, Princeton is lacking in open field habitat for wildlife. Walk through a typical woods in summer, and you'll find almost nothing blooming. How are pollinators to survive? One victory came when the DR Canal State Park agreed years back to sharply reduce mowing in fields near the towpath between Alexander and Washington Roads. After years of ongoing decapitation, wildflowers were finally able to grow to maturity, providing cover and a progression of blooms all summer.

Retention basins, such as this giant one at Elm Court, can also be converted to excellent habitat. Mowing is done annually rather than every week or two, saving money, effort, and any risk associated with mowing those steep slopes. This is just one of many such basins around town, designed to catch runoff from nearby buildings and parking lots. Their periodic inundation would be beneficial to the many kinds of native floodplain wildflowers available.

In this photo, you can see the "sidewalk to nowhere", a puzzling design feature that, last I heard, has been shown to be unnecessary.

Smoyer Park, out Snowden Lane on the northeast side of Princeton, has some fine prospects for reduced mowing. These basins are useless for recreation and may as well become habitat. A federal program, called Partners for Fish and Wildlife, has already funded the successful conversion of a similar basin at Farmview Fields on the west side of town. They replace the exotic turfgrass with "warm-season" native grasses (Indian grass and big bluestem).

The best thing about a sidewalk to nowhere is that it will eventually break up and make room for plants to grow.

Retention basins vary a great deal in how wet they remain inbetween rains. Some receive seepage from underground, which helps keep the ground wet and allows a greater variety of plant species to survive. Where there's good moisture, you can see small rushes and sedges already growing (dark clumps in photo), despite the frequent mowing.

One basin that has particularly great potential is just down from the office complex on Ewing Street. With the Princeton Charter School next door, it would make a great educational asset for the school if planted with native floodplain species. My efforts to interest the out-of-state owner in substituting habitat for turf were unsuccessful, but it was worth a try.

Severe Tree Pruning

A couple years ago, it seems that someone came through the neighborhood telling homeowners they had dangerous trees that needed to be pruned or taken down. One neighbor, apparently moved by fear or the low price, had a silver maple trimmed back to the trunk. The tree had a couple sprouts on its trunk last year, but otherwise no sign of rebound. The best one could say, on its behalf, is that it is storing some carbon, and may prove a good host for woodpecker food. Perhaps its slender shadow could be used to tell time.

Severe pruning is practiced in Europe, particularly along narrow city streets where trees need to be kept small, but obviously there's an art to it, and I have yet to meet a trained American arborist who would say anything good about the approach.

Goulds to Speak Tonight On Animal Navigation

One highly fortuitous place to find yourself at 7pm tonight (Tuesday) is in the Princeton Public Library Community Room, where Jim and Carol Grant Gould will be giving a presentation on animal navigation. An article by Linda Arntzenius in the current U.S.1 publication provides an excellent introduction to this local couple's life and work.