Fountain Park--Ancestral Connection to an Eternal Spring

It is my sister-in-law Edna, not my siblings and I, who has taken particular satisfaction in researching our family's ancestry. She traced one lineage on my father's side back to Lord Hempleman of Hesse-Kassel. If my parents had known there was a Lord in our family's past, they might have called on me to show more regal bearing as a kid. Though it's flattering to learn of some royal ancestry, the most exciting find was another lineage, on my mother's side, extending seven generations back to an eternal spring located one hundred miles west of Princeton. 

In Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania, there is a fountain that flows nonstop, year-round, without aid of any pump. It's water rises from a spring perched on the hillside, then flows down the hill to a fountain where residents of the town still come to have a drink.

The fountain was part of an innovative underground system of wooden pipes that transported water from the spring down one side of a valley and up the other to provide drinking water in wooden troughs on the town square. 

According to some literature:

"The water company in Schaefferstown has the oldest gravitational conveyance system by underground pipes in the United States. The water system was constructed sometime between 1744 and 1750 by the founder of the town, Alexander Schaeffer."

It's also called "the oldest Chartered Waterworks still in operation in the United States."

This ancestral connection has all sorts of resonance in my life. Water holds an attraction for most people, but in my life it has been a recurring theme. I grew up near beautiful Lake Geneva, WI, got a masters degree in water quality, founded a watershed association, turned a soggy field in a public park into a wetland garden, dug a series of miniponds in my backyard, and favor wildflowers that thrive in wet soil. As a kid walking home from school when winter was finally giving way to spring, I loved to build dams out of wet snow to hold back the snowmelt along the curb. Clearly, all this time Alexander Schaeffer's genes have been whispering encouragement to his great-great-great-great-great grandson.

The eternal spring is in a park that also feels eternal, appropriately called Fountain Park, 

Halfway up the hillside is the spring house, which looks more like a mound of earth, with a wall on the bottom end, its own picket fence

and its own caretaker--one in a long line of caretakers dating back to the mid-1700s

Peer in through the door in the wall, 

and you'll find what looks like a small indoor swimming pool--a durably crafted stone chamber where the water collects before flowing down to the fountain. 

One enduring mystery, which I'm hoping a hydrogeologist who strays upon this post can explain, is why springs tend to emerge not at the bottom of a hill but halfway down. 

Climb up this hill and you quickly reach the top, where there hardly seems to be enough land to feed such a copious and consistent spring--not much more than a small farm field, with the land beyond lower and flowing off in different directions. 

German immigrant Alexander Schaeffer laid out the town in a way reminiscent of those he knew in Europe, and initially called it Heidelberg, after one of the most beautiful cities in Germany. 

Water from the spring still feeds troughs along Market Street, bringing back memories of ancient Roman water works seen in Italy.

The park is owned and maintained by residents of Market Street. Buy a house on Market Street, and you also become part owner and steward of the park. 

While in town, I met one of the owner/stewards, Ann Ginder, who gave me some copies of this pamphlet. At the time--my visit was in 2018--her husband, Andy, was president of the group of residents along the street who take care of Fountain Park. Carl "Cork" Meyer, who I didn't meet, is the one who does most of the physical work to maintain the park. 

On the town square, Alexander Schaeffer built what still stands as a tavern called Franklin House, and it was there that I met what proved to be a distant cousin of mine, Howard Kramer. Our ancestral connection to each other and the town's founder can be tracked back via gravestones variously populated with names like Meyer, Moyer, and Meier. Ann Ginder calls Howard the "unofficial mayor" of Schaefferstown.

Schaeffer's house and farm on the outskirts of town are being restored as a historic site, with summer festivals to celebrate the town's history. It's not just the unique drinking water system and a long line of advocates and stewards that has saved the town's historical features. As one website explains,

"Because the area was left isolated from rail lines, canals, and modern highways, the town did not grow appreciably in the 19th or 20th centuries. This greatly influenced the small-town look and feel that the area maintains today."

Thanks to my sister-in-law Edna for discovering our ancestral link to this special place, founded by my great-great-great-great-great grandfather. And thanks to those who care enough to cherish and sustain that history. Howard wrote to me that "years ago there was a steady line of people getting their drinking water here and at the fountain mid-way up Market St." Even now, with all the world's turbulence, radical change, and myriad threats to what we once thought of as forever, there is an improbable spring perched above a Pennsylvania valley where the water still flows.

Native Bamboos Once Common in the Southeastern U.S.

This post isn't about the tall bamboo you often see growing around town. That would be golden bamboo (Phyllostachys aurea), native to southeast China, cultivated in Japan for centuries, and first introduced to the United States in the 1880s. In our neighborhood, I sometimes see people of asian descent harvesting its young shoots in the spring. (If you're looking for a clever way to get rid of it, or want to eat it, or both, scroll through my various previous posts that actually ARE about the nonnative golden bamboo.) 

Nor is this post about the bamboo you are confronted with when you pull out of the Spring Street parking garage behind the Princeton Public Library. That one's probably the nonnative arrow bamboo (Pseudosasa japonica), which lacks the towering, thick stems. Instead, it grows into a dense mop of evergreen foliage, seldom rising much beyond ten feet high. It's rarely seen in Princeton, but was a common feature in neighborhoods where I used to live, further south in the piedmont, in Durham, NC. We'd find it thriving in shade, and in that Princeton back alley it does an excellent job of screening the homes beyond it from the sight of cars pulling out of the parking garage day and night. 

This post IS about what that patch of arrow bamboo reminded me of: native bamboos. Yes, there are native bamboos that once dominated vast stretches of the southeastern U.S., but which are now largely lost from the landscape.

The photo shows a patch of native bamboo, cane so-called (Arundinaria sp.), that I planted 20 years ago in a nature preserve we created in Durham, NC. Called "17 Acre Wood," the neighborhood preserve straddles Ellerbe Creek--good floodplain habitat for native cane. A scientist with the Natural Resource Conservation Service, Roger Hansard, had given me the plant. (He was also the one who showed me the last remnant of another little known, long-lost feature of the eastern U.S.--extensive native grasslands. There once was a great native meadow just south of Princeton, called Maidenhead Meadows.) 

Prior to western settlement, early European explorers in what is now North Carolina documented not the unbroken forest of lore, but a mosaic of grasslands, forest, and canebrakes. The canebrakes were dominated by native bamboos. 

There are three species of native bamboo. A Name That Plant article gives a quick overview of native (Arundinaria sp.) and nonnative bamboos in the U.S.. 

Differences in distribution and vegetative characteristics help to distinguish among Arundinaria species and from non-native species. Typically river cane is more widely distributed in the southeastern US, switch cane in coastal plains and lower elevations, and hill cane in higher elevations (Appalachian Mountain region).

The Tennessee Conservationist has an excellent writeup on the river cane that until the 1700s formed "the dominant ecosystem in the Cumberland River valley." Dense stands of river cane, growing from 5-40 feet tall, served as important resources for American Indians, excellent forage for bison and later cattle, and hiding places for escaped slaves. They postulate that some of these massive canebrakes were the result of cane reclaiming corn fields abandoned by "prehistoric Mississippian peoples" many centuries prior, as major droughts led to the breakup of an early civilization. In turn, the canebrakes proved easier than forests for newly arrived western settlers to turn into farm fields.

If you've never seen bamboo blooming, it's because it can grow for decades without blooming at all. Then a year finally comes when the whole patch will bloom at once, then die. I've seen a whole city block suddenly die in this way. 

The cluster of roots and leaves of native bamboo that I planted alongside Ellerbe Creek some 20 years ago in Durham has grown into a patch 30 wide. Maybe someone will come along and use it as a source for replanting the Cane Creeks of the world, named for what was once abundant and now is seldom seen.

That's what I was reminded of a few weeks ago, pulling out of the Spring Street parking garage next to the public library.

A Rose Blooms in Brooklyn

 Quite the surprise, arising the morning of January 1st,

to find a rose blooming in a Brooklyn backyard. My first thought on this first day was, "Why is this rose blooming? Doesn't it know it's winter?" And such a large, beautiful rose!

Then I looked up and was surprised again, by two tall towers--iron exclamation points--rising along the back fence between two backyards in this row of brownstones. "What were those towers?," I asked my hosts.

Turns out that long ago, these towers anchored an elaborate web of clotheslines that stretched back to the apartments. I'm guessing the lines were mounted on pulleys, so that residents could hang laundry all the way out to the towers, then "pulley" it on back when it was dry.

It looked something like this--not unlike a harbor full of miniature sailboats. 

Sailing and line drying clothes are both ways to collaborate with nature. Both require being tuned in, aware of the outdoors, alert to shifts in the wind and the weather. Lacking an outdoor clothesline, I can still collaborate by hanging my clothes on a rack, then return the next day to find that nature has effortlessly dried them. 

Machines have stolen us away from collaborations with nature, yet, embedded in concrete, these iron towers remain, soaring skyward like the masts of idled sailboats, still standing ready to launch us back to a more sustainable lifestyle. Patiently indifferent to a changed world, they teach the rose to bloom in January.

More about what it was like to hangdry clothes out the back window can be found in a post on Ephemeral New York. 

Handling Rainwater Runoff in My Yard--a Video

I was one of the hosts for a highly successful Green House Tour in Princeton this summer, organized by the Princeton Environmental Commission (PEC) and Sustainable Princeton. While other tours were of homes that demonstrate how to shift away from fossil fuel dependence, my tour was of my yard, and all the ways to utilize rainwater runoff to feed native plants in the landscape. The organizers made four excellent videos of the various tours, including one of my yard, below. Devan Sekaria did the filming, with editing mentorship by Seth Mellman.

 (A good companion piece to the video is a post from ten years ago about how to incrementally shift your lawn to garden, called "The Incredible Shrinking Lawn, Thanks to Cardboard.")

Default Landscapes That Lack the Touch of a Human Hand

Much of the land in central Jersey has been highly traumatized, first by agriculture, then by suburbanization and invasive species. During the agricultural era, plowing erased the land's memory of what it once had been, not altogether unlike the erasure of Native American culture through forced assimilation. On this traumatized land now live many people who have lost connection to the land around them. Land that long ago lost its memory--its seedbank of native species that once flourished upon it--has now lost the touch of a human hand. 

Tended only by machines, this landscape of turf and tiny cannonball shrubs is what can be called a cultural default landscape, with closely mowed and trimmed plants kept in an eternal infantile state. The values expressed here are neatness and simplicity. Nature, being neither neat nor simple, becomes the tacit enemy of the suburban landscape. Subdivisions like this remind me of the motels we would plop down on the Monopoly board.

Heightening the sense of disconnection, this development, with houses dropped on the land as if they were spaceships from another planet, also lacks any clear physical connection to other developments around it. West Windsor at some point becomes East Windsor, their names suggesting they are west or east of something, and yet Windsor itself--once called Centerville because it is located at the center of the state--has barely 300 residents. 

In Princeton, there is more sense of connection, with a downtown nearby, and a few trees have grown up, but otherwise the default anti-nature landscape of house plus sterile lawn tended by machines is the same.

Here is another cultural default landscape, and by that I mean a landscape whose relative sterility is enforced by engrained cultural expectations. This is perhaps the largest detention basin I have ever seen, meant to capture runoff next to a public school. My guess is that the school cannot use the area for sports, and no one will think to turn it into a meadow, so it is destined to remain a barren mowed lawn in perpetuity.

Surprisingly, this large field across the street from the mansions has been left to grow up in broomsedge--a native grass. Not a high quality grassland by any stretch, but the less frequent (probably annual) mowing at least allows the grasses to reach sexual maturity.

Over near the hospital in Plainsboro, a vacant field demonstrates another kind of default landscape, where engrained cultural imperatives of farm or turfgrass have ceded control to invasive species. Cultural abandonment allowed three classic weeds to move in: mugwort, Chinese bushclover, and late flowering thoroughwort. Those first two are nonnative, with the mugwort being crowned "most likely to succeed" in abandoned fields. 

It is astonishing to witness the hegemony that mugwort can achieve. Monocultural stands of mugwort stretch for miles along roadsides in the Plainsboro area. This can be called an invasive species default, in which aggressive nonnative species fill the void left by past agricultural trauma followed by neglect. 

Chinese bushclover appears to be newer on the scene in NJ. In the North Carolina piedmont, where I used to live, this highly aggressive species was planted by the Dept. of Transportation to reduce erosion along roadsides. Solving one problem, the DOT created another, as Chinese bushclover has since invaded native grasslands across the eastern U.S., and is now displacing other species along rights of way and on vacant lots in the Princeton area.

How does one counter the cultural and invasive species defaults in our area? One approach is to knock out the worst of the invasive species--the mugwort, Phragmitis, and Chinese bushclover--and then plant deer-resistant natives like late flowering thoroughwort and wild senna. These in turn will produce seeds that can start shifting the seed bank back from nonnative to native. It's all we've had time for thus far, in this field next to Herrontown Woods, preserved but otherwise forgotten. Maybe one day it can be a shining example of a native grassland, that, unlike so many others, has received the steady, ongoing, healing touch of a human hand.

Our Color-Coded Forest -- v2023

Happy Thanksgiving to readers of Princeton Nature Notes, now 17 years old--the blog, that is, and maybe even some of the readers. I will be leading a nature walk this Sunday, Nov. 26, from 1-3pm, open to all. Meet at the main parking lot for Herrontown Woods, off Snowden Lane. I had hoped to show off what I call the color-coded forest, but a storm of heavy wind and rain stripped most shrubs of their remaining leaves. It will still be good to have a hike, though, and you can see in this post what area woodlands looked like until just a few days ago.

November is when woodlands turn into one of those paintings where you match the color to the number. It's a time when you can gaze into the distance and identify every woody plant by its color. For instance, in this photo of a woodland overlooking the canal in Kingston, check out the yellow in the upper right. That's what's left of the Norway maple leaves, which turn color later than the native maples, and seem to know no other color than yellow in the fall. And the green in the understory? That is bush honeysuckle--what I call the "second forest." It's still green because it evolved on a different continent with a different climate, and so its timing is different from the native flora in spring and fall.

Seen this past week from the cliff in Herrontown Woods, the color coding was much more complex, with non-native Photinia, winged euonymus, and bush honeysuckle mixing with native species.  

Here's a glorious dogwood along the red trail. 

Up on the ridge, the maple-leaved Viburnums develop subtle shadings.

In our "cultural zone" between the Barden and Veblen House, young white oaks turned a rich burgundy earlier in the month. I tell people it's called a white oak because it turns red in the fall. Red oaks mostly turn orange. Naturalists have been doing Stop Making Sense tours long before David Byrne got around to it.

And then there's Photinia villosa, which is both beautiful and concerning, given how densely it has come to dominate in areas across town in Mountain Lakes and the Institute Woods. A few specimens turn bright orange, while

most turn bright yellow, even when growing side by side. You won't see a Norway maple going rogue with orange in the fall.

Another shrub, related to Photinia but just starting to show up in our woods, is a mystery. I discovered it across town fifteen years ago in Rogers Refuge, and even crack botanists have yet to put a name on it. 

Here you can see Photinia (yellow), American holly (evergreen), and in the foreground some sweetgum leaves (red). You can see how empowering the color coded forest is for distinguishing one species from another. 

Barberry is beautiful as well. If only wildlife could feast on beauty, we'd be all set.

Bush honeysuckle--here photographed mid-month with a background of pink winged euonymus--keeps its leaves longer than other nonnatives. Even after all that wind and rain, it could still be easily spotted, clinging to its leaves. 

A less common nonnative called jetbead (Rhodotypos scandens) has found its way into one area of Herrontown Woods near the little red barn. Like bush honeysuckle, it keeps its leaves late into the fall. Having blended in all summer, it suddenly becomes exposed this time of year, thanks to the color-coding.

Small patches of this unusual native grass, found thus far only in a couple spots along the ridge, are easily spotted now as well. 

You can see the long awn on the seed that gives this grass an attractive look, as if it has fancied itself up with long eyelashes. The coppery background leaf is beech, which will keep its leaves far into the winter, a reminder of November's color-coded artistry.

Past posts about the color-coded forest. 

Liz Cutler's Pressed Flower Art

This is a post to honor the work and artistry of one of Princeton's great environmental educators, Liz Cutler. I first knew Liz as founding director of the nonprofit OASIS (Organizing Action on Sustainability In Schools), which promoted sustainability at 23 area schools. As sustainability director at Princeton Day School, she organized school garden tours and climate summits focused on mobilizing and empowering the next generation. Once a year, PDS would send a hundred kids to Mountain Lakes for community workdays back when I was the resource manager there. Later, we served together on the Princeton Environmental Film Festival committee.

Since leaving PDS, Liz says she's been consulting with schools all over the country to help them become more environmentally sustainable. One particularly nice-sounding gig: she spent this past winter as Master Teacher-in-Residence at The Island School in The Bahamas helping their young faculty improve their teaching practice.

To her extraordinary environmental work has more recently been added extraordinary art, specifically pressed flower compositions. According to Liz, what "began as a meditation in 2020 has become a creative manifestation of my love of nature and of my life's work as an environmental educator." 

Less than two years after she started creating her many and varied compositions of pressed flowers, the Princeton Public Library hosted an exhibit of her work. 

She now has a website, LizCutlerPressedFlowers, where she makes prints of her original compositions available for purchase as lasting gifts. The website is an opportunity to check out all her lovely work, and includes a description of her process. Twenty percent of all proceeds go to benefit The Watershed Institute and the D&R Greenway Land Trust. 

The Pleasure and Aesthetics of Native Seed Collection

One of the more pleasurable and aesthetic outdoor experiences in the fall is gathering seeds. I claim no expertise, but adhere to one simple rule: let the stem below the seeds turn brown before harvesting. And harvest when the seeds are dry. Also, be messy. Let some of the seeds fall where they would have fallen if you hadn't come along to take some. Alright, that's three rules. But that last rule is especially enjoyable. How many times in your life have you been told to be messy? 

There are more official rules out there for seed collection, particularly of uncommon species, but nearly all the seeds I collect now are either from my backyard or the Botanical Art Garden, both of which I planted. It's gratifying to see these new populations of local genotypes thriving, and to expand their local presence further. 

The plants I harvest from tend to be generous towards a human tendency to procrastinate. Many species hold on to their seeds for months in the fall and into the winter. But the prettiest time to be picking them is sooner rather than later, as they become increasingly weathered and threadbare as winter progresses.

Harvest of wild senna, seen in the first photo at a lovely stage when the leaves contrast with the dark seed pods, can be postponed considerably, as the pods hold onto the seeds for months.

The bright, fluffy clusters of ironweed seeds are easy to identify on stems that can reach 8 feet.

Rose mallow hibiscus (Hibiscus moscheutos) holds its seeds in convenient cups. Best not to wait too long, because there's a slow attrition to spillage and insects as winter sets in.

As with other sedges, the seed clusters of morning star sedge (Carex grayi) will break apart as fall progresses. Some other local sedges with easily collectible seeds are squarrose sedge and fringed sedge.

The seeds of bottlebrush grass, attractively arranged along the stem, were already starting to fall off when I collected them in late October. Just grab the dried stem between thumb and finger and pull upward to strip the seeds. This is an attractive understory grass. 

The seeds of turtlehead (lower left in the photo) are still ripening, having shown their own form of procrastination, waiting until early fall to bloom.  

Collecting seed has extra meaning and purpose this fall, because many of them will be planted along a wooded slope in Herrontown Woods where a large clone of wisteria had pulled down some of the trees, creating openings where sun can reach the ground. Years of effort, particularly with the consistent, transformative work over the past year or two by volunteer Bill Jemas, has largely snuffed out the daunting wisteria clone that had taken over an acre or two, choking other growth as it steadily expanded along this broad hillside. It even somehow traversed the creek and was headed towards the Botanical Art Garden, adding another layer of urgency to knocking it out. Into the void created by our wisteria removal has come garlic mustard and stiltgrass, but this year we pulled those before they went to seed. 

With much of the slope now bare (the photo shows wisteria to the right, cleared areas to the left), it's time to introduce native plants. We could toss the seeds hither and yon, but I like to give them a better chance by being more deliberate. Deer are an issue, of course, given their appetite for native plants, and my plan is to plant seeds in small circles here and there, creating loci a couple feet wide. I like to scrape a thin layer of dirt away, scatter some seeds, then sprinkle some dirt on top and tamp it down. Then I'll place a 3 foot high plant cage around each circle. Those that grow inside the cage should be protected enough to mature and produce seed that can then scatter beyond the cage on its own in subsequent years. 

It's actually a good way to find out which species the deer leave alone, and which they munch on. We are, in a way, creating "deer feeders" by protecting a few plants inside the cages--plants that each year spread beyond the cages, where the deer can eat them. This approach has been successful at the Barden. Thanks to the town's investment in annual deer culling, many of the plants that sprout beyond the cage survive. 

Of course, all of this thus far is talk. Procrastination is a particularly powerful factor when it comes to getting plants or seeds in the ground. There's so much other work to be done! What's real and lovely, and has actually happened, is the seed collecting. 

The Fiery Look of Prairie Grasses in Fall

These little bluestem grasses (Schizachyrium scoparium), planted in front of town hall in Princeton, looked like they were on fire last week when backlit by morning sun. The last time I saw prairie grasses turn a fiery color in the fall was thirty years ago, when I lived in Ann Arbor, MI. Indian grass and big bluestem would turn bright yellow and orange at the base, making them look as if they were aflame. 

The mimicry of fire was fitting, because prairie grasses are adapted to thrive where periodic fires sweep through. Each fall, when they die back to the ground, they leave above them persistent remains ready to feed a fire. If no fire comes, that persistent dead foliage can get in the way the next spring, casting inhibiting shade on the new growth. 

No fire will sweep through this ornamental planting. Hopefully, someone will imitate fire to some extent by cutting the old stems to the ground next spring so the new stems can grow unhindered.

Little bluestem is shorter and more persistently erect than other prairie grasses like big bluestem and Indian grass, and so fits better into an ornamental planting. Here it is in the courtyard at Maplewood, a nearby retirement facility where our Onstage Seniors documentary theater group recently performed.

And here it is growing near the Princeton University soccer stadium along Fitzrandolph Road, mixed with switchgrass and other native grasses. 

The fiery version in front of town hall was surely a cultivated variety bred for especially dramatic color. But the prairie grasses in Ann Arbor that appeared to be aflame were wild. For some reason, perhaps a milder climate, the same species growing wild at Tusculum or along the gas pipeline right of way in Princeton don't attain that dramatic fall look. 

When I lived in Durham, NC, I often found additional species of native prairie grass persisting beneath powerlines, where they were spared the stifling shade of trees. One that was particularly beautiful when backlit was splitbeard bluestem. Its cottony-like seeds seemed to glow when they caught the autumn sunlight. 

It's good to see native prairie grasses showing up in plantings around town. The university seems to be learning how to maintain them better, which means catching the weeds early. Nice to be surprised by some sideoats grama poking through the fence at the soccer field.

 

Update on Native Butternuts and Chestnuts in Princeton

There's a lot of gratitude being expressed towards trees these days. The gratitude tends to be towards trees in general, but this fall, I'm especially grateful for three trees in particular. 

All three, growing at the TRI property, are among many that have been planted over the years by local nut tree expert Bill Sachs and me as part of an effort to bring back two marginalized native tree species. One is an American chestnut. The other two are butternuts. Both of these species have been laid low by introduced diseases, and I feel fortunate to be part of an effort to make them numerous once again in Princeton. 

The two butternuts at TRI bore a bumper crop this year, some 200 nuts--the first sizable harvest since the parents to these two trees were lost 14 years ago. One fell in a storm; the other ironically was cut down as part of an environmental remediation. It's Bill who played the role of Noah, growing new seedlings from the seeds we collected from the two trees before they were lost.

We planted other members of this new generation of locally sourced native butternut trees at Harrison Street Park, Herrontown Woods, Mountain Lakes, and Stone Hill Church. Bill in particular did a lot of the followup work, checking the cages that protected them from the deer, and serving as a one man bucket brigade to sustain the trees through droughts in their first couple years.

Bill also did a great deal of work to re-establish native chestnut trees in Princeton. That project began in 2010, when chestnut researcher Sandra Anagnostakis, of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station came to town to give a talk. She brought along 20 chestnut seedlings for us to plant in local parks. The seedlings were 15/16th native, 1/16th Japanese chestnut. Of all of those that Bill planted, at the Princeton Battlefield, TRI, Herrontown Woods, and Harrison Street Park, only the one tree at TRI has borne fruit. Many of the hybrid trees have died, despite the effort to breed in resistance. 

There have been some other efforts to get the American chestnut growing again in Princeton, by the Friends of Princeton Open Space at Mountain Lakes and also by arborist Bob Wells at Greenway Meadows. The best bet for repopulating our world with the American chestnut may well lie in research that led to inserting a gene from wheat into the American chestnut genome that confers resistance. This seems a much more dependable and faster way to embed resistance to the fungus, and bring back this spectacularly useful native tree. 

In the meantime, we can celebrate the hard-won harvest we're getting from this new generation of native nut trees, and after letting them cure a bit will even get to find out what a butternut tastes like.

Related posts

From 2021: Butternut Redux--A New Generation Bears its First Crop

From 2010: The American Chestnut Returns to Princeton

Lorenz Hiltner--Plant Scientist and Potential Relative

A few years ago, my brother, Bill Hiltner, got interested in running a farm-scale composting operation near where we grew up in Wisconsin. Having degrees in physics and chemistry, he's the kind of guy who would be drawn to wondering what actually goes on inside a compost pile. Before long, he came across the research that another Hiltner had been doing a century prior. 

Lorenz Hiltner, according to an article published in the professional journal Plant and Soil, was "a pioneer in rhizosphere microbial ecology and soil bacteriology research" and the first scientist to coin the term "rhizosphere," back in 1904. 

"Due to Lorenz Hiltner's research on the biological basis of soil fertility, which places soil organisms and the humic content of soils in central focus, he is recognized today as one of the founders of applied microbiology and organic farming."

One of the founders of organic farming? A Hiltner? Not that we've managed to trace any clear genealogical link, but maybe some inherited genes inclined me to start growing organic vegetables in high school, and then teach organic gardening at a summer camp called Innisfree in northern Michigan. Maybe it was some sort of genetic echo that caused me to read the 15th printing of Rodale's Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening as if it were a bible, and revel in the richness and earthy aroma of leaf mold three feet deep where the landscape crew at Yerkes Observatory had deposited big mounds of leaves each fall for decades. Or maybe it was just coming of age in the 1970s. 

Lorenz Hiltner "was born on November 30, 1862, in Neumarkt, Upper Palatinate (Oberpfalz), Bavaria, as the first son of a master in acetic acid fermentation and gastronome." A Wikipedia entry describes his father in less lofty terms, as "a vinegar maker and innkeeper." By 1885, Lorenz had completed his academic studies, and in 1896, he and a colleague patented a means of "'vaccinating' legume seeds with pure cultures of nodule bacteria," according to wikipedia. The inoculant was called "Nitragin."

Most of his research he performed in the Bavarian Agriculture-Botanical Institute in Munich, where he was the director from 1902 to 1923, building the institute from four employees up to 90. The Institute's mission was to support agricultural practices in Bavaria, but scientists came from all over the world to learn from his experience. According to wikipedia, "Until 1904, his institution was the only place in the world that supplied "vaccine bacteria" to farmers. At the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Hiltner and his Agricultural Botanical Institute were awarded a gold medal." (Note: The article and wikipedia both say St. Louis, Michigan, but the Worlds Fair that year was in Missouri.)

Another quote from the article makes him sound particular relevant to today's intense interest in the give and take between tree roots and other life in the soil. While we focus on how trees and other plants support life above ground, it would seem they also give as much as they get from the soil beneath them, sending the overabundance of their photosynthetic production downward to feed soil life. 

"Hiltner became convinced that root exudates of different plants support the development of different bacterial communities. His definition of the rhizosphere in the year 1904 centered on the idea that plant nutrition is considerably influenced by the microbial composition of the rhizosphere."

Lorenz Hiltner was part of the great European tradition of cutting edge research that was the envy of American scientists early in the 20th century. In researching the lives of my "adopted ancestors", American mathematician Oswald Veblen and atomic physicist Walter Colby--both of whom traveled frequently to Europe as the century began, wishing to emulate the great institutions of learning they found there--I see a contrast in trajectories. As the U.S. rose in prominence and innovation, European scientists became increasingly hampered by political conflict and instability, even before the Nazi rise and WWII. 

Always working to advance research and apply it to people's everyday needs, Lorenz Hiltner sought to make the best of the worsening political conditions. During WWI, he "conducted intensive studies on alternative food sources for men and livestock to prevent disastrous consequences of the famine in Germany." "After the war, he managed to start his scientific journal again in 1921 despite the problems with the unstable situation and ongoing revolution and counterrevolution in Munich."

His scientific contributions were deemed worthy of a centennial symposium. From the article: 

"In the centennial symposium of Hiltner’s definition of the “Rhizosphere” in Munich in September 2004, more than 450 scientists gave tribute to his founding work on the rhizosphere and presented studies that continue on many of the ideas first brought to light by Hiltner."

He died unexpectedly, of a stroke while in his office, 100 years ago at this writing, on June 6, 1923. His work was continued by his eldest son, Erhard. Regardless of whether we discover an ancestral connection, I'm feeling some kinship.