Comeback Chestnuts and Butternuts in Princeton

On the 7th day of the 7th month, when the Brits via Andy Murray came back after 77 years to reclaim the Wimbledon men's tennis title, I took a hike with arborist Bob Wells to see some of the comeback kids he had found along the Princeton Ridge, in the form of native chestnuts and butternuts. Bob had recently conducted a tree inventory for Princeton, completing the township portion that can then be merged with the borough's. Along the way, he found a chestnut and a couple butternuts--species that have been laid low by introduced diseases. The number of naturally occurring specimens known to still be growing in Princeton can be counted on one hand.

I found Bob sitting in the woods near Bunn Drive with his dog, Mongo. While waiting for me, he had counted 21 woody species around him, a testament to the Ridge's diversity. Multiple kinds of hickories, maples and oaks, a beech tree, ironwood, cherry, tulip poplar, black birch, sweetgum, two kinds of Viburnum, witchhazel--learn to identify trees and you'll never be alone in the woods.

One of the other species was a solitary American chestnut tree of 6 inch diameter,

its distinctive leaves backlit by the afternoon sun.

One branch appeared already to have succumbed to the blight that laid waste this once dominant species of the eastern forests. The species as a whole went underground, its roots surviving, sending up suckers that would in time be killed off by the blight. Bob wasn't sanguine about this particular tree's chances, but at least it's still there, a century since the species was stricken by imported disease, still growing towards the sun.

Our next stop was further up the road, where clearing for the new Westerly Road Church had left a tall, gangly butternut out in the open. Though the native butternut (Juglans cinerea), also known as white walnut, was never a dominant species, and Princeton is on the southern edge of its range, its numbers have been reduced still further by an imported fungus.

Bob double checked the book's description. Thirteen leaflets, positioned opposite and stalkless, fit well,

and the dark brown pith. The trunk being hollow, Bob wasn't too optimistic about this tree's longterm chances, either, but to find a survivor is always reason for hope.

Heading around the bend onto Herrontown Road, Bob pointed out the thinned out foliage of a number of ash trees. Ash dieback, ash decline, something's going on with Princeton's ashes, and not much is known about the cause. Thinking it might be the arrival of the Emerald Ash Borer, the Asian insect accidentally introduced into Michigan that has been devastating ash trees on its way east, Bob arranged to have some traps set in the area. Results were negative.

To know and love trees is to realize that we cannot take our forests for granted, that behind the facade of static green is a shifting drama of competition, predicted demise, potential comeback, and mystery as engaging on its time scale as any sport. People play negative or sometimes positive roles in this high-stakes game. The easy accident of introducing a new disease to America is followed by a very long and hard struggle to save the species that are then pushed to the brink.

Our last stop was Autumn Hill Reservation, where Bob led me to a healthy butternut back in the woods, with room in the canopy to grow. I thought I saw another some 100 feet further off the trail, with impenetrable brush impeding our effort to confirm.

The bark of a butternut has a distinctive weave to the ridges. As you can see they've been known to sport a green trail marker, though they receive less compensation than famous athletes with product logos attached.

A few days later, I showed these trees to local nut tree expert, Bill Sachs, who has been growing and reintroducing American chestnuts and butternuts in various Princeton parks. He had located three butternuts growing naturally in Princeton, two of which have since been lost--one to a chainsaw, the other to flood and wind. Bob's discoveries bring the number back to three, plus all the seedlings Bill has grown.

We loppered our way through the invasive brush to reach what I had thought was an additional butternut 100 feet off the trail. A closer look proved it to be a black walnut.

Butternuts need more than one tree in order to bear nuts. The hope is that these few survivors have some level of resistance to the attacking fungi, and if we can start new groupings of these trees that will then bear seeds, these species can be coaxed back from the brink, to take their rightful place in Princeton's future.

Naked Coffee Trees on Harrison Street

Here's one of the last holdouts from spring, still in its wintry hunch, bare limbs stark against a cloudy sky. Plants, like many authors and movie stars, have two names. The common name for this not very common tree is Kentucky Coffee Tree, which refers to the resemblance its seeds bear to coffee beans. It's scientific name is Gymnocladus dioicus, which may refer to its way of losing leaves early in the fall and sprouting them late in the spring. Gymno means naked.

Cool Beans!

Why does that expression haunt me so? I've heard it used maybe twice in my life, in situations where "That's great!" might suffice. I resist using it, but it keeps coming to mind. It's nonsensical, but something in its sound and double exclamation fits the feeling. One entry in the Urban Dictionary, describing the phrase's origins, suggests I'm not alone in my quandary:

"The phrase then spread like a virus, infecting the vernacular of people of older and younger generations regardless of gender..."

Finally, however, a situation has come along where it fits perfectly. We found these cool, wild beans along the canal during a recent nature walk. They are (affectionately?) known as hog peanuts. Scientists endearingly refer to them as Amphicarpa bracteata. Cool beans expresses it better. They are fairly common in nature preserves, but rarely do they get enough sunlight to flower and bear fruit.

There's another cool wild bean in Princeton, called ground nut, which not only produces beans but also an edible tuber. At the FOPOS mini-greenhouse, we've started growing them from seed, in an effort to make them more common in the Princeton landscape.

The Missing Mildfire in Australia

Repetition is a powerful force in our culture. For many people, a lie can be turned into the truth simply by saying it over and over. And one of the lies we are told over and over, even in well-intended daily news reporting, is that fire is the enemy of the forest. It's a lie of omission, a one-sided portrayal that leaves readers with a false impression, time and time again.

The reality is much more interesting. Many species are adapted to periodic fire, and languish without it. Pines of various kinds in the U.S. and eucalyptus in Australia have evolved clever adaptations to encourage and survive fire. Depending on the species, they may shed leaves or bark that resist decomposition, and thus accumulate on the forest floor to carry a fire along. Ever wonder why oak leaves are slower to decompose than maple leaves? Oaks gain advantage from periodic fire, and have thick bark to protect the trees from the fires that their persistent leaves promote. Many kinds of pines and eucalyptus have "serotinous" cones or capsules that release seeds only after being heated. The seeds drop to the ground after a fire has swept through, make contact with the newly exposed soil, and then the seedlings prosper in the ash fertilizer and more open conditions a fire leaves behind.

Fire-dependent trees and prairie grasses depend on periodic small scale fires. These mildfires, as I like to call them, burn cooler, so they don't sterilize the soil. They burn lower, so they don't spread to the canopy. Fire-dependent trees and herbaceous plants quickly spring back to life once the fire has swept through. Periodic burning makes the forest safe, by burning through fallen branches and leaves. If left unburned, these fuels can accumulate to dangerous levels and cause the truly destructive fires we've seen in California and Australia. Fire-dependent forests, then, accumulate a congestion of persistent leaves and other fuel that can become dangerous if not relieved by the cleansing and renewal that periodic mildfire brings. A parallel can be seen in people who lack a healthy outlet for feelings that otherwise build up.

Smokey Bear, then, needs to be fired, so to speak. At the same time, fire can be dangerous, and mustn't be casually started. How does one use a potentially dangerous tool to keep fire-adapted forests safe? In the U.S., people are trained to do carefully planned and prescribed "fuel-reduction" burns. It's a necessary but cumbersome approach, and the result is that many forests that need mildfire go unburned.

The situation is greatly complicated by irresponsible homeowners who build in fire-prone landscapes. A recent NY Times article offered an apt description:

" ... many people are putting themselves at risk by building homes in remote, fire-prone areas without taking essential steps to make the homes fire-resistant, like installing metal roofs. Extensive research shows that wildfires will usually leave properly built and maintained homes with little damage, but rural communities have hesitated to adopt strict building codes. 

“People like to do whatever they damn well please on their own land,” said Timothy Ingalsbee, a former firefighter who now runs an advocacy group,Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics and Ecology. “But when a wildfire comes, they’re calling Uncle Sam saying, ‘Please, come save me.’”

The article gave a portrait of a less cumbersome approach used by the aborigines in northern Australia. As was done in North America centuries ago, aborigines use mildfire to tame and stimulate the forests they inhabit.

The article carries an important message:

"Far from being calamities, fires are now seen by many experts as essential to improving the long-term health of the forests, thinning them and creating greater variability on the landscape. Yet that awareness has yet to penetrate the public consciousness. People still think forest fires are bad and expect the government to try to stamp them out, even in remote wilderness areas. Federal and state firefighting costs in some years approach $2 billion."

Why, as the article states, has the public remained unaware that these conflagrations are caused by a lack of beneficial fire in the landscape? I offered one reason in a comment on the article:

Since the massive Yellowstone fires of 1988, and probably well before, periodic articles such as this one have served as useful correctives, but they have had little impact on policy. One reason may be that the day to day reporting of wildfire continues to present fire as the enemy. That repetitive message has far more power than these periodic articles that say, "Oh, by the way, fire is actually an important part of fire ecology, and the real enemy is a dangerous buildup of fuel due to fire suppression."  

Nature is complex, while storylines are kept simple for easy consumption, and the result is a maintenance of the status quo that grows ever more costly and destructive. Knowing how important fire is for forest health, I read the daily reporting--which for some reason decides it's necessary to tell endless stories of victims while saying nothing about how nature works--and wonder how people are supposed to learn about fire ecology. The people who need to learn are not likely the ones reading this article. These periodic correctives are useful and important, but are not enough.

In a sense, the daily reporting that wrongly portrays fire as the enemy is like the accumulation of fuel on a forest floor that creates conditions for a periodic article whose insights into the ecological role of fire sweeps all the accumulated misconceptions away. This enduring cycle has its psychological satisfactions. It works for journalism, but works against the need for enlightened policy.

There's an important lesson about nature waiting to be learned by our culture. While the aborigines are immersed in nature, and see themselves as informed stewards of the complex forests they inhabit, we are largely disconnected from the natural world, and seek simple answers as to how nature works. Fire is categorized as bad, as is the carbon dioxide that is fueling the climate crisis. Yet fire and CO2 are important and elegant components of a functional nature. The real problem is too much of a good thing--fire so hot that it leaves in its wake a moonscape, and so much extra CO2 poured into the atmosphere that the planet becomes overheated and the oceans too acidic. Change, too, is a matter of amount. Though climate has changed through the eons, it is the unprecedentedly rapid pace of human-caused change that is proving particularly destructive. Journalism needs to find a way to convey these lessons, repeatedly, so that more than a peripheral few can learn.

I once heard a talk by the fire historian and author, Stephen Pyne. Grappling with a question about how best to time fire in the landscape, he stepped out of all the complexity of how to safely burn forests in populated areas, and imagined what he called a poet: someone off in a remote habitat, informed by knowledge, experience, and instinct, able to sense when the humidity, wind, and fuel loads of the forest were just right for a fire that would do the most good and the least harm. I often wondered who these poets might be. An article about how aborigines use fire may not change the world, but it offered evidence that the poets Stephen Pyne dreamed of are alive and well, if only clustered in one small part of Australia.

Optimism, Habitat, and Landscape

If people love trees so much, then how do we explain Jill Biden's choice for a painting that was part of Inauguration Day ceremonies in the Capitol rotunda. Painted by African American artist Robert Duncanson as the Civil War was looming, Landscape With Rainbow depicts a pastoral paradise in which a young couple and their cattle head back to a homestead blessed by a rainbow. 

A closer look reveals that the distant hills in the painting are forested, but it is pasture--albeit a bit overgrazed--that dominates this optimistic landscape. Though people love trees, we also love vistas, which trees are very good at blocking. Who hasn't climbed a mountain, expecting a grand vista at the top, only to find that trees have grown to block the view? 

It seems strange sometimes that communities don't actively seek to create and preserve vistas, given how pleasing they are. If people can see into the distance, maybe they'll think into the distance as well. A vivid memory from the Sourland Mountains, just up the road from Princeton, is a view of the Manhattan skyline. It came as a complete surprise, and was made possible only by the ongoing suppression of trees along the gas pipeline right of way that extends up and over the mountain ridge. Ideally, vistas would be made possible in our world by something less linear and fossil fuel-related than a pipeline, but our approach to managing preserved open spaces seldom offers an alternative means of creating areas that are more open. 

Also running counter to open space preservation norms, the focus of optimism in the painting is a house, embraced by nature, towards which the rainbow, people and animals all point. One approach to purchasing open space for preservation is to demolish any buildings left on a newly preserved property. We had to overcome this bias against buildings embedded in open space in the process of saving Veblen House and Cottage at Herrontown Woods. 

One question, then, is how to adjust the classic view of open space--as uninterrupted forest--to consider the clear attraction we have for the mosaic of habitats depicted in this painting, where people play an active role in the landscape. What is pleasing to people can also serve the needs of biodiversity. At the Botanical Art Garden at Herrontown Woods, we are actively preventing a forest opening from reverting to the deep shade that stifles the growth of so many native plant species less gifted with height. Succession to forest need not be considered the only natural destiny for a landscape. Historically, such forest openings would have been maintained by periodic fire, in what is called a fire-climax community. 

Though a deep forest of towering native trees can evoke a sense of awe and reverence, and deserves to be preserved, many areas of preserved open space are thick with stunted, second-growth trees. Add the typically dense layer of invasive shrubs and the effect becomes cluttered and claustrophobic. As the death of ash trees due to the Emerald Ash Borer opens up the forest canopy, we may want to manage some of these openings to create a more varied habitat. If the non-native invasive shrubs can be limited, and young trees kept from reclaiming the sunlight, there are many native shrubs that could flourish in a more illuminated understory. Spicebush, hazelnut, serviceberry, native azalea, blueberries, Viburnums, Hearts-a-burstin'--these are a few of the native shrubs that would bear abundant fruit for wildlife if given more sun. 

One of the most optimistic moments I had in my life had some parallels to the Duncanson painting. I was driving out of Washington, DC after picking up a passport. The president at the time was highly competent and believed in government, and the WhiteHouse gleamed brilliant white in the afternoon sun as I drove past. On the radio was a live broadcast of Copeland's Appalachian Spring, broadcast from the Library of Congress in honor of its premier performance there some 50 years earlier. Along the roadsides as city began to transition to countryside were prairie grasses, golden in autumn. The youthful roadside vegetation resonated with the music of spring's awakening, and a sense of the nation's promise. 

Grasslands, meadows, shrublands--these are the younger landscapes, whose dynamic growth happens at our own height rather than far above. Their flowers and foliage also serve the insect community through the summer when deep forest has gone floristically silent. The aim here is to become more strategic and discerning about trees, to determine where they are precious, and where they might best be managed to serve ecological and aesthetic goals. 

Last Chance to Pull Stiltgrass

This week and maybe next are your last chance this year to pull stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum). This mega-invasive is an annual, so the logic of countering its spread is to pull it before it can produce and drop seed. If the seeds haven't loosened yet at the end of the stalk, you can still pull it. Throw it in the trash, or if there's a lot, make a big pile of it so that any seeds that sprout the next year will all be in one place and easily covered or pulled. Definitely don't put it in your compost if its seeds are forming. If stiltgrass is just starting to invade your yard, pulling as completely as possible now will greatly limit its seedbank for next spring. Another strategy for large stands is to let the stiltgrass grow, then just as it begins to flower mow it short and hope its feeble roots don't have enough energy to grow another flowering stalk. 

For those fuzzy on identification, google lots of images, and look for the silver line running down the middle of the leaf. Stiltgrass can grow in the shade or sun, climb up to four feet, or thrive in a miniature state while ducking below your mower in the lawn. It's incredible survival skills include being incredibly inedible for wildlife. Stiltgrass gives nothing back to the habitats it increasingly dominates.

More on Stiltgrass, and a Success Story

Walking in the local woods, you've probably seen this kind of scene--what looks like a grassy meadow extending through the forest. In the filtered light of the understory, its simplicity and lushness may have some visual appeal. And yet, in some ways what you are looking at is the ecological equivalent of an urban food desert. 

Stiltgrass is an introduced plant that could be called a pervasive invasive, able to thrive most anywhere and dominate whole landscapes. Its success has come in part through being inedible. As wildlife selectively eat native vegetation, the stiltgrass expands, preventing the native plants from rebounding.

Unlike another nonnative annual weed that can look similar, crabgrass, stiltgrass becomes ubiquitous because it can thrive in sun or shade. That means the stiltgrass invading your lawn and flower beds can continue spreading ad nauseum into the nearby forest, or vice versa.

We used to call it bamboo grass--something in the shape of the leaves is reminiscent. The stiltgrass name refers to its angular growth, with each segment supporting the next as it climbs up and over fallen logs and other plants. Packing grass is another common name, referring to how it was once used to pack porcelain for shipment. That's probably how it first reached the U.S., in packing crates sent to Tennessee. 

When I first encountered it, growing on the bank of Ellerbe Creek in Durham, NC, I thought it graceful. Then came Hurricane Fran, bringing floods and fallen trees. In the aftermath of that massive disturbance, stiltgrass exploded in the landscape, expanding and ultimately choking forests with its vast, dense stands. New Jersey proved no different. 

Stiltgrass tends to establish itself along roadsides. Here it is growing in a green ribbon along Herrontown Road. Trails, too, provide an avenue for extending its reach, its tiny seeds carried on boots or the hooves of deer.

Though stiltgrass has covered large areas of woodland in the eastern U.S., we have found it worthwhile and even satisfying to counter its relentless incursions. Today in the Barden at Herrontown Woods, some volunteers pulled it out of a patch of native jewelweed along the edge of the parking lot. 

Nearby, on land where we have largely eliminated a massive clone of wisteria, stiltgrass was starting to move into the void. If nothing were done, this open woodland would have become a pasture of stiltgrass. But we have acted early enough to be able to remove all of this year's stiltgrass, dramatically reducing the seeds available for next year's crop. This photo shows the last patch before we pulled it. 

Interestingly, there are native grasses that look a little like stiltgrass, the main one being Virginia cutgrass (white grass), Leersia virginica. It has longer, narrower leaves that lack the silver stripe down the middle. As is a common ecological refrain, the native grasses "play well with others," not forming stiltgrass's massive, exclusionary stands. Some smartweeds like Lady's Thumb can also bear a resemblance. 

Last Chance to Pull Stiltgrass

Late August and early September mark the last opportunity to pull Japanese stiltgrass before it goes to seed. An annual grass that was introduced from Asia, and which wildlife show no interest in eating, stiltgrass has taken over large swaths of the forest understory in Princeton, as well as many yards.  We called it bamboo grass when we first noticed it in the 1990s, back when I was living in the piedmont of North Carolina. It was also called packing grass, because it had in the past been used to pack porcelain coming from Asia. That's probably how it got a foothold in the U.S. 

The stiltgrass name fits when it extends it seedheads this time of year, appearing to climb up and over other vegetation, as if on stilts. Height tends to be around 2-4 feet, though it can even spread into lawns and somehow survive and reproduce as a miniature version a few inches high.

In late summer in the forest, it looks like this, ready to flower, bear abundant seed, then die. This is actually one of the smaller patches. In some invaded areas, stiltgrass extends through the forest as far as the eye can see.

In late summer, stiltgrass can form monocultures along wooded roadsides, thriving on the extra runoff from the pavement. 

Many people assume that since stiltgrass is so widespread, nothing can be done other than to wait a few hundred or thousand years for something to evolve to prey upon it and bring its numbers into balance with all the other kinds of plants currently drowning beneath this inedible green wave of supergrowth.

But there are many areas of Princeton where stiltgrass is just beginning to invade. Many yards still don't have it, or have small enough amounts to pull. Being an annual with weak roots, it is very easy to pull, and satisfying progress can be made if you have a small patch or many hands.

My strategy is to pick my spots, preferably pull it by late August, before it begins to flower, and just leave it on the ground to dry out. But even in September it can be pulled before the seeds begin to fall off. If it is already blooming and forming seeds, then either bag the pullings for the trash or, if you don't want to add to the landfill, pile it in one spot where any seedlings next year will be concentrated and easily dealt with.

We have made considerable progress in diminishing its presence at the Botanical Art Garden in Herrontown Woods, simply through persistent pulling to markedly reduce the production of seed. 

A friend at the NC Botanical Garden has found that large patches of stiltgrass can be treated effectively, before seed production, with a very dilute (0.5 %) solution of herbicide. Annual plants don't invest much in roots, and stiltgrass's weak root structure makes it more susceptible to systemic herbicide than perennial plants that may be interspersed. 

Here's what it looks like when it's going to seed. Stiltgrass seedheads look a bit like crabgrass, which is also an introduced annual that gets a late start in the spring and then seeds in late summer. What makes stiltgrass an aggressive invader of woodlands is its capacity to thrive both in sun and shade. 

On a recent walk along the Princeton ridge in Herrontown Woods, I found stiltgrass fairly early in its invasion, just beginning to form sizable patches.  Interspersed was a native grass with similar appearance--Virginia cutgrass--and it's interesting to note that the native grass, while common, does not form the large, exclusionary patches that the introduced species does. 

It's a challenge to tell the two apart. Most homeowner's yards won't have the native Virginia cutgrass, but it's interesting to compare. Here is Japanese stiltgrass, which also goes by the latin name Microstegium vimineum.

Here is Virginia cutgrass (Leersia virginica), with its longer, narrower leaves and more spread-out seedhead. 

Stiltgrass leaves often have a stripe down the middle.

Virginia cutgrass does not.

Once you start taking a closer look at the grasses along the ridge, you may notice the subtle differences between one species and another. Here's a native grass that I haven't learned the name of as yet. You can see that it has dense clusters of short leaves, in contrast to the others.

A look-alike homeowners are more likely to see is a nonnative smartweed called "lady's thumb," which has a cluster of pink flowers at the end. This photo shows lady's thumb at the bottom and stiltgrass growing up and to the left. Both are easy to pull.

Previous post on this subject: Stiltgrass's Annual Trillion Seed Initiative.

Urban Beekeeping

An interesting article on growing honey bees in the city. It's now legal in some places. I know someone who has a beehive in his suburban garage, with a little hole in the back wall for them to come and go.

In particular, one beekeeper interviewed says that, if you grow bees, you start thinking like a bee and want to transform the landscape to make it more bee-friendly. If there's a beekeeper in the neighborhood, fruit trees bear more fruit, including arctic kiwi--a frost tolerant version of the fruit that grows in northern latitudes. (A friend tells me at least one Princeton resident is growing them--kiwis, that is--with very good results.) Bees, then, can help in the process of re-imagining a neighborhood.

I was surprised to learn, back in the early '90s when the honeybee population crashed due to an introduced mite, that honey bees are not native to America. The photo, from a 2008 post, shows a couple honeybees mixed with some native pollinators on the flowers of boneset, a native wildflower that becomes the insect world's favorite food court every August.

A Botanist's Revisiting of Central Park

Enter New York's Central Park across from the Natural History Museum, and you're likely to come upon one of the giant rocks where kids climb. For a parent whose kids have grown, it's a chance to gaze at the changing skyline in the distance (taller, skinnier), and remember back some distance to that parental mixture of worry and delight as a young daughter explored the sometimes precipitous contours of this massive boulder.

For many people, this spot may not offer much beyond rock, water, and skyline softened by an undifferentiated sea of green foliage.

But for a botanist and wild gardener, this place evokes so much more. That tree on the left in the first photo is a serviceberry (Amelanchier) that in early June is loaded with ripe berries. I gorged while the incurious streamed by on their way to rocks and water.

A massing of cup-plants under a sycamore tree brought back memories of where I first encountered this towering native wildflower, growing untended next to a dumpster in the parking lot of Mark Twain's historic house in Hartford, CT.

The sight of royal fern (Osmunda regalis) brings back memories of all the other places I've seen it, whether planted in my yard or growing wild, back in the depths of Herrontown Woods.

This Virginia sweetspire looks very much like the one in my front yard, but with a grander backdrop, and brings back memories of the one time I saw it growing in the wild, along the banks of the Eno River in North Carolina.

These rosemallow hibiscus are offering little in mid-June to catch the untrained eye, but recognizing them without flowers links Central Park to my backyard, the edges of the Millstone River headwaters, and everywhere else I've seen this native hibiscus growing. Familiarity with the plant in all stages also makes it possible to "see" the big, broad flowers that will come in July. For a seasoned wild gardener, that is, a gardener who has been through all the seasons with this or that plant, the present is enriched by the past and future it holds within it.

The community of plants near the climbing rock--native shrubs and wildflowers that thrive with wet ground below and sun above--is what we've propagated into many areas of Princeton, but Central Park adds the framing of the skyline, rock outcroppings and water. To see it there, or in the parks of Chicago during a recent visit, is to bear witness to a recurring community gathering, each member with its quirks. Buttonbush, with its buttons of forming seeds, is in this particular photo. Many others are not shown, like Joe Pye Weed, lizard's tail, cutleaf coneflower, Helenium, New England aster, cardinal flower--their coevolution in the wild here emulated in a park.

So many steps it takes, to raise kids or raise an enriching awareness of plants, which in turn brings meaning and memory to every new step taken.

Early Autumn Vignettes

Nature can sometimes come in close in the fall. This wooly creature, the caterpillar of a great leopard moth, not to be confused with a wooly bear, showed up on the floor in a corner of our bathroom.

Perhaps it came in with some firewood stacked in the sunroom next to the bathroom. I meant to take the caterpillar outside, but got distracted, and found it the next day in the hallway beyond the family room. At that point, it was given transport out to the back corner of our yard, where it will presumably find some cover for the winter.

Bumble bees can get soporific in the fall, dozing on a flower as if they've forgotten their reason for being, which all but the queens may well have. This one landed on my hand while sitting outside a cafe on Nassau Street. Its curiosity seemed harmless enough.

Another surprise came while walking home on Moore Street. Pokeweed (inkberry) is a large, fleshy plant that often looks rank and weedy, but every now and then, it grows in a place that reveals an elegance and beauty. Its perennial root sends up a new stem each year, unlike its close relative in Argentina, the ombu, which has a tree-like perennial top but lacks a real tree's xylem.

A subtle surprise of the ornamental seed variety came during a recent walk at Herrontown Woods, where the path intersects with one of only three hearts a' bustin' shrubs (Euonymus americanus) as yet to be found growing wild in Princeton. These three somehow grew tall enough to elude the deer, whose appetite for the plant has kept all other specimens in the woods only a few inches tall.

Also coming as a recent surprise is the University's native prairie planting next to the Firestone Library. It's off to a good start, with the classic eastern grassland species.

This ambitious planting comes after another attempt at a native grassland a few years back, at the psychology building, was mowed down after mugwort, Canada thistle and other weeds were allowed to invade until they became unmanageable. It's good to see the University didn't give up on the concept. This latest planting next to Nassau Street is higher visibility, which could prioritize its maintenance. If there's someone on staff who can provide the early, skilled intervention to keep the weeds out of this complex plant community, it should become a low-maintenance planting whose rich diversity echoes the book collections stored below.

A Mexican milkweed growing next to our carport turned into a miniature monarch butterfly nursery this summer. The monarchs are unpredictable as to which milkweeds they'll actually lay eggs on, but this one plant finally played host to some caterpillars late in the season.

Even harder to predict, oftentimes, is where the fully grown caterpillars will go to make their crysalises,  but these were easy to find underneath the shingles of the house. This particular one did not mature into a butterfly,

but a few others did, the evidence being the wispy remains of the chyrsalises coinciding with sightings of a couple monarchs whose flight looked tentative in the way one would expect first flight to be. Reports on fall migration back to Mexico have been promising thus far, though the next post on Monarch Watch should speak to any impact from the hurricanes.

(Note: The Journey North site has more frequent updates, and for NJ, check out the Monarch Monitoring Project in Cape May )

Fall is also a time for biking down to university soccer games, in the process crossing the pedestrian bridge, where the native persimmon trees planted there have finally risen high enough

to push their fruits close against the wire mesh. Not quite ripe when this photo was taken, but there are two home games to go. Catching them when they're ripe would be a fine surprise.