Writings from Durham Days--Rain ponds, live stakes, and falling leaves

Googling myself, I found some published writings from my days in Durham, NC, where I founded a nonprofit called the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association. Published in the "Front Porch" section of a news magazine called Indyweek, they make a good entry for this website's 1250th post.

August 07, 2002Columns » Front Porch

Rhapsody to a rain pond 

By Stephen K. Hiltner

Though the reservoirs that feed Durham's faucets--Lake Mickie and the Little River Reservoir--are still low, I am happy to report that Lake Hiltner is now filled to the brim, thanks to recent heavy rains.

Located on an upland slope in an old city neighborhood, it receives its waters from a nearby mountain range, better known as my roof. Lake Hiltner is what my next door neighbor calls this new, homemade body of water, but at 8 feet across, terracing down to 2 feet deep, it's somewhere between a pond and a permanent puddle. A pondle, perhaps, or a pund.

It needs a good name, because it's such a satisfying thing to have in a backyard garden. In time, frogs will move in, and hummingbirds will find the hibiscus, cardinal flower and jewelweed that bloom along its shores. Most of all, the mini-pond is responsive to the weather and the seasons, slowly diminishing in drought, rising in the rain. Flowers come and go in succeeding waves; the school of mosquito fish--a native of local creeks related to guppies--swells with each new batch of fry. And then there are the distinguished visitors, which in other backyard mini-ponds have included great blue herons and hawks.

For those who seek larger meanings in backyard projects, a neighborhood dotted with Lake Smiths and Joneses will be better prepared for extremes of weather. Drought and flood teach the same lesson: Find a place for rainwater in the landscape. The current practice of shedding runoff quickly from roofs into streets into urban creeks not only creates destructive flooding, but also leaves the rainwater-deprived landscape more vulnerable to drought.

The most drought-resistant landscapes are those where water is allowed to linger, whether in mini-ponds or in absorbent swales where water will seep in over a few days. Water allowed to seep into the ground creates an underground reservoir of moisture for plants to draw on during drought. This has been clearly demonstrated this summer as larger-scale projects like the stormwater wetland at Hillandale Golf Course and the wetland gardens at Indian Trail Park continue to flourish without watering.

The same philosophy applies to the backyard. The way to reduce weather's extremes is to accept the gifts currently spurned. It involves harvesting the rain that falls on house and yard, in rainbarrels, raingardens, grassy swales, mini-ponds and soil made absorbent by mulch. Even the condensate from air conditioners, most abundant when it's most needed, can be directed to a pond or raingarden rather than left to soak into the foundation.

Though droughts and torrential downpours teach harsh lessons, the response can be a rewarding adventure.

March 27, 2002Columns » Front Porch

Dogwood candles 

By Stephen K. Hiltner

It's fun to watch 6-year-olds deal with the concept of spring starting on a particular day. They think something magical is going to happen--all the flowers will burst forth, the temperature will suddenly jump. But the heavens and the trees don't give a hoot about March 20th, the official start date for spring, and kids everywhere are left to wonder what it's all about.

By coincidence, March 20 was the day I went to my daughter's first grade class to do a little planting project. The bushes we were going to plant had no leaves and no roots, but I assured the students that they would grow. That would have to be magic enough to fill the gap between this most ordinary day and the far grander work of their imaginations.

The activity is by now pretty standard. A couple of big plastic tubs--the cut off ends of a donated 55 gallon drum--stand ready outside the classroom. After some discussion about the things plants need to grow, the kids do their best to shovel schoolyard dirt into the tubs. When they're filled to the brim, we add water to turn the dirt into glorious mud. Finally, each kid takes a freshly cut section of stem from one or another native shrub that grows along Ellerbe Creek in Durham--silky dogwood, buttonbush, elderberry--and sticks it deep into the ooze.

This time, though, about when we had 20 stems in each tub, the kids began singing "Happy Birthday." Now the grown-ups were left wondering. In the eyes of the first graders, the tubs of brown mud with sticks pointing up had taken on the look of birthday cakes with chocolate frosting and candles. "Happy birthday, silky dogwood. Happy birthday to you."

In a week or two, the buds on the sticks will open, and the buried portions will sprout roots in the mud. By fall, Forest View Elementary will have 40 shrubs to plant on the school grounds. But more importantly, the kids got to dig the good earth, to learn which way's up on a buttonbush sprig and, best of all, they found meaning in the day. A birthday for spring--maybe that's what March 20 is really all about.

November 08, 2000

Front Porch 

Rhapsody in leaves

By Stephen K. Hiltner

The narrow leaves of willow oak spin earthwards, catching flashes of morning light. In walks along the tree-lined canyons of city streets, we are all victors in a ticket-tape parade. The sun's rays, having lost their summer harshness, now angle into the sheltered air beneath trees, illuminating the languid descent of leaves from the vaulted canopy.

Not all leaves are so elegant. Pine needles plunge earthward like clouds of arrows. The broader leaves of maples fall in rocking zigzags. But willow oak leaves are designed to celebrate their momentary freedom in one long graceful pirouette. They spend summer clustered overhead, anonymous in dense masses of green. Then they become a million individualists in their first and last dance back to earth. In loose embrace with gravity, they fall--each spinning in its own manner, at its own tempo, each captured for a moment by the sun's beaming light. Having reached the ground, again anonymously massed, they mingle and merge and return by degrees to the soil from which they came.

At such times, it's hard to think of leaves as anything but a gift. In the competition for my heart between lawn and leaf, lawn has had to yield. I used to rake the leaves and mow the threadbare grass. But now I channel my yard's sylvan tendencies rather than struggle against them. The leaves fall where they do for a reason: to soften the soil, to catch the rain, to help dogwoods through the droughts and to give kids one more reason for delight. What pleasure to trace a leaf's whimsical flight and find, at bottom, a sense of rightness and rest, rather than impending chore. The Triangle is a forest masquerading as metropolis, and we are the beneficiaries of its golden rain
.

Raingarden in June--Whole Earth Center

Mr. Frog gave me a report on how the little raingarden along Nassau Street in front of the Whole Earth Center is doing. The report got lost under some papers on my desk, so don't blame the frog if the report is surfacing a month late. He said the oak-leafed hydrangea is having a splendid blooming season. The button bush is bouncing back big time from a trimming it got from whatever maintenance crew the landlord employs to breeze through in the spring, leaving dark, ornamental mulch in their wake. Mr. Frog's predicting a big show of cutleaf coneflowers in July, and that solitary tall meadowrue is hanging in there amidst all the enthusiastic growing going on.

Mr. Frog is pretty proud of all the non-standard plantings that are doing so well at the other end. That corralberry (Symphoricarpos orbiculatus)
is thriving beyond all expectation, and that mound of fringed sedge (Carex crinita) is doing a good imitation of the big hair of a country western singer.

Tucked close to the ground amidst the opulence is the diminutive blue-eyed grass (Sisyrhinchium sp.), which is really an iris doing a grass imitation.

The mulch, combined with some proactive weeding, makes maintenance a breeze. But Mr. Frog pointed out a few small matters to attend to. There's that pesky nut sedge (one tiny one at top of photo) that can gain momentum and spread throughout a garden if it's not pulled out as soon as it appears. Some weedy, sprawling grass (lower right) needed to be pulled out, too. That left a few little deertongue grass seedlings (lower left, with broader leaves) and a mistflower in the upper right to let grow.

The deertongue grass seedlings will make good transplants later on, because they'd otherwise grow out onto the sidewalk if allowed to mature in place.

Deertongue grass (Dichanthelium clandestinum) along the edge of a building? Its native habitat is in the floodplain down along the canal, but it actually provides an attractive mound of green and the texture of its tongue-sized leaves.

Whenever it rains, roof runoff comes through this narrow garden via a buried perforated pipe that's connected to a nearby downspout. I like to think that the plants have tapped into that supply, and are thriving as a result.

A Walk Through Herrontown Woods and the Princeton Ridge

By chance, my daughter and I both had the same idea at the same time--take a walk through Herrontown Woods. Must have been the call of a spring day that finally reached us late in the afternoon, deep in our suburban exile.

Sightings of a pileated woodpecker and a wild turkey awaited us as we headed down Snowden Lane, traffic squeezing by us as we negotiated the sections that still don't have a bike trail (a bit of a hint there to the Ministry of Bike Trail Construction).

A short hike up from the preserve's parking lot are the Veblen cottage and, through an opening in the fence, the Veblen House, where remnants of Elizabeth Veblen's many daffodils and a lone Kerria still bloom. The Veblens--Oswald being the famous visionary mathematician--donated the farmstead and Herrontown Woods to the county back in 1958. In retrospect, it appears to have been Princeton's first nature preserve, the seed from which the now preserved corridor of the Princeton Ridge grew.

A patch of mock orange blooms (update: I've since learned that this is actually an invasive shrub called jetbead!) not far from the Veblen farmstead. Wood anemones and Christmas ferns grow in profusion along the paths in some areas, testimony to the capacity of these rock-strewn slopes to keep the plow from erasing the land's memory. (2021 update: What looked like mock orange proved to be jetbead, a nonnative that has been showing up in various preserves around town.)

A little ways west of the farmstead, my daughter told me to stop and listen to the echo. Our shouts reverberated among the boulders to the count of four. In addition to having saved a rich flora, the boulders enrich the acoustics as well.

Trails have gotten more zig-zaggy since Hurricane Sandy. Reaching this blockade, we saw a young man approaching from the other side. With the creation of a Friends of Herrontown Woods in the back of my mind, I said hello, thinking a conversation might lead to recruiting him to help clear trails. Turned out he was training after a long week at the office for a Ninja Warrior contest, and was using the Herrontown Woods obstacle course to hone his reflexes. For him, the more challenging the trails, the better.

He made quick passage through this muddy stretch, making the long leap from stone to stone.

We chose a drier trail that led up to Princeton Community Village, across Bunn Drive from Hilltop Park. Bisecting this affordable housing is a section of the Transco Pipeline, whose proposed expansion has been causing some controversy. The pipeline carries natural gas, and an expanded pipeline would help whisk the nation's shale gas out of the ground and onto ships for export, which seems to undermine the notion of energy independence in the longterm.

Across Bunn Drive, behind the soccer field at Hilltop Park, Bob Hillier's Copperwood development is due to be completed later this fall, according to their sign.

It's a good example of clustering that allowed preservation of 17 wooded acres of this Princeton Ridge parcel. It's also a good example of how community activism, through a group called Save Princeton Ridge, can bring about a more environmentally sensitive development than had originally been planned.

As part of the agreement to build the development, this massive stormwater retention basin at the base of the hill, built originally for runoff from the Village, is being repaired.

Nature, too, had been at work building its own retention ponds, with some better at holding water than others. Though it's sad to see so many trees blown down by storms in recent years, these pools can be seen as one of the tree's parting gifts, providing a nursery for tadpoles in the spring, and a place where the wild turkey we heard, and then saw, might take a sip as it walks in its gallinaceous manner through the woods. A lumpier land more closely approximates what existed in America before the forests were cleared and the land plowed. Here's a link to other posts about adapting this sort of minipond concept to backyards.

In the recently preserved Ricciardi tract, across Bunn Drive from the new development, a pileated woodpecker swooped by me just twenty feet away. It landed on a nearby tree, pausing between short head-bobbing hops up and down the trunk to scrutinize the bark for signs of insects. Finding nothing, the bird then flew to another tree, where it repeated its survey routine before flying to another, and another. It's reassuring, somehow, to see that this Princeton Ridge forest's inventory of trees are being so thoroughly inspected, and by such a beautiful bird.

This monster white oak, with its characteristic blotchy bark, has sprawling limbs that suggest it dates back to an earlier, less forested era in Princeton, when trees were more solitary and could spread out.

High bush blueberries are scattered through the understory in the 35 acre All Saints Tract. Here, too, you can see how one of the many tributaries of Harry's Brook begins to form out of pools and rivulets, fed by seepage from the hill.

Not sure what's going on here. Affordable housing for the birds? There was no evidence of past use, and it looks like it would get hot in the summer if the sun reached it. The stringiness of the bark of the tree it's attached to says "Eastern red cedar"--more evidence of a less forested past.

Lush growth of skunk cabbage forms a green ribbon leading back into Herrontown Woods.

This is how twin white oaks fall--laying down an angle in a mathematician's forest. Just needs a couple more walls and a roof to make a cozy habitation, though there might be the problem of a wet basement.

Back at the parking lot, the kiosk erected some years back by the county gives no indication of the pleasures of Herrontown Woods. Something about human nature makes it easier to build kiosks and those wooden boxes for brochures, than to keep them filled.

Heading back on Snowden Lane towards home, a silverbell (Halesia sp.) was blooming, with a snowbell (Styrax sp.) across the street. Both are in the Storax family, and neither have I seen growing anywhere else in Princeton.
(Note, 4.28: Of course, as soon as I say such a thing, I notice a Halesia in full bloom on South Harrison Street, on the left before reaching Route 1. Hard to glance sideways while navigating a narrow 2-lane road.)

As the day's light waned on Franklin Ave., far from the rocks and echoes and wildflowers of Herrontown Woods, my vote for "Princeton's most graceful Forsythia" grows.

Central Park in Spring

Central Park back in April, where a glorious nature is framed by a Manhattan skyline, like a verdant postage stamp in the Forever series, 50 blocks long and 3 long blocks wide.

The land's mix of rock outcroppings and swamps, a desire to emulate parks in European countries, and a healthy dose of 20/20 foresight (short history here) all played a role in sparing this ground from economic imperatives, a place where nature can have its day, every day.

Central Park is ringed by museums of art and history, but Central Park's history is of the living sort, etched in infinite varieties of green and blue, enduring but ever changing, bottomless in its imagination, needing no roof other than the sky.

Spring migratory birds, shuttling like ambassadors between earth and sky, continent and continent, drew a crowd of admirers welcoming their return, cheering their journey, as if the birds were sailers just off the ship.

The warblers gobbled down proteins and energizing fat in the form of insects nourished by a patron oak's foliage,

while a raccoon's interest in the tree was more structural. Indifferent to our earthbound attention, it snoozed through the day in its high rise apartment (no elevator but rent controlled) in the crotch of the tree.

I could count on one hand, well, maybe two, my visits to Central Park, and yet it strikes deep chords within. Buildings are usually framed by nature, but in Central Park, its the buildings that do the framing. Get to know plants on a first name basis, and they will become like old friends you run into wherever you go. Central Park is like seeing an old friend all dressed up in a suit for the first time.

The habitat restoration being done along the trails of the Ramble are not yet Shakespearian in depth--Shakespearian here defined as the more you look, the more you see. But the restoration of expanses of native wildflowers, grasses, sedges and ferns on the forest floor is sufficient to trigger memories of the rich understory many eastern forests had just a few decades ago. Though ringed by concrete and highrise buildings, Central Park has in some ways a better chance to be natural than more rural areas thrown out of ecological balance by intense browsing pressure and unfettered invasive species.

I know of only one bluebell growing in Princeton's preserved open spaces. Central Park has many, protected from their primary threat, straying pedestrians.

A cool-season grass, presumably native, is being used on slopes for erosion control.

One reason why prospects are good for native plant restoration in Central Park is the vast pool of potential volunteers to draw on, given the auspicious ratio of NY's residents per acre of greenspace.

Not that one needs any additional evidence of the shear scale of human numbers in NY, but the Run-As-One fundraiser that day in Central Park drew 8000 participants, royally served by a row of Royal Flushes extending as far as the eye could see, that might rival some nearby buildings if stacked one upon another. Might this be an irreverent artist's vision of infinity?

How does one capture the scale of the operation, all of which must be periodically latched to stretched out trailers and hauled away for a bit of refreshing? Clearly, I digress, but then again, how many nature posts are thoughtful enough to provide a bathroom break midway through?

Segueing smoothly back into nature, here, a Fothergilla ornamenting some snazzy bins.

Park volunteers were spending a beautiful spring afternoon immersed in their own sort of marathon, pulling weeds, including the lesser celandine, that pretty but very rapidly spreading plant that had a post devoted to it earlier this spring.

The leader explained that herbicide use is not allowed in the park, so they're having to pull each lesser celandine individually. They showed me the tuberous roots. Pretty slow going, but fortunately, there isn't much of it in the park.

A few places in the park benefit from a thoughtful lack of intervention. These spent daffodils are being left unmowed so the post-bloom leaves have a chance to feed their roots for the next year.

There was some conspicuous smooching between a tree and boulder, familiar to anyone hiking the Sourlands or the Princeton Ridge. Nature has always thrived on an intimate relationship between the animate and the inanimate.

A gentle breeze propelled sailboats and memories of daysailer days.

Princeton has a couple of these Carolina bells (Halesia), one on Snowden, one on South Harrison. Strangely, almost no dogwoods were to be found in Central Park.

A frame within a frame, as nature, framed by the city, frames a sculpted shelter.

A grove of elm trees brings back memories of what American streets used to look like before Dutch elm disease swept through.

Leaving the park, we found Teddy Roosevelt in good company at the entryway to the Natural History Museum. Might he offer them horses as well? Looks like they're all trying to get back to the nature in Central Park.

Just inside the Natural History Museum, there appeared to be an allegorical confrontation between Truth and Towering Ignorance. Might Congress's high dome be accommodating something similar? Nice to see that T-rexian Truth had a nice set of choppers, though it wasn't clear who was going to win.

Public Raingarden Bulldozed

(See followup post for an update.)

You know, it's been a beautiful summer, and I really don't feel like being upset. But this past Thursday, on August 7, the raingarden at the Princeton Housing Authority's Spruce Circle on Harrison Street was bulldozed. Just like that. Gone. For six years it provided beauty to passersby, and food and habitat for wildlife. This time of year is peak flowering, with Joe-Pye-Weed, cutleaf coneflower, boneset and swamp milkweed providing color and feeding pollinators that find precious little to feed on elsewhere. In an urban landscape dominated by trees and turf, the raingarden offered an oasis for the dwindling numbers of monarch butterflies that come our way each year.

When I discovered the destruction, the sign was still there. It would have been thoughtful if the head of maintenance, whoever that may be, had read the sign first, to find out what the garden's function was, and who planted it. The next day, the sign too had been ripped out.

I called the Housing Authority, and was told by an assistant administrator, who could not have been more indifferent, that anything planted on their property is under their control, and can be destroyed at will. I explained that it had been planted and maintained for six years by volunteers, and asked if she might feel any regret? She said she would be lying if she were to say she did. Since I had called a few minutes after the office closed, she said she was doing me a favor by answering the phone.

It's true the housing authority has control over its property, but not completely true. That land is public land. It's not owned by the recently hired maintenance supervisor. The raingarden was approved in 2008 by the executive director, Scott Parsons, and the Princeton Housing Authority board. It was faithfully maintained by volunteers. Such decisions can't be reversed on someone's whim, or so you would think.

Having planted a lot of raingardens on public land, in three different towns, I've developed a thick skin. The first time one was accidentally mowed by a new and uninformed employee, in Durham, NC, it felt like a punch to the gut. I discovered, however, that gardens are resilient. They grow back from a mowing. So two years ago when I came upon a man trimming the Harrison St. raingarden with a chainsaw, I calmly explained that the wildflowers are not a hedge, and we joked about it later. But bulldozing represents a new level of ignorance and indifference.

One of the ironies is that I had just received an invitation from Princeton's mayor to a Volunteer Thank You Party. Well, the raingarden was a volunteer of sorts, doing everything right. In addition to the interest, beauty and habitat it provided, it also capturing runoff from the roofs to reduce downstream flooding. What a nice thank you it received, from a bulldozer. 

And here, flashing back to 2008, is an example of community volunteers doing everything right. When Curtis Helm told me about his idea of planting a demonstration raingarden at Spruce Circle, I helped choose the spot and facilitated the permission process. Curtis carefully regraded the soil to hold just the right amount of runoff, so the water would seep into the ground after a day or two, feeding the plants but killing any hapless mosquito larvae before they could mature. By tempting mosquitoes to lay their eggs in ephemeral water, a raingarden actually reduces the urban mosquito population.

Surrounded by buildings and streets whose imperviousness displaces nature and contributes to downstream flooding, and whose emissions contribute to destabilizing climate, the raingarden acts as a buffer, welcoming nature and slowing the water down. In a time of increasing extremes, we need more raingardening, not less.

Curtis arranged a generous donation of plants from Pinelands Nursery, and paid for the sign with his own money. The raingarden was part of a Green Home and Garden Tour that year. Photos of the garden were used in presentations at conferences, and also appear in the Rain Garden Manual of New Jersey (pp. 14 and 50), which is accessible on websites in NJ, Connecticut, Maine and elsewhere. When Curtis left town to take a position with Philadelphia's parks department, I weeded the garden each year and made sure the roof downspouts were still feeding it water.

It takes a certain breed of person to keep a garden going, year after year. So many distractions in life, so many demands, and the weeds take advantage. There are some successes in Princeton. The gardens that serve as an attractive entryway to the town pool and the recreation building thrive because of the volunteer t.l.c. of Vikki Caines, a rec. dept. employee, and the Dogwood Garden Club. But other gardens have recently lost their longtime stewards. The splendid gardens at Riverside Elementary are losing Dorothy Mullen after so many years of devotion. The Barbara Sigmund memorial park on Hamilton Ave. lost Polly Burlingham's stewardship, in part due to a lack of volunteer help. Other plantings have gone for years without adequate attention. The memorial dogwoods at Princeton Battlefield languish beneath a tyranny of freeloading vines while acres of ahistoric lawn get mowed. The Harrison Street Park plantings got a burst of volunteer attention their first year, but then most of those gardens were left to the weeds and the unskilled grounds crew.

The lack of botanical training for employees charged with caring for our public spaces has always been hard to fathom. Princeton has an arborist, but no one versed in plants that happen to lack cellulose. Usually, the lack of training expresses itself through the steady decline of any planting other than trees and turf. But now we find that this lack of knowledge and training has expressed itself as a willingness to destroy even those gardens well cared for by volunteers.

What we end up with is "greenery", for example this mound of invasive Japanese honeysuckle vine that suffocated whatever shrub was planted there long ago, and now survives by being sufficiently boring and mindless.

The Princeton Housing Authority has been incommunicado this week as it moves into new offices. Their executive director only works one day a week, and has yet to reply to requests for information. All indications, however, suggest that this was a pointless act of destruction.

So, really, what does Princeton value? Does it value the time, passion, knowledge, and energy its volunteers give to the community? Does it value the stream--Harry's Brook--that this raingarden was aiding by holding back runoff? Whoever destroyed this garden thought no one would care, that the Housing Authority Board and town council would simply make excuses or look the other way. We'll find out soon whether the town rebuilds this raingarden, or if public spiritedness is to be turned into a slurry of mud headed towards Harry's Brook.

Update, 8/14: The Housing Authority's executive director, Scott Parsons, responded soon after this post was written. He explained that there was a misunderstanding with his maintenance staff, but that there wasn't much that could be done. He apologized for the misunderstanding.