Urban Succession--Butler Apartments Turned Into Meadows

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

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

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

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

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

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

Common milkweed sometimes caters to the needs of monarch caterpillars.

Rudbeckia

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

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

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

I call this frost aster.

Various goldenrods.

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

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

Crown vetch is an invasive just beginning to show up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Visits By Butterflies

One perk for us stay-in-Princeton types in the summer is the fabulous display of native flowers--the tall, lanky sort that are like slo-mo fireworks, growing, growing, then bursting forth with a show of color. My backyard is filled with them, and I make a point of going out there not only to appreciate their extraordinary work, but also to see what sorts of insects they attract. Achieve a certain stillness, forget all the other things left undone, and a whole new world may open up. In its own miniature way, insect life can be as surprising and compelling as a trip to exotic lands.

Butterflies are a good entry point. Mimi, a friend of this blog, sent me an email, excited about having seen a common wood nymph. She didn't have a camera the first time, but it returned and she was able to get a photo with her phone. Thanks, Mimi! She noted that it was hanging out around the black-eyed susans, morning glories and beebalm, and that the host plant is purple top, a common native grass in our fields.

I haven't seen a wood nymph, but have had visits from a common buckeye, maybe because we have bottlebrush buckeyes in the garden. This one's visiting a boneset, a plant that hosts a whole ecosystem of insects and spiders this time of year.

The upswing in monarch numbers has created more opportunities for magical moments. (This one's visiting ironweed.) Their flight is extraordinary to watch. There's the strength, speed and agility they display when chasing each other, and then there's the way they navigate a garden. A couple evenings ago, one came and stayed awhile. The garden surrounds our patch of grass, so to stand on the lawn and watch a monarch weaving in and out and over the flowered landscape, seeming to check out every plant yet rarely landing and then just for a sip, is like standing at the center of a merry go round. There's a whimsical, carnival ride quality to its flight, as it darts, then coasts, then darts again, changing direction on a dime. It flies with extraordinary confidence, yet seems unsure where it wants to go. This may simply be a matter of my not understanding its motivations. Whatever its aims, there's a feeling of blessing when a monarch comes to the garden. It lives up to its name, for long with the whimsy is a regal, ambassadorial quality, as it graces each plant with its presence before moving quickly on to the next.

Maybe this year I will finally learn the different sorts of swallowtails. This one appears to be a male two-tailed swallowtail, visiting a giant cup-plant in our backyard.

From the link, it looks that females have more blue.

Another magical moment this summer came unexpectedly while clearing trails at Herrontown Woods of debris. Deep in the woods, I lifted a stick and up flew what seemed like a large moth, the size of a monarch but white, pale like a luna moth but squarish in overall shape. It flew up into the canopy and disappeared. Its presence was reassuring, a sign that something of nature's depth persists in our altered world.

A Stream of Summer Flowers

A trumpet vine flower looks giant with Veblen House as a backdrop. It was a pretty sight to see a hummingbird visiting one.

Culver's Root draws clouds of pollinators of varied sizes.

A week or two before, the Culver's Root took on an upside down chandelier look during a brief drought.

Tiger lilies are an asian species found along Princeton's streets this time of year. A couple native species survive in the wild in our area, though nowhere in Princeton to my knowledge.

Here's a contrast between the native black-eyed susan

and a bred variety that puts on a big show but doesn't seem to attract pollinators.

Cutleaf coneflowers are almost as pretty in their bud stage

as when they open up.

The first of what will likely be hundreds of native rose mallow Hibiscus flowers in our garden, freshly opened and freshly chewed upon.

There are a few specimens of storax around, with its pendulant flowers.

One of my earliest interactions with plants was popping the buds of the hostas that lined our patio when I was a kid. If the buds are just at the right stage of development, they make a loud pop when squeezed. This type of hosta isn't very common in gardens now.

Common milkweed outside some classrooms at Littlebrook Elementary provided food for a bumper crop of monarch butterflies last year.

Purple coneflowers bloom for a longer stretch than most other flowers, which makes them so popular in gardens.

Lizard's Tail is a native growing along the shores of Lake Carnegie. It also does well in wet gardens.

Earlier in the summer, the tall meadowrue were attracting colorful hoverflies, which true to their name hover next to a flower before alighting. Send a photo of an insect to BugGuide and someone will quickly identify it for you. In this case, Allograpta obliqua, a common oblique syrphid.

The hoverflies did their job, judging from the abundant meadowrue seeds now forming.

A gathering of bucks grazing in the field at Littlebrook Elementary.

Monarch Population: Up in the East, Down in the West

Monarchs seemed more common this past summer, but it's been a long wait for a status report on their numbers where they overwinter in the mountains of Mexico. This past week, Monarch Watch finally posted some data, confirming our impressions here in New Jersey. The population is two and a half times larger than a year ago. That's the good news in Mexico, as the time for them to begin migrating northward in March approaches.

West of the Rockies, however, the population with its traditional roosts in Pacific Grove and elsewhere is in jeopardy.

This monarch's perching on a swamp milkweed plant. You can tell the plant species by its leaves, which are softer and more narrow than the common and purple milkweeds. Though the monarch larvae require monarch foliage for food, the adults feed on a wide range of flowers, including the buttonbush in the first photo.

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.