Maintenance Will Determine the Fate of the Betsey Stockton Garden

When I look at a plant, a garden, a meadow, a forest, I can see the future. It's a form of extrapolation, defined in the Oxford Dictionary as "the action of estimating or concluding something by assuming that existing trends will continue." I only realize now, writing this, that not everyone exercises such powers. Not everyone has been a gardener of landscapes for fifty some years, accumulating memories of myriad plant species and observing their behaviors. I've seen thriving raingardens and neglected ones, healthy meadows and forests, and degraded ones. I've observed how various invasive weeds spread and come to dominate, each in its own manner and at its own pace. These are the accumulated data points used to predict the future.

One very satisfying thing about extrapolation is that I can see, in my mind, the flower a bud will become. But with that same power to see a garden blooming while still in bud, I can look at a garden in what for others is glorious bloom and see the "seeds" of ruin--the scattered pockets of invasive mugwort, nutsedge, stiltgrass or lesser celandine, crown vetch or Chinese bushclover that without early intervention will quickly expand and ultimately prevail. 

My interventions--a broad mix of successes and failures--have taught me above all that early intervention can make the difference between hope and despair. 

One special garden in town that I stop by to check up on, like an old friend, is the Betsey Stockton Garden planted atop the Firestone Library at Princeton University. This is a complex native planting, containing 35 native grassland species. The person or crew maintaining the garden needs to be able to recognize and identify all 35 intended species, plus all the weeds that could potentially cause problems, not only when they're blooming but at all stages of development. 

That deep knowledge is a tall order. Knowing how little respect maintenance often gets, I worry about this meadow garden in the longterm. Will it receive the knowledgeable, strategic attention it needs to thrive? This photo of wild bergamot blooming with lots of clumping goldenrods suggests things are going well. 

Here, some black-eyed susans lend color, but the pink blooms of quickly spreading non-native crown vetch spell trouble.

New to me is a weed called rabbits foot clover, which may have hitchhiked in from whatever distant nursery the intended plants came from. This, too, was not caught early, and now poses a significant challenge.

Thankfully, there's only one small patch of the fearsome mugwort, but that could quickly expand if not dealt with quickly. Getting as close to zero tolerance for invasives as possible makes maintenance much easier. 

Maintenance is not given its due in part because success is often invisible. In a house, we note dirt's presence, not its absence. A well-run government agency doesn't make it into the news. The bass player who provides the harmonic foundation for a band often goes unnoticed until he plays a wrong note. In medicine, catching problems early doesn't pay as well as dramatically rescuing someone whose problem has grown into an emergency. Extrapolation can help with this. It allows us to see large consequence in small acts, to appreciate how big a problem has been avoided by digging up a small, isolated patch of mugwort.

I found a few relevant local writings. One was an opinion piece in the Daily Princetonian by an undergrad, calling for more native plantings on campus. Planting is a good start, but what goes unmentioned in the opinion piece is that maintenance determines any planting's fate. 

One strategy being used in newer native plantings on campus is to plant gardens with only three or four species, with lots of mulch inbetween plants. This reduces the amount of training required for maintenance. 

Other local writing specifically about the Betsey Stockton Garden can be found in the Princeton Magazine. It includes the list of intended plants (below), and describes the garden as low-maintenance, but that assumes the invasive weeds will be caught early and removed before they can spread.

The Betsey Stockton Garden was planted in 2018, two years after the demise of another campus native planting, around the Neuroscience Institute. Hopefully some lessons are being learned, and the University will bring the necessary expertise and strategic timing for maintenance to bear on this lovely, botanically complex planting. 

Native Plants Featured in the Betsey Stockton Garden
(Some are used on the High Line as well.)

Grasses: Carex comosa, Appalachian Sedge Carex pensylvanica, Pennsylvania Sedge Festuca ovina, Sheep’s Fescue Festuca rubra, Creeping Red Fescue Sporobolus heterolepis, Prarie Dropseed Elymus virginicus, Virginia Wild Rye Schizachyrium scoparium, Little Bluestem Tridens flavus, Purple Top Shade Plants: Aqueligia canadensis, Wild Columbine Aster laevis, Smooth Blue Aster Blephilia ciliata, Downy Wood Mint Erigeron puchellus, Robin’s Plantain Eurybia divaricata, White Wood Aster Polemonium reptans, Jacob’s Ladder Sisyrinchium angustifolium, Narrow Leafed Blue-Eyed Grass Solidago caesia, Blue-stem Goldenrod Solidago flexicaulis, Zig-Zag Goldenrod

Full-Sun Plants: Asclepias tuberosa, Butterfly Milkweed Aster laevis, Smooth Blue Aster Aster pilosus, Heath Aster Baptisia alba, White Wild Indigo Baptisia perfoliata, Catbells Centaurea cyanus, Cornflower Chamacaesta fasciculata, Partridge Pea Coreopsis lancelota, Lanceleaf CoreopsisEchinacea pallida, Pale Purple Coneflower Echinacea purpurea, Purple Coneflower Monarda fistulosa, Wild Bergamot Penstemon digitalis, Beard Tongue Rudbeckia hirta, Blackeyed Susan Solidago juncea, Early Goldenrod

Fuel Tank Raingarden Losing Out to Weeds

Maintenance is looked down upon and taken for granted in our culture. One reason for this is that, done well, maintenance is invisible. Our human tendency is to notice what is wrong, not what is kept right. At home, we are more likely to notice dirt and disarray than the cleanliness and order a housemate worked hard to achieve. 

In landscaping, the tendency is to fund and celebrate design and installation, then leave maintenance to the vicissitudes of chance, undertrained and undermotivated staff, and perennially strapped budgets. But even with the best designs, maintenance is what ultimately matters. Maintenance is destiny. 

Maintenance at its best is a form of love. In gardening, what we call maintenance is really more akin to the nurturance of parenting--an ongoing process of encouraging what is desired, and discouraging what is not. A garden can also be thought of as a playground. When maintenance is done right, plants that exhibit bullying behavior, like mugwort, don't get to play in the garden. 

Environmental groups encourage people to dig up some lawn and plant native wildflowers. These meadow plantings are characterized as low-maintenance, but that is true only if the weeds are caught early. Once the weeds get firmly established, maintenance becomes very difficult.

The only gardens I've seen flourish are those that are loved, like a child is loved. Love leads to knowledge and steady attention, and early intervention when things go wrong. 

Just off Witherspoon Street in Princeton there are contrasting examples of loved and unloved public gardens. 

The loved garden in this instance has almost no weeds--a standard few of us achieve. For years, near the entrance to the Community Pool, gardens around the Princeton Recreation Department offices were taken care of by "Vikki C. and Team PRD," as the sign proudly declares. That would be employee Vikki Caines. Vikki's glorious plantings expanded over the years well beyond the Rec. Dept. building. She retired in 2023, but when I asked her, she assured me that her gardens would continue to be well kept. 
 

By contrast, just down the street, past the Princeton First Aid and Rescue Squad, lies a rain garden that collects water from hard surfaces around the town's fuel storage tank. Regulations require that raingardens be dug and planted to collect and filter runoff from new paved areas. In a series of posts, I've tracked the destiny of this very public but largely unnoticed raingarden, whose extended limbo in 2020 ended with planting in 2021. But in gardening, as when a baby is born, the birth of a garden is not the end but rather just the beginning. In 2022, it was still full of color and easy to weed, but by 2023 the weeds were getting entrenched. 

I alerted town staff that the raingarden was losing out to the weeds, and was told that the municipality was weeding it once or twice a year, and was working "towards a system of regular maintenance, while balancing many, many other priorities."

This year, the original plantings are beginning to disappear beneath waves of mugwort, nutsedge, and other botanical bullies that don't play well with others--

weeds like foxtail grass, 

and wild lettuce--to name just a few of the species that maintenance crews would need to be able to recognize and remove. Note that the designer of a garden must know only the intended plants, while the maintainer, typically underpaid and underappreciated, must additionally know and recognize the many weeds that can invade.

This is the difference between loved and unloved gardens. Imagine a child being notified that a parent was "working towards a system of regular visits, while balancing many, many other priorities."

Now, a town's public works department does of course have many other priorities. Job one is to serve people, not gardens. But that being the case, the aim would be to keep the raingarden in the easy-to-maintain stage by catching the weeds early. Vigilance and early intervention--a form of love--save time. 

The only way Vikki Caines could maintain beautiful gardens while also doing her job in the recreation department was to stay on top of the weeding. 

Well-designed raingardens are easier than most gardens to maintain. The runoff they collect keeps the soil soft for easy weeding, and many native species of wildflowers and shrubs are adapted to flourish in the wet ground. Regulations can call for the digging and planting of raingardens, but the fate of the planting is left to chance. Weeds grow 24/7, while people are easily distracted. If the weeds take over, the ultimate response will be to mow it down and manage it as lawn. Nature's complexity, unloved, unnurtured, will once again be simplified and suppressed, the better to pursue other priorities.

Related posts: 

To Save a Raingarden, Know Your Weeds 

The Work Behind a Natural-Looking Meadow: Smoyer Park in Princeton

Plant, Run, and Rescue

We did a plant and run at the Princeton High School this past June. The planting was intentional; the running was not. A plant and run is when everyone shows up to plant a garden, but no one comes back to take care of it. I'm the type that's more likely than most to follow through, but the lesson sometimes needs to be relearned.

When my younger daughter expressed interest in doing something along environmental lines at the school, I suggested, not too surprisingly, that she and her friend plant some native wildflowers in one of a number of raised beds that had for some years been growing only weeds. We did, and at least I came away with a high sense of good deedery, owing not only to having involved the next generation in transforming a weed-filled bed into a demo for natives, but also having catalyzed the repair of the gardens' water supply with a well-placed email or two, thereby improving the prospects for all the raised beds going forward.

We had intended to return soon thereafter with mulch, but life intervened, and by the time we remembered, a rainless week later, the plants were looking pretty sad. In the meantime, some students supervised by the school horticulturist had fixed up all the other beds, which is reason to celebrate though suddenly our bed looked neglected by comparison. Still, after a deep watering, careful weeding and a fresh layer of mulch, prospects for recovery were good.

One rainy month later, as if perched on the cog of an internal Mayan calendar, the memory of the garden again surfaced in the mind, leading to our walking the dog over there to see how things were going. Our good deeds had disappeared in a mountain of weeds (there on the right in the photo), while the other beds were growing well-tended swiss chard and beets.

This is where a keen eye comes in handy. There's the cutleaf coneflower in a sea of foxtail grass.

And there's the late-flowering boneset amongst the ragweed.

The thin mulch had done little to discourage the weeds, though it did keep the soil soft enough to allow extraction of a nutsedge with it rhizome system intact--a rare sighting, like seeing baby pigeons.

We carefully liberated the intended plants, which thankfully had hung in there despite the competition.

At some point, the weedy seed bank will exhaust itself, and the native wildflowers will dominate, but after years of growing weeds, this raised bed is a bit like a wild horse that resists taming. It's a good lesson for one generation and a reminder for the other, about the power of weeds and the importance of followup on good intentions.

Let's see, those most recent photos were taken about two weeks ago. Hmmm. I think I know where the evening walk with the dog is headed.