A Rather Long Snow Storm

Here in Princeton, we have artisanal snow removal services, as in this thoughtfully crafted mohawk for the Prius.

Good news about the frontyard raingarden: it works great as a snow garden as well.

During this extended, ground-breaking, or at least ground-exposing, Snow Removal Initiative (SNI), it was important to take frequent breaks to document the innovative "shoveling" technique being used. The Royal We Committee believes this approach, if successful, could serve as a model for other homeowners to emulate. Later in the morning, we saw neighbors beginning to utilize this very method, suggesting our demonstration project could have a transformative impact on snow removal in Princeton and beyond. 

The Initiative included a research component. Careful study of this cross-section of the cliff face reveals the various strata laid down by the storm. This having been an unusually long snowstorm, it's understandable that the darker patch in the middle was at first mistakenly dated back to the early Devonian. Further analysis and some equipment tweaking showed that snow in the darker stratum likely fell during the warmer daylight hours the day before, with the lighter layers above and below having been deposited during the preceding and following nights.

Other keen observations: some of the neighbors didn't get the memo. Recycling postponed until Saturday, or the mid-Anthropocene, depending on how long the storm lasts.

What is snow good for? Enforced social distancing, for one. Not likely to have a close encounter with the neighbor for some time to come. And the kids can sort of remember what it used to feel like to get a snow day.

Other writings on excessive snow include an oldie but goodie: Snowbound Language

Fall is Burstin' Out All Over

After the heavy hitters of late summer are past--the Hibiscus, coneflowers, bonesets, et al--it's easy to think the season of native wildflowers is over, but this fall has been a surprise in the beauty and variety that nature held in reserve for these sweet autumn days. 

One that's been a big hit at Herrontown Woods is Hearts-a-bustin', though I prefer to call it Hearts-a-burstin', because when I see it my heart does more burstin' than bustin'. 

This native euonymus (E. americanus) would be a common shrub in the forest if not for the deer, who love to eat it, stem and all. They keep it browsed down to a couple inches high, so we had to take some of those and grow them out in cages so that visitors could see the ornamental seed capsules on the shrubs, one of which has risen to eight feet thus far. It helps, too, for the ornamental seed production, if it's growing in a clearing where the trees aren't hogging all the direct sunlight, like our Princeton Botanical Art Garden.

A little earlier in the fall when the capsules were just starting to open, you could see why it is also called strawberry bush. 

A solitary white snakeroot is growing near a Hearts-a-burstin' planted behind Veblen House. It can easily be confused with boneset and late-flowering thoroughwort. When I first moved to Princeton almost 20 years ago, white snakeroot was common in some areas, even weedy, being one of the few native wildflowers that deer didn't eat, but it seems much less common now. 

A few fall flowers in Herrontown Woods manage to bloom despite deep shade. Wood asters adorn some of the trails, 

occasionally accompanied by a wreath goldenrod.

More subtle is beechdrops, which parasitizes beech tree roots rather than producing its own nourishment through photosynthesis.

Along a busy street in a frontyard raingarden fed by runoff from the roof, blue mistflower blooms profusely for an extended period while staying low. 

New England aster also brings color to the garden late in the season.

The white of late-flowering thoroughwort makes a good foil for New England aster's rich color.

Another cloud of white late in the season comes from what I call frost aster. Because it can become too numerous, I would in the past make plans to enjoy the bloom, then cut it down and remove it before the seeds were released. But once it's bloomed, it quickly fades into the background of landscape and thought, foiling the best of intentions to control. 

Turtlehead grows quietly and unobtrusively during the summer, bending around other plants to attain its tall, skinny, awkward state of maturity. The blooms make for a top-heavy look, but this year were solidly ornamental.

Indian grass is particularly pretty when growing in a distinctive clump, rather than crowded in a field. Like many prairie grasses, it responds beautifully to the wind.

Bottlebrush grass is more of an understory grass, and unlike most native grasses it gets an early start in the spring. 

This one's called woolgrass, for its wooly appearance, but is actually a sedge, with edgy triangular stems. Unlike most native sedges that get an early start in the spring and move quickly to flower, woolgrass takes its time, gaining more height and slowly developing its inflorescence, which is ornamental at all stages, particularly when backlit. Though typically found growing on wet ground, it has been thriving through our wetter summers when planted upland as well, as here in the botanical garden at Herrontown Woods.

There are many species of native sunflower. They can make a big and very welcome show in the fall after other tall yellow wildflowers like cutleaf coneflower and cupplant have faded. A powerline right of way in the Sourlands preserve is one of the few places where they really show their stuff around here.

In North Carolina, they had names like "giant," "showy," "woodland," and a rare one called "Schweinitzii." I knew giant sunflower (Helianthus giganteus) from only one derelict patch growing along a roadside outside of town, and decided to do it and myself a favor by taking a tiny bit of the patch and planting it in my garden and in a sunny opening in a nature preserve I managed in town. As often happens, what seemed like a species on the brink in the wild turned out to be prolific and expansive in the garden. 

The sunflower in the photo, though, is sunchoke, a sunflower that has long carried the name Jerusalem artichoke. Each year, I think I'll eat its tubers, which I don't, even though they have an appealing nutty flavor when eaten raw, and can work well in a stirfry. And each spring, I attempt to pull out every last sprout, tired of its aggressive underground spread. Then in the fall, longing for summer blooms to continue, I am thankful to find that my eradication efforts have once again failed to completely stem the tide. 

These are some of the flowers that ease the transition from summer's glory to a palette of browns and grays. Let their colors, and the rich spectrum of autumn leaves, penetrate deep into your soul, to carry you through the winter to come.

Princeton's Fuel Tank Raingarden Wannabe

Why would a plant lover be drawn to this desolate scene of concrete and asphalt? Because there's a raingarden behind that fence, or at least a raingarden wannabe, and that means I'm seeing not what is, which is pretty drab, but what could be, which is a dynamic, jubilant planting of native wildflowers, grasses and shrubs filling that skinny raingarden squeezed between the sidewalk and the town's fuel tank. The fuel tank was for awhile serving double duty, fueling town vehicles while its appearance fueled controversy in the neighborhood. A fine rain garden planting could go a long way towards healing the discontent, in my humble, totally plant-biased opinion.

The first good news is that the fresh layer of asphalt there appears to be appropriately tilted to shed its runoff towards the raingarden. What is a raingarden, after all, if the rain that falls on the surrounding topography doesn't flow towards it?

For some reason the raingarden hasn't been planted yet, so the plants have gone ahead and started planting themselves. It's looking a little sparse thus far. Or you could say that the plants are social distancing.

Whenever I see plants trying to colonize bare dirt, I think of people who live in an emotionally impoverished situation. Back when I was in that predicament, I was drawn to places like this. Weeds trying to grow in parched ground were my friends and fellow travelers. Maybe that's why I can remember plant names when most people struggle, because the plants aren't just variations on green. They touch something deeper in me.

This late-flowering thoroughwort is a keeper--a native wildflower whose name is unlikely to flow smoothly from many tongues. It grows like a weed, and often in weedy places, like abandoned fields or roadsides, but can sometimes achieve great elegance of form when it becomes covered with plates of white flowers in late summer. It shows up early, but blooms late. Thus the name.

Here are the leaves of mugwort, which adds no color and spreads aggressively underground, taking over neglected raingardens over time. It's a force for monoculture and monotony that must be countered early and often.

Smaller scale weeds are clustered here, close to the ground, with dandelion on the lower right, a mock strawberry in the middle, and one 3-seeded mercury on the left. When I see one or two mock strawberries like this, I'm also seeing five years hence when it will have spread to coat the ground in an unattractive and inedible way. That increases the motivation to be proactive and pull it out now, before the task becomes overwhelming. This ability to imagine the future, learned in a garden, is directly translatable to global issues like climate change, where the job only becomes harder the longer one waits. 

Lots of homeowners puzzle over what to do with hundreds of oak seedlings in their yards, when everyone is telling them we need to plant more trees. Most tree species don't need help. They plant themselves, often in inconvenient places, like this raingarden.

Playing the editor, I'd say this nonnative red clover is a keeper as well, but pull the tall sweet clover at the other end of the raingarden. Sweet clover can be kind of pretty in a gangly way, but it is one of those midwestern and western weeds that appear to be expanding eastward, like teasel, Queen Anne's Lace, knapweed, and wooly mullein. Having lived in the midwest, I've seen how they can start to take over.

Leaping into the void in plants and action a couple months ago, I pushed some "live stakes" of buttonbush into the bottom of the raingarden. Despite the poor, hardened soil, they have sprouted. Here again, I'm seeing not so much the less than impressive seedling but instead the 8 foot high shrub it could become if it's allowed to get well established.

Just up Witherspoon Street, at the Princeton Recreation Dept. headquarters next to the community pool, is a demonstration of how gardens can look if there's someone knowledgeable taking care of them year after year. There's some serious tending going on here. Even the scarily aggressive variegated goutweed (whitish leaves on the left), which tends to take over gardens, is neatly contained in a discreet clump. These gardens owe their existence and beauty

to Vikki, whose job description in the Recreation Department probably has nothing to do with plants. From what I've seen over the years, it's clear that Vikki is one of the few people in town who is hard-wired to have a soft spot for public gardening, like Polly Burlingham with her hanging baskets downtown, and the various school gardeners, and like Dorothy Mullen was until she left our world earlier this year. I'd say that all it takes is love, and from that all things follow--vision, knowledge, persistence, strategic timing.

Maybe the sad, forsaken raingarden wannabe just a block away will somehow become loved ground. It's got "good bones"--sun, inputs of moisture. Good things could happen.

The Thinking (and Action) Behind a Successful Raingarden

In this post, we explore the thinking behind a successful raingarden. Thought has power, in that it sometimes turns into action, and so we will explore the thought behind the action that has made this large native planting thus far succeed.

In this case, it is a detention basin in Smoyer Park that was converted from turf grass into a wet meadow dominated by native prairie grasses with some wildflowers mixed in. Planted by Partners for Fish and Wildlife, this large-scale raingarden appeared sparse its first couple years, but has now grown thick and subtly colorful with time and attention.

Thick, that is, with intended plants, which is not a given when a raingarden is planted. How many gardens of all sorts, no matter how lovely the vision that brought them into being, have been taken over by mugwort, Canada thistle, and other invasive weeds? Having been this raingarden's volunteer caretaker for its first three seasons, as part of my work for Friends of Herrontown Woods, I visited it recently to see what needed to be weeded, and found nearly nothing requiring my attention. For a gardener, this state of affairs is almost unimaginable.

How could this be? Well, it helps to have planted a strong backbone of tall native grasses:

Indian grass

and big bluestem, to claim the space.

The caretaker's job then becomes a matter of influencing what other species come up in the spaces unclaimed by the grasses. Given limited time, a caretaker must learn to recognize each species and know from experience what to weed out and what to leave. Balance, beauty, and diversity are the goals. Some weeds like mugwort, Canada thistle, and crown vetch are notorious for taking over, and so were weeded out early in the game, before they could become too numerous and ruin any chance for diversity and beauty.

Others, like this fluffy-seeded, native but weedy pilewort that is growing lustily around the edge of the meadow, are judgement calls. I left it in, hoping it will behave like lambsquarters--another annual that makes a powerful showing one year but largely disappears the next.

(An example in this raingarden of a species that was numerous one year, gone the next, is black-eyed susan, which was in the original seed mix and generated lots of color before disappearing this year.)

There are a few native perennial wildflowers that have moved in on their own. At this stage, they are relatively few, and add spots of color and late-season nectar. But I don't entirely trust that they will continue to "play well with others." These include late-flowering thoroughwort,

a goldenrod species with narrow leaves,

and frost aster.

Providing bright color earlier in the season was one large specimen of false sunflower (Helianthus helianthoides)--commonly found in seed mixes for wet meadows. In another raingarden some years back I found it to be overly aggressive, but how it will behave here is yet to be seen.

A native annual I wish would spread around more is jewelweed, whose tubular orange flowers serve hummingbirds all summer long, and whose explosive seedpods delight anyone who takes one in their palm and touches it. Usually, the plant is rambunctious enough to survive the insistent browsing of deer, but for now it's huddling against the concrete outlet, chewed down before it can flower.

A "seed bombing" conducted by a girl scout troop in late spring may have been the origin of these young rose-mallow hibiscus (Hibiscus moscheutos),

and some ironweeds. These are local wildflowers we added to get more color and cater to the pollinators. Both of these can get tall, but may end up being kept low by deer browsing.

One of the pleasures in this wet meadow thus far, surely unnoticed by passersby and hard to photograph, is the clarity, by which I mean one can see inbetween plants all the way to the ground. Low-growing weeds like stiltgrass, carpgrass, ground ivy, and many others tend to muddle the planting, obscuring the ground. This clogged condition, the visual equivalent of listening to a scratchy record, has ecological as well as visual impacts. If the spaces between the bunch grasses are clogged with weeds, ground feeding birds have a harder time navigating, and can become more susceptible to disease from rubbing up against wet foliage.

An encounter with a garden that needs no weeding brings, for an experienced gardener, a mixture of feelings. There's surprise, some quiet pride and elation (that past interventions could have had such a positive effect), and a sense of foreboding. Surely I was missing something.

As it turned out, there was good reason for the foreboding. Getting ready to leave, I spotted a small patch of stiltgrass invading along one edge. Unlike lambsquarters or blackeyed susan, which can be prominent one year, gone the next, stiltgrass is one of the uber-invasives, an annual that grows ever more numerous with time, producing billions of seeds each year. Inedible to wildlife, it creates a stifling appearance, making a planting or whole woodland appear to be blanketed with green cobwebs.

Since its seeds were not yet ripe, I pulled as much as I could find out of the ground, then collected them all and threw them in a nearby woods where stiltgrass had already invaded. The source of the stiltgrass was actually the mowed lawn that surrounds our wet meadow. Given that stiltgrass can grow and seed even though only a few inches tall, the lawn is likely to remain a source of invasion for the foreseeable future. Since the weed prefers moist conditions, the more frequent and heavier rains we are experiencing due to global warming will only make it more aggressive. There continues to be hope that something--a fungus, an insect--will figure out how to consume it and thereby begin to bring stiltgrass into ecological balance, but that wait could be long.

These, then, are the thoughts that fill a wild gardener's mind when visiting a raingarden. Because the aggressive weeds were caught early--nipped in the bud, so to speak--the visits need only come once or twice a month for an hour, even for a wet meadow nearly an acre in size. Knowledge and experience make for strategic, efficient interventions. There's time left over to appreciate the bright flowers of partridge pea and the growing diversity. And it's satisfying to know that in a landscape dedicated to ballfields, a lowly bumblebee or the occasional monarch butterfly will still find some sustaining habitat when visiting Smoyer Park.

Sunchokes--The Native Sunflower That Stirs Gratitude and Grief

Sunchoke, aka Jerusalem artichoke, or Helianthus tuberosus, is such a neat plant that I never quite manage to eliminate it from our yard. That may sound strange, but the combination of opulent flowers, edible tubers and, less wonderful, a habit of spreading every which way from where they're planted, makes for a mix of affection and exasperation.

This year's unsolicited crop included a plant that grew to 11 feet, holding its flowers high and proud, as if defying autumn's inevitable dousing of summer's riotous blooms. The sunchoke's brilliant display is appealing yet feels a bit out of place, like an overly-enthusiastic late-comer to a party everyone thought was over.

Here's a way to enjoy all that sunchokes have to offer while containing their spreading habit: Get a really big plastic tree pot. Fill with soil, buy some sunchokes at the local healthfood store (Whole Earth has them sometimes through the winter). Cut tubers up into chunks and plant four or five pieces in the pot. Place in a sunny place, either on asphalt or on the ground with a piece of plastic underneath to prevent the roots from spreading into the garden. Keep watered. After the plants have grown, bloomed and died back in the fall, cut the stems and turn the pot upside down, leaving the pot on. You now can lift the pot, pluck a few of the 40+ tubers to eat raw or in a stir fry, and put the pot back on to protect the soil from winter weather. I haven't tried the part about turning it upside down and taking a few at a time, but it would likely work better than harvesting all the sunchokes at the same time and then having to store them.

Other places in town where sunchokes thrive are Chambers and Robeson,

and also Harrison Street Park, where they have taken over a raingarden we planted in a swale at the end of the field. The sunchokes are outcompeting two other species of sunflower we put there, and in a couple years may well swallow the bench. Each year I think of covering the sunflowers over with big sheets of cardboard, to eliminate all the aggressive spreaders while saving what few JoePyeWeeds and other non-aggressive natives may still persist, but I don't get around to it. One has to be scrupulous, persistent, eschewing all sentimentality lest some little sprig of sunchoke survive to reassert utter dominance over time. In the wild, sunflowers do not dominate like this because they are growing amongst other native plants just as aggressive.

In other plant news at Harrison Street Park, a couple rare native trees called butternuts are thriving, if not as yet bearing butternuts. They've been laid low in the wild by an imported disease, and our local nut tree expert, Bill Sachs, is working to bring them back.

The two at the park have an interesting way of splaying out around six feet high into multiple stems of similar strength, rather than maintaining a strong central trunk.

One survivor from the older generation of trees in the park is hosting a dense vertical stand of English ivy. Like the native poison ivy, English ivy doesn't bloom unless it's able to climb.

The flowers provide nectar for the monarchs migrating south, but any resulting berries probably get delivered to neighboring yards by the birds, making for yet another plant that, whatever its charms, must be deterred from its relentless spread.