Princeton Cares Helps Out at Mountain Lakes

Princeton Cares, a local nonprofit, organized a workday at Mountain Lakes on Sunday, May 17. Ten high schoolers from Princeton Day School, Hun and Princeton High School, along with two parents and a sibling, cleared invasive species and planted native bottlebrush grass near the Mountain Lakes House.

This was stop #1 in a whole day of good deeds by the nonprofit volunteers.

Plant Sale Sunday

Friends of Princeton Open Space and the Whole Earth Center are sponsoring a small plant sale at Whole Earth Center on Sunday, June 1 at 2pm. Species available: cardinal flower, great lobelia, black-eyed susan, mistflower, serviceberry, swamp azalea, red chokeberry, Virginia sweetspire and sweet pepperbush. Prices range from $3-$12.

Around 3 or so, we'll take a short walk to visit native gardens that have been installed just a block away from Whole Earth Center, in Harrison Street Park and at the Senior Center on Harrison Street. The gardens aren't blooming yet, but we'll look at their placement, design, and how the plants are doing. One of the goals of the native plant workshops is to create demo gardens around town, and these are two fine examples.

Whole Earth Center will provide refreshments.

Photo: Great Lobelia

Evergreen Growth Logic

People often think of evergreen trees and shrubs as static, but they too go through seasonal transformations. An American Holly demonstrates this well. The photo shows three years worth of leaves. This spring's new leaves are olive green, last year's leaves are bright green, and the two year old leaves (yellow) are in the process of being cast overboard. The tree might look unhealthy, but the shedding of two-year-old leaves is as natural as when deciduous trees drop their one-year-old leaves in the fall.

A New Raingarden on Harrison Street

Sometimes you just have to seize the day, take an idea and run with it. Borough resident Curtis Helm called me one day with an idea for a rainwater garden in front of the Senior Center at Spruce Circle. We found a nice sunny spot that could be fed by water from the nearby roofs. Curtis drew up a design and plant list, I met with Scott Parsens, head of the Princeton Housing Authority, who then got the go-ahead from the housing board. A day later, Curtis had already picked up plants donated by Pinelands Nursery.

This past weekend, serenaded by traffic noise on Harrison Street, Curtis broke new ground, so to speak, using his trusty old TroyBuilt roto tiller to remove the sod. We then recontoured the ground with shovels, digging out dirt and building a berm to catch the runoff from nearby downspouts.

The next day Curtis planted a host of native wildflowers, rushes and ferns--Cardinal Flower, JoePyeWeed, Sunflower, Swamp Milkweed, Smooth Rush, Sensitive Fern to name a few. Switchgrass and Virginia Sweetspire will be planted on the berms. Some woodchip mulch around the edges, a trimming of the shrubs, signs to explain it all to passersby, and the raingarden's birth will be complete.

Rainwater enters from the upper and lower righthand corners, accumulates to six inches or so, then seeps in over several hours, providing the plants with an underground reservoir of water to feed on as their roots grow.

I like to think of this as "sunken bed" gardening, as opposed to raised beds.

Asian Photinia--A Newly Identified Invasive

Sometimes Mother Nature can fool those who don't look closely enough. It was recently pointed out to me that the large, aggressive shrub in our Princeton, NJ preserves that I was happily calling Aronia arbutifolia is in fact an exotic invasive, Photinia villosa.

It did seem strange that a species I had had no luck with growing in the past could be doing so well and acting strangely dominant and exclusionary in the local wilds. A quick look in Michael Dir's hefty Manual of Woody Landscape Plants showed distinct differences.

They have similar flowers--both are in the rose family--but native Red Chokeberry blooms a few weeks earlier, with Photinia blossums opening in mid to late May.

The petiole (segment connecting leaf to stem) is 1/8th inch on Photinia, longer on Chokeberry. The leaf venation pattern too is different.







Fall color is tan, while Red Chokeberry is said to be red. Photinia also grows much larger, reaching 15 feet or more.

Results from an internet search suggest that I'm not the only one who has been unaware. The USDA government site shows it growing in three states plus DC, but not in NJ. A University of Florida site says it has little invasive potential.

Thanks to Jared Rosenbaum, of D&R Greenway, for alerting me to the presence of this invasive.

Persistence May Further

In New York's Central Park, many of the lake edges have been planted with native wildflowers. This is the first year we've tried it at Princeton's "Central Park", a.k.a. Mountain Lakes Preserve. It's not as easy as it might seem. Years ago the StonyBrook Watershed Association tried it. I've been told the geese and deer watched from afar as the plants were installed, then moved in after all was planted and munched to their hearts' content.

This past October, our Princeton Native Plant Workshop group planted the edge of the upper Mountain lake with native wildflowers grown from seed (see Oct '07 post). It was a fun session, and lots of plants went in, but they suffered from frost heave over the winter.




A number of the plants survived, however, and this spring I added some more from the Mountain Lakes greenhouse--cutleaf coneflower, rose mallow Hibiscus, woolsedge, swamp milkweed--and added some visual cues and signage to help prevent inadvertent mowing and trampling by passers by.

Last year, one lone Late-Flowering Boneset was all the lakefront had to offer to pollinators in July and August. With some luck, they'll have more faire to sustain them this summer.

NJ Trails helps out at Mountain Lakes

A volunteer crew from the NJ Trail Association came to Mountain Lakes Preserve this past Saturday to add steps to a steep section of the Farmview Trail that overlooks neighboring Coventry Farm.

Note the Egyptian method of transporting heavy stones found nearby along the hillside.

Friends of Princeton Open Space board member Ted Thomas, on the right in the second photo, coordinated the session.

A big thank you to NJTA for their help. If you ever want to download maps of nature trails, including those in Princeton, go to their website at www.njtrails.org.

This Sunday, A Talk and a Walk

We'll talk the talk and walk the walk this Sunday at 3pm, when the Friends of Princeton Open Space has its annual meeting at Mountain Lakes House. The very brief meeting will be followed by a talk by international climate change expert Stephen Pacala, who is a professor at Princeton University and Co-Director of Princeton's Carbon Mitigation Initiative. There will be some refreshments after the talk, and then I'll lead a nature walk through Mountain Lakes and the meadows of Tusculum, stopping by our habitat restoration project just upstream of the lakes.

If you're planning to come, please call 921 2772 to rsvp. All are welcome. Mountain Lakes House is at the end of the long driveway at 57 Mountain Ave. in Princeton.

A Popular Walkway

One of the more popular walks for Princeton residents, of all sorts, is the driveway leading up to Mountain Lakes House. For anyone not ready to venture onto the trails around the lakes, up into the boulder fields of Witherspoon Woods, or over to the meadows of Tusculum, the driveway provides a broad, dependably dry passage into nature.

Right now, the dogwoods are showing the rest of the wooded world what elegance is all about.









If you look down along the roadsides, you'll see some other white blooms--spring beauties and, alas, the highly invasive garlic mustard. Less ubiquitous is the native Virginia Knotweed (photo), which has a dark thumbprint on its leaf.




There's even one small patch of native wild geranium along the edge of the driveway, offering a bit of alternative color in this time of flower white and leaf green.

Shrubs Around Town

A few shrubs blooming around town right now:

There's an impressive grouping of Fothergilla, a shrub native to the southeast US, near the ballfield at Marquand Park. In shady locations, it's less opulent with the blooms, but its leaves still turn a brilliant orange in the fall.

Here's a closeup.


















English Laurel is in full bloom at Pettoranello Gardens. Though not native, it has not proven invasive, and can be a sturdy evergreen for landscaping.







Blackhaw Viburnum is a common large shrub growing wild at Mountain Lakes Preserve, just down the long driveway from Pettoranello Gardens. The flowers are often 20 feet up, and are harder to see now that the woods is greening up.

April 27 Workday at Mountain Lakes Preserve

During this past Sunday's workday, Kim, Owen and I planted up more seeds, potted some green bulrush, and protected newly planted shrubs with cages and homemade stakes fashioned by Clark earlier in the week.



Photos above: 1) Spicebush blooms on an island we're restoring just upstream of Mountain Lakes. 2) Native hibiscus sprouts in the greenhouse.

Master Gardener Plant Sale This Saturday

This Saturday would be a great day to check out the Mercer Educational Gardens during the Master Gardeners' Spring Plant Expo. They'll be selling perennials and herbs from 10-2, Barbara Bromley will be on hand for Q&A, and there is always the grounds to explore, which includes demonstrations of some 17 different designs for compost bins. Photos and descriptions of these can be found on their website. The Gardens are a short drive out of town towards Pennington.

More info, and lots of other things to explore, at www.mgofmc.org.

From Seed to Seedling to New Home

One of the objectives of the Friends of Princeton Open Space is to restore habitat in the many natural areas the organization helped to preserve. Part of this effort is to use remnants of local biodiversity as seed sources for reintroducing species that for various reasons disappeared from other preserves.

If enough of these wildflowers are grown, then we can start offering them to homeowners who want to improve habitat in their backyards.

The seedling in the photo was grown last year from seed collected locally. Cutleaf coneflower is a showy native wildflower that prefers sun but still blooms in the shade, and can grow to eight feet. It grows in only a few spots locally, most notably along the towpath, but with some help could beautify floodplains, detention basins, preserves and backyards throughout Princeton.

Here, it's being planted at Rogers Wildlife Refuge, as part of a habitat restoration project that began with the removal of the highly invasive Phragmitis reed by Partners for Fish and Wildlife.

The rootbound seedling first gets its roots torn up (second photo), then gets planted, marked and (hopefully) protected from deer by a little tipi made of skewer sticks (an untested approach).

Though watering probably won't be necessary in the marshy ground, we'll need to check back to make sure the smartweed sprouting all around doesn't overwhelm it.

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.

Norway Maple's Spring Moment

This photo was taken four days ago. Spring is in such a pellmell rush right now that the scene has already changed, but for a few days anyway you could spot every Norway Maple in town if you knew what to look for. Their flowers and emerging leaves made a distinctive flush of yellow-green, just ahead of most other trees. If you were keeping your head down, you could still see their tiny flowers fallen onto the sidewalks.

Like the barberry bush, the Norway maple is an exotic that can be very invasive. It pops up along the fencerows of people's yards, and before they know it, they have a large bully in their yard, pushing up into the canopy of more favored trees, making such dense shade and grabbing so much soil moisture that nothing can grow underneath it. Though it has long since lost favor in the horticultural trade, its self-seeding and capacity to tolerate shade insures it a place in Princeton's default landscape.

Barberry Bush Bops Bees

I would like to say something nice about a shrub that, despite one very cool characteristic, is being cut down as part of the habitat restoration at Mountain Lakes. Barberry is a commonly planted shrub, used as a hedge in many yards. It's generally around 4 feet high, has small leaves and small thorns on its stems. This time of year, it sprouts lots of small flowers, white or yellow.

Back in my college days, we learned in field botany that if you tickle the flower at the base of the filament, the anther will slap against the stigma. All of which is to say that if you take a small leaf blade, stick it into the flower and look closely, you're likely to see a sudden, quick motion.

When a bee pays a visit, its legs probably poke into the flower and trigger the anther to slap against its body, thereby giving the bee a dose of pollen that it will carry along with it to other barberry flowers, thus serving the cause of pollination.

Another interesting aspect of barberry is the bright yellow of its inner wood, which you will discover if you cut it down. Though barberry is not as highly invasive an exotic as multiflora rose in local preserves, it's bad enough to make one wish people wouldn't plant it, and would consider removing it from their properties so there are less seeds to aid its spread into wild areas. In the meantime, the flowers can be entertaining.

Weekly Habitat Restoration Workday this Sunday, 9:30am

This Sunday's habitat restoration workday will run from 9:30 to 11:30am at Mountain Lakes. A description of last week's workday is below.

It's a busy time of year: more wildflower seeds to plant in the greenhouse, shrubs and wildflowers started last year to plant in areas cleared of invasives. This is prime time to pull garlic mustard--the biennial invasive herb (to get acquainted with this weed, check out photo in May 2, 2007 post on this blog).

If you'd like to join in, please wear work clothes, leather gloves, and bring tools if you have them. A shovel or spade could prove useful. For anyone wishing to work more on invasive shrub removal, bowsaws, loppers or pruning shears are handy. I'll have a few extras. As you drive up the driveway at 57 Mountain Ave, you'll likely see the blooms of spring beauty and flowering dogwood.

We'll meet in the gravel parking lot just before the house.

Last Sunday's workday was very productive. Clark and Brownlee fashioned deer guards for the native shrubs grown last year in the greenhouse (photo above). Kim planted more wildflower seeds in trays, while Brownlee cleaned seed. Annarie and her son cut more invasive shrubs in the valley west of Mountain Lakes House.

Already sprouted in the greenhouse are Rose Mallow Hibiscus, Late-Flowering Boneset and Fringed Sedge.

Thanks to all for their help.

Rose-Rosette Disease in Princeton Preserves

A typical scene in a Princeton preserve this time of year, with exotic shrub species greening up while the native trees are still dormant.

Most of these shrubs are multiflora rose, which bears thorns that will punish anyone daring to explore the woods. Removing these highly invasive shrubs has been a big part of our habitat restoration efforts.

Recently, though, I've become aware of a quiet accomplice to our efforts leaving signs of its work--signs that grow less subtle with each passing year.




Rose-Rosette Disease, which causes infected multflora rose bushes to sprout dense clumps of distorted, red leaves, has been spreading through Mountain Lakes Preserve, and in some cases has killed shrubs completely.

We can dream that the virus, which has been spreading eastward from the western U.S., apparently spread by a tiny native mite, will eventually wipe out this prolific, intimidating weed, but it's much too early to tell. There's also the possibility that the disease will pose a threat to the native swamp rose and cultivated varieties. Still, at this juncture, there's reason to entertain hope.

Daffodil Donation Brightens Up Mountain Lakes House

Thanks to the Garden Club of Princeton, whose members donated bulbs, time and effort to brighten up the grounds next to Mountain Lakes House.

The house, which is owned by the township but leased to Friends of Princeton Open Space (FOPOS), is rented out for weddings, parties and other events. All income beyond expenses helps support land preservation and restoration efforts in Princeton.

In addition, the Garden Club of America, through a recommendation by the Garden Club of Princeton, gave an award to the FOPOS board this year "For their devotion to the preservation of open space and increasing environmental awareness in and around Princeton, NJ."

Daffodils, by the way, are an example of a non-native species that doesn't spread into local woods and fields.

The Last Flower, or the First?

An improbable flower blooms on a slope overlooking the Mountain Lakes in Princeton. It's a bloodroot, the only one of its kind in the preserve, as far as I've been able to tell, and it wouldn't have been noticed at all if not for some observant weekend hikers.

I had been pulling up honeysuckle shrubs while my daughter built a stone house for an earthworm family along the creek--"so they can get married," she reported to me. We were about to leave when Owen and Marilyn came along. They had just noticed the flower, and showed it to us back up the trail.

The suspense now is whether this lone flower will have its daring investment in leaf and flower wiped out by a passerby--deer or human--or will be able to produce seed and spread.

Another wildflower that's very rare in the preserve is windflower. I found only two patches of this species, maybe ten plants total.

They can easily be mistaken for spring beauties, which are much more common.




Common as the spring beauties are the trout lilies, though few of them actually produce flowers, for some reason.

Many factors have made wildflowers rare in the preserve--past plowing, the high deer numbers, the competition for sun and water from invasive species. The wildflowers are most numerous in places that were not plowed, such as along old roadways, in floodplains and along the lake edge.

Mountain Lakes Habitat Restoration Update

We made more progress last Sunday. Clark cut invasive shrubs on the island just up from the lakes, and I planted about 40 more live stakes of silky dogwood, elderberry and buttonbush.

This weekend, I'm going to take a pause from field work to devote time to getting square with Uncle Sam, and will also take GPS readings to figure out how close we are to clearing brush from 4 acres, as FOPOS is contracted to do for the WHIP habitat restoration grant.

Thanks to all who have helped thus far.

Rogers Refuge Gets Some TLC

Birds don't have cell phones, so how were we to know that the birdhouses at Rogers Refuge were so full of previous years' nesting material that there was no longer any room for the birds?

Maintenance--the eternal battle against entropy--is most often encountered with its sidekick modifier "deferred." The act of maintaining is an expression of love, increasingly rare in a hurried, throwaway age, and is to be celebrated whenever and wherever it happens.

On March 15, Fred, Winnie and Alex Spar took the possibly unprecedented step of cleaning out and re-positioning the many birdhouses at Rogers Wildlife Refuge. Most were jam-packed with a decade's worth of nests.


Fred and Winnie are both members of the Friends of Rogers Refuge (FORR)--the volunteer organization that works with the water company and the township to manage this haven for birds. Fred serves as president of FORR.




Visitors to the Refuge will notice some curious yellow tubes proliferating around the edges of the marsh, like Chinese lanterns. These have been installed to protect "live stakes" of native shrubs planted this spring. If all goes according to plan, this field, which until last year was dominated by invasive Phragmitis, will become populated with silky dogwood, buttonbush, elderberry, and various species of wildflowers grown from locally collected seed.

Turning the Tide, One Island at a Time

Working our way down the valley towards the lakes at Mountain Lakes Preserve, cutting down invasive shrubs as we go, we came upon an island. Or, rather, Clark came upon an island, and has been spending some spring afternoons relieving it of a long-held burden of the usual suspects--multiflora rose, privet and honeysuckle.

A big ash tree stands guard at the upstream end, splitting the stream in two and preventing periodic floodwaters from carrying the island's soil downstream into the lakes.


In the course of removing exotic species, some native ones have emerged from the tangle. Below is a Christmas fern, growing at the base of a privet, and just about to send up a new crop of "fiddlehead"-shaped leaf shoots. Other natives discovered on the island are elderberry, spicebush and wild indigo (Amorpha fruticosa).

Clark, who is enjoying a very active retirement, has also been cutting down invasive shrubs along many of the Mountain Lakes trails he walks daily. Thanks to volunteers like Clark, the landscape at Mountain Lakes is becoming more and more a place to nourish wildlife and the human spirit.

Reading the Forest Floor

These cool, grey days aren't very springlike, but take a look amongst the dull brown leaves at Mountain Lakes, or most anyplace in Princeton that's within a stone's throw of a creek, and you're likely to see the wave of growth beginning its quiet surge.

Two annuals--one native, the other introduced from Asia--are sprouting in abundance. The first photo shows native jewelweed, which will grow to three feet and offer orange or in rare cases yellow tubular flowers to the hummingbirds all summer long. It has gelatinous sap that is used to treat poison ivy. If you put one of its leaves underwater, it will suddenly appear metallic silver. The flowers hang like earrings. Either one of these features could explain the common name. It's also called Touch Me Not, which refers to the spring-loaded seeds that explode when you touch the pods. But for now, they are just tiny sprouts among the dull leaves on a grey spring day.

Some day I will commit an hour to counting how many Japanese stiltgrass sprouts come up in an average square foot of Princeton soil. Multiplied by how many square feet Princeton contains, the figure will no doubt soar into the trillions and beyond. There are whole meadows of this stuff in Princeton nature preserves, which means there is precious little room for native species once the stiltgrass gets through hogging all the nutrients, water and sunlight. It also changes the soil chemistry, which can have ecological ramifications.

People think of Kudzu as the ultimate invasive weed, but it's these little fellows that come up by the trillions that are turning our preserves into monocultures of plants no wildlife will eat.

I've heard that jewelweed is an invasive problem where it has been introduced in Europe. I wish that ecosystems had mechanisms for quickly bringing new species into some sort of balance, but wildlife seem to adapt their tastes very slowly, if at all, giving the uneaten exotics a huge competitive advantage.

EEK! There's a bug in the house!

Call the police. Vacate the premises. Secure the perimeter. There's a bug in the house, and it's ready to attack.

Having been alerted to the situation by a distressed family member, I courageously approached the beast, armed with an insect identification book fully loaded with images and text. I fumbled through the pages, searching fruitlessly for a name with which to peg the intruder. Fortunately, my trusty companion Google was nearby, and soon gave me the lowdown on what I was up against: a fully grown Brown Marmorated Stinkbug!

Not wishing to engage this fearsome fellow in head-on conflict, I decided to let it crawl up on my finger, from which perch it was able to observe me starting to type this blog entry. Apparently in an attempt to do some editing of my description of events, it decided to hop down on the keyboard--dangerous territory for a highly squashable true bug, given the forest of flying fingers. By the time I thought to put it outside, it had already slipped off the keyboard and disappeared. I reported happily to the family that everything was under control.

Like another frequent indoor visitor--the Asian ladybug beetle--the brown marmorated stinkbug is not native to the U.S. It reportedly can raise a stink if it wants to, or if you crush it, but I didn't have a chance to find out. There are many colorful stinkbug species, but this is not one of them.

March Native Plant Workshop Update

We had perfect weather for another hands-on workshop session March 30 at Mountain Lakes. Clark, Kim and Steven continued cutting invasive multiflora rose, privet and honeysuckle from the small valley upstream of the lakes, and Simonette and I planted seeds of cutleaf coneflower, tall meadow rue, Joe Pye, Late Flowering Boneset, ironweed, bladdernut and fringed sedge in the greenhouse.

The habitat restoration is being funded by a grant from the USDA's Wildlife Habitat Incentive Program, and we're currently in hurry up mode to meet the deadline for the brush removal phase of the project. Thanks to everyone for their help.

The workshops are co-sponsored by Friends of Princeton Open Space and the Whole Earth Center.

Skunk Cabbage Pollination

I had assumed that, because skunk cabbages smell bad and mimic the color of rotten meat, that their flowers catered only to flies. But two weeks ago I happened to peer into one and found a honey bee collecting a major load of pollen. A fascinating description of skunk cabbage's central heating system and unusual root characteristics can be found at the Wikipedia website.

March 16 Workday Update

We had a good workday on the 16th at Mountain Lakes. Russ went after more multiflora rose and I planted 15 elderberry "live stakes", using the thickets of previously cut rose and privet bushes to protect the elderberries from the deer.

Spring Has a Spring To Its Baby Steps

Spring is bursting out here and there, in subtle prelude to the full unleashing of flowers. These crocuses are celebrating their liberation from English ivy, which happened last year (see last year's posts for easy ivy removal). Other non-native annuals like snowdrops and aconite have also been blooming for weeks.





Native species blooming this time of year are more understated--nature without makeup on. These are the catkins of alders lining Pettoranello Pond. Look up at the street trees, and chances are you'll see the reddish haze of tiny maple flowers. The skunk cabbages at Mountain Lakes are putting a call out to all flies for pollination services, as the spring peepers offer up eerie, spontaneous, mass orchestrations of primordial mating calls. There was even a V of geese flying north today.

Live Stakes Today, Shrubs Tomorrow

Thanks to yesterday's habitat restoration session at Mountain Lakes, the invasive shrubs are less legion, and some thirty new native shrubs now have a foothold in the valley just up from the lakes. It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon for working outside. The high winds left over from yesterday's storm front sailed high overhead.

We lopped the invasive bush honeysuckles and multflora rose bushes off at the ground, pulling many of the smaller honeysuckles completely out by the root. The more massive invasives were left in place as nifty protective cages into which we could plant the native shrubs, which took the form of live stakes.

A live stake, as I never tire of explaining because it's such an elegant way to create new plants, is a two foot cutting taken from a dormant, fully grown shrub. You then stick the bottom end into the soft late-winter soil and cut off all but a couple sets of buds above ground. Then wait for spring, when roots form below ground and leaves above. It would be highly convenient if all native shrubs were so cooperative, but only three species root on their own in this manner: silky dogwood, buttonbush and elderberry. All three can be found growing in the wet ground along streams. We planted the first two kinds.

Thanks to Clark, Steven and Annarie and her two children for their help and good company.

Another session is planned for this coming Sunday, March 16.