I wish I were as organized as a red maple tree. While other trees are still waking up from their winter hunch, these maples have already flowered, formed seeds and have moved on to sprouting leaves. With the task of making progeny done for the most part, the rest of the year is gravy.
Louise Senior calls these volunteer days "Into the Woods", which is where we all headed this past Sunday. Louise organized some volunteers from the Unitarian Church on Cherry Hill Road to start restoring the township-owned woods that borders the church. My job with Friends of Princeton Open Space is to assist such initiatives with some supervision and supplies.
I usually forget to take before and after shots, but here is the forest clearing choked with invasive multiflora rose bushes. This area was targeted for restoration because it is often wet, and open enough to get some sun to the ground.
Here is the transformation--a wet, sunny location ideal for all the various native wildflowers that thrive in such habitat. Some more invasives removal, a follow-up planting of native plants, and what has been a rather empty woods of evergreen trees will start offering a more varied diet for the local wildlife.
Volunteers also potted “live stakes” of native elderberry, silky dogwood and buttonbush. Cuttings from these three species can be stuck in soil and, if kept watered and given some sun, will sprout roots and leaves and grow into full-sized shrubs. This small collection of pots actually holds 60 new plants.
Cherry trees, planted back when the canal area was a cultivated entryway into Princeton University, add ornament to the towpath next to Turning Basin Park. Last year, the university student group Water Watch cleared out the invasive Tree of Heavens that were starting to shade out the cherries. Neither the cherries nor the Tree of Heaven are native, but the former is ornamental and non-invasive.
Because garlic mustard is a biennial, there were actually two generations of the plant present. We pulled only the second year plants, which were just starting to send up their flowering stalks. The smaller ones are first year plants, which we left because they won't flower this year. Many of them will die anyway, from overcrowding, before they reach the flowering stage next year.
I would love to report that shad are running in my minipond, which I dug where a small tributary of Harry's Brook once flowed, before my backyard was a backyard. The brook is connected to the Millstone River, which flows into the Raritan River, which empties into the ocean just south of Staten Island.
Who knows if shad ever made it up to my neighborhood, but the blooms of a solitary shadbush in the backyard tell me that somewhere the shad are running. The shrub is also called serviceberry, and will have delicious berries later in the season. 
Migrating fish have lost my ecological address, but a lot of other wildlife have found it. Though the shad didn't make the walk up to my miniponds, I was surprised and flattered by a visit from a couple young wood ducks the other day. That was a first.
A snapping turtle, some 14 inches long, though who's going to try to measure. I thought he had left last year, but is back, bigger than before. We may take him for a short ride back down to the creek.
While the exotic but non-invasive forsythia blooms bright yellow in residential areas, the native spicebush is coloring the floodplains of natural areas with a subtler shade of yellow.
Pause long enough to take a close look at the spicebush shrubs and you're likely to find them abuzz with skittish flies of various sizes. The smaller ones allowed me to photograph them, but I had no luck getting a focused photograph of any of the other kinds.
The spring ephemerals are in bloom at Mountain Lakes Preserve. Their survival strategy is to emerge early, bloom, set seed and absorb solar energy for the next year. By the time the trees sprout leaves and cast a deep shade on the forest floor, these wildflowers are finishing up and getting ready to go dormant until the next spring.
Less common, surviving mostly in floodplains, is the beautiful trout lily.
Less common still (I've found a grand total of five of these in the whole preserve) are bloodroot, which actually keep their leaves into the summer.
The sidewalks and pavement of Princeton tell a lot about what sorts of trees are growing overhead. If you see lots of red when you look down, there's probably a native red maple above that has just dropped its small flowers.
A spent flower cluster colored pea green indicates a Norway maple. 
This time of year, it's possible to travel down the street identifying every Norway maple in sight, with their distinctive shade of green. Norway maples were a popular exotic tree to grow at one time, but their very deep shade and allelopathic tendencies (they release chemicals from their roots that suppress growth of other plants) make it hard to grow anything underneath them. They have also proved very invasive in some parts of the country.
A collection of prickly balls on the street mean a native sweet gum tree is nearby. 
These sweet gums line the 206 side of the Community Park soccer fields.
Sometimes, returning home from travels can cause as much culture shock as going abroad. This time around, driving home after ten days in Spain, my neighborhood in Princeton looked suddenly very strange. Why, I wondered, are all the houses separated one from another? I had gotten used to seeing stand-alone houses in Spain only on farms we passed on the highway. In town, all dwellings were apartments or townhomes. 
In Spain (these photos are from the Extremadura region, where Pizarro came from), we only saw large expanses of "lawn" out in the country, 
and the mowing was conveniently done by horses, sheep and cattle.
As is the case most anywhere, kids love to run out into a field of low cut grass, but in a pasture the grass is also serving to convert solar energy into something useful. Our lawns may look clean and subdued, but they grow nothing more than yardwaste. 
Here's a figure deep in thought on a plaza in the museum district of Madrid, Spain. It's a beautiful spring day. What could he possibly be so perplexed about? 
Nearby, there's a garden with many kinds of flowers, some of which look suspiciously like foamflowers native to the U.S.
Some others look like hostas and wild geraniums. Nothing particularly unusual. 
But wait a minute! They're growing on a wall! Now that IS something to puzzle over. 
From the side of the wall, it looks like the plants are growing in nothing much more than a thin wool-like fabric with small pockets cut into it, and a strong nylon backing. One thing about wall gardens: They're easy to water. Water is released from the top of the wall and trickles down through all the vegetation below. And you get a big effect while using next to no real estate.
Such joy and mystery a frozen lake holds. The Princeton recreation department declared Carnegie Lake safe two days ago, and we managed to get out there before last night's snow came down, like a curtain on a fantasy play. The ice was smooth in places, a bit rough in others, whispering its secrets to us as we skated from hither to yon and back again.
But most fascinating was the story the ice was quietly telling, through the language of its patterns, of how it formed. I have no idea how the ice makes eyes--those circles that look like a dark pupil with rays of the iris radiating outward.
The others? My guess is that the white plates embedded in the ice reveal that the ice froze some weeks ago, then broke apart, then refroze, capturing the leftover chunks in the new formation.
In other photos, a fish frozen in the season's amber of ice.
A gathering of geese left their unmistakable traces.
And broad lines traversing the lake give a mini-lesson in plate tectonics, showing where the expanding ice formed fractures.
Most of the year, this evergreen shrub is an inexpressive green blob in the yard, but nothing says cold like a Rhododendron. When the temperatures dipped down into the 20s and teens recently, most trees and shrubs looked unperturbed. But all the Rhododendrons in town struck a compelling pose, telling every passer by what they already knew: "It's cold out here!"
Long-existing plans to restore the historic dams at Mountain Lakes are now moving ahead. Last week, engineers and historians did a walk through to discuss various details of the plans. The dams were built around 1900 in order to harvest ice, which was stored in three-story barns just below the lower dam.
A typical backyard scene on an atypically warm December day. But wait what is that speck of gray near one of the mini-ponds?
Looks like it's time for a restocking program.
(First appeared in the Princeton Packet)
Of all the contrasts in perspective between children and adults, none is more striking this time of year than in how we view autumn leaves. For children, leaves are a crisp sound underfoot, a source of beauty in color and flight, a gift from above to revel and play in. For many adults, that joy and gratitude mutates into resentment and complaint. Glorious leaves become an unwieldy burden called “yardwaste”.
There is plenty of adult logic to suggest that the child’s view is less naïve. Each time leaves get piled on the curb for pickup, the urban soil becomes less fertile, less absorbent, less hospitable to birds and other wildlife. The yard’s loss then becomes a public hazard, obstructing traffic and polluting local streams with nutrients. The CO2 spewing from battalions of leaf blowers, and the municipal convoys that scoop up the leaves and haul them out of town, hastens spaceship earth towards the tipping point of ecological havoc.
But I can understand why people grow resentful. Trees, in their own quiet but relentless way, are ongoing critics of our way of life. They are constantly dumping some sort of detritus on our patios, our houses, our idle lawns. Whether it's spent flowers in spring, seeds and sticks through the summer or dead leaves in the fall, the message is clear. Trees are predisposed to bury our coiffured human habitats and bring back a cool, moist forest floor into which they can spread their roots.
It’s best not to take this personally. And though our adult bodies may not be ready to leap into a pile of leaves for the sheer pleasure of it, there are ways to smuggle into adulthood a child’s gratitude for leaves. To get along with nature, and to sustain hospitable conditions on our one and only spaceship, it helps to work as nature works, by finding opportunity in discarded things. Nature has no landfills. All “stuff” travels in an endless circle, from life to death and back again. Think, therefore, of your yard not in terms of leaf exports and fertilizer imports, but as an economy unto itself, where plants extract nutrients from the soil, then send them dancing back down again as spent leaves to replenish the soil and all the life it holds.
To accommodate autumn's harvest in our tidy urban landscapes, become a connoisseur of leaves. For each type there is a strategy. Pine needles make an attractive mulch under shrubs and trees. Locust leaves are so small they require no raking at all. Silver maple leaves curl up and quickly decompose, so can be raked into flower beds or ground up by the lawn mower and left on the grass. Oak leaves, being thicker and longer lasting, will need to be corralled in a corner of the lot to settle back into the earth over time.
Children may push their vegetables away, but they know a thing or two about appreciating leaves. For the leaf-spurning adult world, it’s worth taking a fresh look at autumn’s harvest. Surely there is some measure of happiness to be regained when a foe becomes a friend, when the eye sees not burden but opportunity falling all around.
More information can be found in the Fall Leaf Management brochure, published by the Princeton Environmental Commission, available at town halls and downloadable from www.princetonboro.org.
A fine example of using native shrubs in a foundation planting was in its fall glory at the Princeton Junior School earlier this month. The yellow is sweet pepperbush (Clethra alnifolia). Virginia sweetspire (Itea virginica) is burgundy, with a bit of blueberry (orange) in the lower right.
Dwarf witchalder (Fothergilla gardenii) is the dazzling orange in the second photo, with Clethra to the left, then the evergreen inkberry holly (Ilex glabra). Another holly in the planting, not shown, is winterberry (Itea verticillata). Most of these shrubs are rarely found in the wild (Fothergilla does not even include NJ in its natural range) but grow easily in gardens.
