Shad, Wood Ducks and a Reptile

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.

There was also a return visit from another wild creature who did make the walk, and whose presence doesn't so much flatter as cause the heart to flutter. Just beneath the reflection of trees on the water's surface, a reptilian presence soaked up some afternoon rays.


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.

Upcoming Open Space Events

Mark your calendars for two upcoming events on the weekend of April 25-26:

Saturday, April 25: The Friends of the Charles Rogers Wildlife Refuge (FORR) will dedicate two new observation platforms overlooking the large Upper Marsh at the Refuge on Saturday, April 25, at 9:00 a.m. The marsh is an extraordinary place, totally unexpected in the Princeton landscape. It's also one of the best birding spots around. The platforms allow you to look out across an expansive, several acres marsh filled with life. The ceremony will take place at the first observation platform in the center of the sanctuary, which is located off West Drive in Princeton. It will be followed by a bird walk to look for early spring migrants in the Refuge and in the adjacent Institute for Advanced Studies Woods.”

Sunday, April 26: The Friends of Princeton Open Space (FOPOS) will be holding its annual meeting at 3pm at Mountain Lakes House, 57 Mountain Ave in Princeton. After a very brief bit of business, the featured speaker, Michele S. Byers, will speak on "Garden State Greenways". Michele is Executive Director of the NJ Conservation Foundation, and writes environmental columns that appear locally in the Princeton Packet and Trenton Times. I hear she is an excellent speaker, and from the title it sounds like she will give a good sense of how all of our work with FOPOS fits into the effort to preserve functioning ecological corridors in New Jersey.

Ms. Byers' talk will be followed by refreshments, after which I will lead a nature walk through Tusculum and Mountain Lakes.

FOPOS is celebrating its 40th anniversary this year!

What's the Buzz on Spicebush?

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.

These and other entries this year will focus in on how wildlife is served, or not, by the plant life in Princeton's preserves. Insects play a big role in making the solar energy captured by plants available to other wildlife such as birds. Though birds eat seeds and berries, they rely on insects for a critical part of their diet, particularly during spring breeding season.

Many insects, however, have not developed appetites for the many invasive species that have been introduced to this continent over the last several hundred years. These exotic plants, then, as they displace native species, may be depriving wildlife of the edible plants they need to survive. It's a compelling argument, and it will be interesting this spring to see how it plays out in the fields, and forests, of Princeton.

Native Spring Flowers of Mountain Lakes

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.

The most common of these at Mountain Lakes is the spring beauty, which grows so abundantly along the driveway as to seem almost weedy.

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.

Other spring ephemerals that you will be lucky to find in a few locations are windflower and toothwort.

The rarity of these wildflowers at Mountain Lakes is a legacy of the agricultural era, particularly the plow, which erased the soil's memory of past glories. Though the old fields eventually grew up in native trees, the spring flora don't have the capacity to quickly recolonize.

Browsing by deer has also played a role in suppressing wildflowers in Princeton's preserves, though the township's deer culling program is helping native species like the bloodroot to recover.

To Identify Trees, Look Down

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.

Even when past the flowering stage, the trees still have a reddish tint this time of year, as the seeds (called achenes) begin to grow out of the red flower stems that remain on the tree.

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.

It's not the best tree to grow in a yard if you like to romp barefoot in the grass, but they can be impressive in other ways. When I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where they are uncommon, a horticulturist at the university took great pride in a small sweetgum he had planted. The beautiful paneling in my parents' home was said to be sweetgum.

In natural areas, they tend to grow in floodplains, sprouting thickly in open areas.

Princeton--A Town of Idle Mini-Farms

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.

And what is all this vacant land around each house? What is it for? You mean we have to mow the lawns ourselves, with odd-looking, noisy machines? This perception--this "out of culture" experience--lasted only a few minutes before I again donned my cultural blinders and assumed the way we live our lives is normal.

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.

So those were the few minutes of insight, gained through ten days of travel, that though Princeton is a town, it can also be seen as a particularly concentrated gathering of farmhouses, each surrounded by a miniature pasture that has long since forgotten its reason for being. With grazing animals long gone, we mow these pastures, not knowing quite why, other than that everyone else does, and it makes the idle land look tidy.

This is written at a time when two movements are pointing out how potentially useful these clusterings of idle mini-farms could be. The Eat Local movement sings the praises of vegetable gardens--in the backyard or right out front. Portions of schoolyards are being converted to vegetable gardens with great success. And environmentalists are encouraging us to convert parts of our lawns to native plant habitat.

Are these movements to be seen as radical change, or simply a means for the American landscape to find its way home after a very long and curious journey?

Exotic Plants and Disconnected Solar Panels

I tried googling exotic plants and disconnected solar panels, but didn't get much, despite the fact that they have a lot in common. Both plants and solar panels convert solar energy into forms that can be used in natural or human economies. A plant, if wildlife finds its leaves edible, transfers that captured solar energy up the food chain, from leaf to butterfly larva to bird. Solar panels transfer captured solar energy into a grid, to feed the machine world.

The leaves of exotic plant species--those that did not evolve in this area--are generally not edible to local wildlife. Many insect species, for instance, have become over countless millenia very specialized in their tastes, and will only eat certain native species. The energy captured in the foliage of most exotic plants, therefore, does not get transferred up the food chain. In that way, planting exotic plants in the yard is much like installing solar panels that remain unplugged.

The question can come up as to why one would want to plant something in the yard that's just going to get devoured by the local insect life, but there seems to be a balance struck. A few leaves are sacrificed, but the general appearance is not affected. I had one swamp milkweed plant stripped by monarch butterfly larvae, but that's been the exception. The response to that serendipitous "problem" was to plant more milkweeds, so there'd be plenty to go around the next year.

Walls Go Green in Madrid

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.

Deciding What Nature To Bring Home

It's usually hard to find the silver lining in back pain, but a few days of incapacitation caused me to glance over at the bedside table and notice a book that had been waiting patiently there for nearly a year. Bringing Nature Home, it's called, by an entomologist named Douglass Tallamy, and inside its cover is a more meaningful journey than I had been managing of late with all powers of mobility intact.

What does a scholar of the insect world have to tell us about our own? Take for instance the decisions many homeowners are making this time of year about what new plants to bring into the garden. We usually make these decisions based on what looks pretty, what will grow to the right size, what will provide privacy or hide an unwanted view.

All of these qualities matter, but if one´s seeking meaning in a garden beyond pleasing views, Tallamy provides as good a guide as any to how your garden can either shun the local ecology or become an integral part thereof. In so doing, he provides answers to some basic questions like the difference between native and exotic plants, and the ecological consequences of planting one or the other. Establish enough of these building blocks of understanding in your thinking, and you´ll begin to see how decisions made about backyard plantings will help determine the fate of many species of wildlife that are becoming ever more marginalized. Each of us in our own small way has the power.

As my back pain (negative but instructive) and the accelerating local initiative to make Princeton more sustainable (highly positive) began mixing with Tallamy´s narrative, I started developing a Unified Theory that would finally explain the hidden connections between nature, local economies, and the ecology of back muscles. All of this may come out in subsequent posts, along with the answer to the question, How is an exotic plant like an unplugged solar panel?

PUBLIC MEETING ABOUT SUSTAINABLE PRINCETON PLAN

An important meeting for the environmental future of Princeton is coming up on Wednesday, March 11. The public will get a chance to learn more about and comment on the Sustainable Princeton Plan. This is the document that will guide Princeton's community-wide shift towards greater sustainability. Everyone--residents, schools, businesses, local governments--has both a stake and a hand in this effort. Please come to this event, to learn and give input.

At the March 11th workshop (7 p.m., Suzanne Patterson Center behind Princeton Borough Municipal Building, One Monument Drive), the draft document will be summarized, general comments will be made, and then the participants will break into small working groups to discuss how to carry out specific actions of the plan. Light Refreshments will be available.
For further information, please contact the Princeton Planning Director Lee Solow: 609/924-5366 or lsolow@princeton-township.nj.us

Additional information:

Sustainable Princeton Steering Committee, composed of municipal officials, representatives of Princeton groups and institutions, and local residents invites the public to participate in a Tuesday, March 11th, 7 p.m., workshop at the Suzanne Paterson Center , 1 Monument Drive, Princeton to review and comment upon the Sustainable Princeton Community Plan (SPCP). The draft plan outlines the goals and objectives of the Sustainable Princeton Initiative. The workshop will provide the input needed to finalize the SPCP and to launch the community on a course of achieving – and sustaining - a green and greener Princeton. Copies of the draft are available at the municipal buildings, the public library and online at http://www.princetontwp.org/Sustainable-Princeton-Draft2-5.pdf

The SPCPoutlines goals, identifies the sectors of the communities that would be implementing these goals, and presents action plans for fulfilling the goals, as well as strategies for measuring/tracking progress. The six goals are: green the built environment; improve transit/transportation; build local green economy; protect health and natural resources; curb greenhouse gases; foster community. The sectors - schools, businesses, residents, government - would be tasked with implementing specific action plans.

Sustainable Princeton had its roots within the Princeton Environmental Commission, which asked the municipalities to form a Sustainable Princeton Steering Committee two years ago and to hire New Jersey Sustainable State Institute (NJSSI) to help the municipalities embark upon a cohesive and effective plan to make the Princetons a model of sustainability in New Jersey. With a grant from the Municipal Land Use Center of New Jersey, the municipalities were able to sustain the Sustainable Princeton Initiative and to develop the Sustainable Princeton Community Plan on which the public is being asked to comment.

The Case of the Missing Babies

Princeton has quite a few natural areas, but in another way, I would say that we are not providing for the needs of kids for nature. Take for instance the strong need in children to witness the wonder of creation and growth. By this, I mean the birth and growth of baby animals. The breeding of dogs is largely left to professionals. Kittens are scarce, which may be just as well, given the toll stray cats can exact on local birds. Farms open to the public are few and require a drive.

What do we have to fill this void? Some people are lucky to have birds nest close to a window. My daughters have seen Monarch caterpillars grow into butterflies, and seen cicadas emerge from their shells. They were delighted to find baby goldfish in our backyard miniponds, and promptly gave them all names. But really this is slim pickins when compared to all the joy, wonder and learning that could be taking place. 

So, what do I tell my eight year old when she pleas to buy an exotic frog at the local store? We know that the trade in exotic pets, as with the importation of exotic plants, has contributed to the unraveling of our ecosystems, as well-meaning owners release exotic animals into the wild when they can no longer care for them at home. 

This situation is akin to the difficulties gardeners face when they seek out native plants to buy. What we have in both cases is a void in local native offerings that people then seek to fill by importing exotics. There are, fortunately, some steps being taken to supply local native plants to buy. The Friends of Princeton Open Space has held small native plant sales the past two years. Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve sells native plants, and other local organizations like Stonybrook Watershed Association and the Mercer County Master Gardeners have periodic sales. Most promising, in terms of scale and sticking to local genotypes, is D&R Greenway's efforts, which began with a sale this past fall. 

The more difficult problem is how to fill the void in children's lives, when demonstrations of nature's fecundity are so hard to find. I remember as a kid bringing a couple tadpoles home from some nearby pond and watching them grow legs in our aquarium. That's the kind of thing I have in mind. Though nowadays we're discouraged from foraging in the wild, there must be an alternative to teaching kids that nature is something they buy at the local store.

Nature Hike Sunday, Feb. 15

All yee cabin fevered,

You're invited to participate in a nature hike this Sunday, Feb. 15, at Autumn Hill Reservation on the eastern side of Princeton. Meet at 10:30am at the parking lot on Herrontown Road, north of Snowden Lane and south of Bunn Drive. Though the walk is primarily a chance to venture out of doors and explore one of Princeton's less-known preserves, we'll also be taking notes on the condition of the trails and signage, and acquiring the bare necessities for tree identification in the winter. We'll be talkin' twigs and bark to our hearts' content. These hikes stick to the trails, but conversations often veer far from the beaten path.

There may be some muddy patches, so wear boots. Below are some relevant websites.

Steve Hiltner

Natural Resources Manager, Friends of Princeton Open Space

http://www.princetontwp.org/authill.html

http://www.njtrails.org/trailguide.php?TrailID=97

Patterns In Carnegie Lake Ice

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.

There was the pleasure of joining the impromptu Skaters Without Borders club, of escaping the tyranny of counter clockwise motion imposed by all skating rinks, as if the whole population is incapable of turning to the right.


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.


Snow then fell, obscuring the ice and preventing the township from testing the ice to declare it safe. During this time, an intrepid cross-country skier and two hikers traversed the lake, leaving their tracks. When the snow melted on a warm day, the tracks melted differently than the uncompressed snow, then refroze.




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.

Droop du Jour

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!"

SKATING ON CARNEGIE LAKE!

Spread the word. The township rec dept. has given the green light for skating on Carnegie Lake. I haven't been down yet, so don't know how smooth the ice is, but that's definitely the afterschool destination. Here's the website where the township provides up to date info on skating conditions at three locations in Princeton: http://www.leaguelineup.com/welcome.asp?url=princetonrecreation.

Mountain Lakes Dams To Be Restored

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.

The photo shows the old spillway, now reinforced with loose rock to prevent it from collapsing. There was some uncertainty about whether the lakes could be dredged as part of the restoration, but the township is now more optimistic about funding, including the possibility of tapping into the upcoming federal economic stimulus package. A great deal of silt has accumulated in the lakes over the past 100 years. Two small dams upstream that used to trap the silt are completely filled, and now the upper lake has six feet of silt, with only one foot of water on top.

A Distinguished Backyard Thief

A typical backyard scene on an atypically warm December day. But wait what is that speck of gray near one of the mini-ponds?


I happened to look out the back window today just as a great blue heron swooped in to take a close look at my water features. After scrutinizing one for awhile, and finding it lacking in edible objects, the big bird strolled over to the other minipond and almost immediately plunged its long neck into the water. Its bill flashed orange as it emerged with lunch, in the form of the one goldfish it hadn't managed to get on its last observed visit two years prior.


Looks like it's time for a restocking program.

Where Do The Children Play?

For anyone interested in the role of nature and play in child development, and the effect thereon of suburban development and school policies, I highly recommend checking out (literally, from the Princeton Public Library or elsewhere) the movie Where Do The Children Play. The Waldorf School sponsored a showing of the movie at the Princeton Public Library last night, with some of those involved in its making on hand to answer questions afterward.

The premise is that children whose schedules are overbooked, who spend large amounts of time in front of computer and TV screens and who are kept indoors by overly protective parents, are at risk. The lack of opportunities to be in nature or to explore their creativity in free play can cause children to lose touch with their creative impulses and capacity for free thinking. Connected to this is the reduced sense of place many suburban kids feel, growing up in neighborhoods where neighbors don't know one another, and where the ability for them to walk or bike to destinations is limited by sprawl. Some excellent interviews with Richard Louv and others are featured.

The movie was developed in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I lived for many years. Though Ann Arbor is one of the safest towns around, an effort to get kids to walk to school failed miserably, apparently due to pervasive fears of "stranger danger".

More info on the movie can be found at:
http://www.wfum.org/childrenplay/index.html

The library has copies of the movie and companion books.

Movie Thursday at Public Library

"Where Do The Children Play", a movie about how "sprawl, congestion, and endless suburban development" have changed the landscape for childhood and may be affecting children's mental and physical health, will be presented at the Princeton Public Library this Thursday, Dec. 4 at 7pm.

It's interesting to note that Princeton used to have high school kids playing the role of "camp counselors" at various parks throughout town during the summer, where kids in the neighborhood could go at any point during the day and play various games. Whereas now the system is centralized, with a rec dept. summer camp at Community Park South, it used to be a free-flowing, neighborhood-based system. Harrison Street Park and Little Brook Elementary are two home bases I've heard about, and there were no doubt others. I've heard, too, that neighborhoods would play each other in sports contests, though this hasn't been corroborated. That would certainly have created a sense of neighborhood identity.

The Forgotten Pleasure and Utility of Autumn Leaves

(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.

Native Shrub Border

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.

The colors are particularly brilliant because these shrubs get a good dose of sun, but they'll do well even when planted in mostly shade.

The rainbarrel, by the way, is connected to soaker hoses that run through the planting, and actually provided some decent water pressure for the attached hose and spigot. There's a screen on top to filter the water and keep out mosquitoes.

Most rainbarrels, this one included, are way undersized when compared to how much water pours down a typical downspout.

Fall's Last Flowers

From the outside looking in, the Princeton High School wetland ecolab looks pretty spent, as it should by the end of October. But a few flowers are hanging on.


This post's second photo is of native black-eyed susan blooming on top of black plastic laid down to contain weeds in some areas.

Third photo is of Helianthus tuberosa, a.k.a. Jerusalem Artichoke--a strangely named native sunflower whose tubers were eaten by American Indians. It's now grown as an edible ornamental.


The pale blue flower in the fourth photo is mistflower--a native perennial that looks like an exotic annual that's sold at nurseries.
Though most flowers are lingering from the summer, the fourth photo shows marsh marigold, a spring bloomer that the weather apparently fooled into blooming in the fall.

In the fifth photo, red clover, a good example of an exotic species that doesn't take over.

The last photo shows not a flower but the color of silky dogwood, a native shrub often found in the wild.

Happy Halloween Update

Some art is not destined for immortality. I was dismayed to find this grizzly scene in my front yard the other day. The Ivy Tailed Deer featured in a Halloween post must have had its dinner of native wildflowers rudely interrupted, as its table, dishware and wine were repossessed by budding art critics, unbeknownst to me. This appears to have been an inside job.

Uptick in Squirrel Graffiti

There's been a noticeable uptick in squirrel graffiti this fall, as pumpkins all over town have been literally defaced, or perhaps refaced. My daughter carved a fine ghost at a halloween party, only to have the ghost consumed the next day by a resident rodent.

One interpretation is that squirrels have turned their substantial intelligence and expressive range to the art of pumpkin carving. Since they aren't afraid of ghosts, they choose to refashion pumpkins with what they consider to be far scarier images--car wheels and cats, for instance. Thus, the circular nature of their carvings, with something ear-like sticking out on top.

Richard Louv in Princeton Thursday, Nov. 6

Richard Louv's book, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature Deficit Disorder, struck a chord among many of us who wonder about where the next generation of environmentalists will come from in an age more and more dominated by urban and electronic experiences. Current educational movements like No Child Left Inside owe much to Louv's research and writing.

Come hear him speak at the Princeton High School Trego-Biancosino Auditorium at 7:30 this Thursday, Nov. 6. The talk is free and open to the public, and is sponsored by Common Ground and the Princeton Junior School. For more information on Common Ground, go to http://www.princetoncommonground.org/page.cfm?p=57.