Growing Monarchs

How does a kid end up with a beautiful monarch butterfly on her finger?

It helps to have a wildflower garden in the backyard, or to have scoped out a patch of milkweed elsewhere in town. This backyard garden is planted with pickerelweed, Joe-Pye-Weed, boneset, and many other native wildflowers.

Most importantly for the monarchs, it has lots of swamp milkweed. Monarchs will only lay their eggs on milkweed plants. In Princeton, there are several kinds of native milkweed. Swamp milkweed grows in low, wet places. Butterflyweed, which has beautful orange flowers, grows in sunny meadows. Common milkweed is, not surprisingly, the most common. It's also the biggest, growing to five feet high or more, in fields and floodplains.

A glass fishbowl works well for housing monarch caterpillars. For documentary purposes, a camera, journal, and a cup of coffee for the grownup are handy. The bowl stayed on our kitchen window sill most of the time.

Monarch butterflies visit our garden every year, but in 2007 a female monarch came and left some eggs under the leaves of a swamp milkweed plant. The picture mostly shows a bunch of yellow aphids, which are tiny insects that drink the plant's juices. But at the top of the photo, you can see a tiny monarch caterpillar that has hatched from one of the eggs the monarch left.

My daughters brought this and other little caterpillars inside, and fed them a steady supply of milkweed leaves. The bedding--folded paper towels occasionally moistened--needed to be changed every couple days because of the mess the caterpillars make with all their frass. One time, the caterpillars ran out of food, and one of them crawled down the hall into the family room. It helps to cover the top of the bowl with netting so they don't wander.

When a caterpillar has grown to full size, it will climb one of the sticks, attach itself to the bottom side, and go into a "J" position.

It becomes very still, and overnight transforms itself into a beautiful green chrysalis with gold spots (on the right in the photo). It's really important that the caterpillar find a good spot to hang from, so that when the butterfly emerges, the wings can unfold and dry without bumping into anything.

After a week or so, if you've been keeping an eye on the green chrysalis, you will see it start to change color. Before long, it becomes completely clear, revealing the butterfly that has been developing inside.

There are two monarchs in this photo. The lower one is just starting to emerge from its chrysalis.

Continuing to crawl out of its shell,

the butterfly emerges, wings ready to unfurl.

The monarch continues to cling to the remains of the chrysalis while its wings unfold and dry. This is a very delicate process, and any disturbance at this point risks deforming the wings.

When the wings have unfolded and dried completely, the butterfly is ready to crawl up and out of the bowl,

and take wing. From this backyard, the butterflies will head south to a mountain in Mexico, where they'll spend the winter clinging to trees on little more than five acres in a special forest.

This miraculous journey is threatened. Logging is reducing the size of the forest where they overwinter. And as we continue to use fossil fuels, changes in climate leave the monarchs increasingly vulnerable to freak storms and other weather extremes.

A Fence Goes Against the Grain

Or vice versa. A friend of mine successfully disguised a fenceline this summer by growing tall grains along it--corn, amaranth and sorghum.

Sorghum looks like a corn plant with a different top. When I was in college, I made granola whose secret ingredient was sorghum, which came in a jar and was like molasses but lighter.

Amaranth is a genus of plants with a fascinating history and potential. An entry in Wikipedia tells of how it was grown for food by the Incas and Aztecs, then banned by the colonial powers, then recovered from wild plant populations in the 1970's. Being easy to grow and highly nutritious, it's seen as having great potential as "the crop of the future." Funny how the future can take forever to show up, though amaranth can be found in some breakfast cereals.

The amaranth in the photo may be an ornamental variety. There are also various weedy amaranths, though I haven't seen them around here. I frequently saw pigweed (Amaranthus retroflexus) in gardens in the midwest, often growing with lamb's-quarters.

Planterrific

It's always a marvel to see beautiful plantings sustained year after year, particularly given the challenges posed by this summer's drought.

The downtown plantings were initiated some years back by Polly Burlingham, and are taken care of by Polly and the borough.

Bamboo IV: The Last Vestiges

It sounds like the final dramatic episode in an epic battle, but these struggles against invasive plants usually end either in a draw or a whimper. Here, we're lucky to have a whimper. This bamboo bouquet (needs some aesthetic refinement) is about all that remains of the dreaded patch of bamboo that four years back was invading my yard from the north. Periodic cutting down, with permission from my neighbor, of course, was all it took to tame the beast. With no leaves to provide new energy, the clone has to draw down its root reserves in order to keep metabolism going.

It's important, though, to resist the urge to declare victory. A couple years of neglect would allow the bamboo to regain its strength.

You can find previous posts about bamboo, or about any subject I've written about on this blog, by putting the relevant word in the search window on the upper left.

Two New Grasses Bloom at the High School

A few years back, I spent an afternoon with some of Tim Anderson's science students collecting bags of Indian grass seed in a location where annual mowing allows prairie species to survive. This is the same Indian grass that flourishes in tallgrass prairies out west. In Princeton, it's most common along the petroleum pipeline right of way that cuts across the Princeton ridge, and in the meadows at Tusculum. Tim wanted to get some growing in the high school ecolab wetland on Walnut Street.

This is the first year they have grown up and flowered in significant numbers on some of the higher ground at the high school wetland. They have golden anthers that can be attractive in a subtle, hard-to-photograph sort of way.

Another grass at the wetland, planted this spring and now flowering, is wild rice, which grows wild along the Stony Brook and at Rogers Refuge. Like corn, it's an annual that grows to remarkable size in one season. The wild rice, when combined with the cattails, Jerusalem artichoke, duck potato, elderberries and, for carnivores, the thriving crawdad population, is making the wetland look more edible all the time. This photo reproduces exactly what the flower head looks like when I have my glasses off.

Duck potato,a.k.a. arrowhead, is also blooming this time of year,

along with mistflower (Eupatorium coelestinum), which only grows to two feet high. It's ambitions are more horizontal than vertical, as it can get expansive and pushy if not surrounded by equally aggressive natives.

Cardinal flower (red) and boneset (white) are likely no longer blooming when this is finally posted. If you visit the wetland now, the dominant color may be yellow, with tickseed sunflower and the native tuberous sunflower called "jerusalem artichoke" taking over the stage.

Native Plants Feed the Needy Next To Mountain Lakes House Driveway

This spicebush silkmoth (Callosamia promethea) is showing its appreciation of our work. Last year, we rescued some small spicebush from the lower dam of Mountain Lakes and transplanted them close to the greenhouse at Mountain Lakes House. After the effort to keep them watered through the long drought this summer, it's flattering that the caterpillar showed up to eat a portion of our fine crop. Spicebush, as is typical of native plants, gives a portion of its leaves to charity, which is to say it provides food for the native insects that specialize in consuming it. The spicebush swallowtail is another example.

Thirty feet away, in a circular garden surrounded by the asphalt of the Mountain Lakes House driveway, is a more familiar caterpillar, the monarch, specialized to eat only milkweed species. In this case it's a swamp milkweed grown from local seed.

Other insects are finding this oasis to their liking. The last photo may be of a Tachina fly ( Trichopoda pennipes), frequently found on boneset this time of year.

Raingarden Plantlist

I've been asked a number of times what plants were used in establishing the raingarden on Harrison Street just south of Hamilton Ave. The garden was designed and installed by Curtis Helm, with some help from me. Plants were donated by Curtis' friends at Pinelands Nursery. This photo was taken at the end of June, just as the tall Joe-Pye-Weeds and smooth oxeyes (yellow) were starting to bloom.

The garden was densely planted several years ago with about 330 plants--ten each of two kinds of ferns, 7 shrubs, and about 25 each of various wildflowers, sedges, rushes and grasses. There are many other species that can be used, but these have worked well together. Hardest hit during this summer's drought were the monkey flowers and ferns.

Swamp milkweed (Asclepias incarnata), turtlehead (Chelone glabra), Joe-Pye-Weed (Eupatorium maculatum), Sweet smooth oxeye (Heliopsis helianthoides), Blue flag iris (Iris versicolor), soft rush (Juncus effusus), Cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis), Great lobelia (Lobelia syphilitica), Monkey flower (Mimulus ringens), Sensitive fern (Onoclea sensibilis), Cinnamon fern (Osmunda cinnamomea), Switch grass (Panicum virgatum), Woolgrass (Scirpus cyperinus), seaside goldenrod (Solidago sempervirens), and Virginia sweetspire (Itea virginica).

Most of these can be found growing wild in the Princeton area, with the exception of oxeye, seaside goldenrod and Itea virginica.

Japanese Angelica Tree

Spreading slowly through Herrontown Woods, and also Community Park North, is an unusual plant with spines and three-foot long leaves. This time of year, its large inflorescence offers black berries to the avian world. I had been pleased to call it Devil's Walking Stick (Aralia spinosa), a native to the eastern U.S., but have learned that it's more likely Japanese angelica tree (Aralia elata). It is especially well established near the Herrontown Woods parking lot in an area where many mature pines blew down this year.

Here's some more information that arrived via a listserve:

"Timothy Block of the Morris Arboretum near Philadelphia wrote: Aralia elata (Japanese angelica tree) is very prickly and becoming common in the woods .... This plant is a rapidly spreading invasive. In most cases, it was formerly misidentified as Aralia spinosa (devil’s-walking-stick) which is native to western and central PA and widely cultivated. The only completely reliable way to tell the two species apart is by the structure of the inflorescence. Aralia spinosa (the native) has a pyramidal inflorescence with a long central axis, while the inflorescence of Aralia elata (the Asian species) has a short central axis attached to which are long branches, giving the inflorescence the appearance of a fireworks burst. In both cases, the inflorescence may be three feet or more across, bearing thousands of flowers and fruits. The seeds are bird-dispersed."

Last Saturday's Canal Walk

About a dozen of us congregated this past Saturday morning for a nature walk along the canal towpath, using our collective wisdom to interpret the myriad sorts of plant life we encountered.

The leaves of Ailanthus and sweet gum were crumpled, and words sought to characterize their aroma. Great respect was given to poison ivy, where it had climbed trees and sent out lateral branches terminating with this year's crop of berries.

I pointed out the wings on winged sumac, the flowers on ironweed, cutleaf coneflower, hibiscus and JoePyeWeed (first photo), and the switchgrass that George W. Bush embraced in one of his State of the Onion speeches as the biofuel of the future.

Where the land between the canal and Carnegie Lake widens towards Harrison Street, we gazed out across rich undergrowth flourishing beneath scattered oaks, and talked of how low-level fire--the Indian's horticultural tool-of-choice--once fashioned landscapes much like this. The open canopy allows native shrubs like elderberry (photo) to thrive. We (which is to say my parents) used to make pies and jelly out of these. Sometimes the birds pick them clean, sometimes they don't. Looks like a good crop this year.

The abundant tiger swallowtail butterflies were out and about, drawing the attention of our youngest participant.

When asked what a certain 3 foot tall plant was, I took a closer look and found that it was a collage of four species all tangled up in their scramble for sunlight. Such is the diversity when you put water and sun together.

And, in a solemn event at the Harrison Street end of the walk, Jim Manganero photographed my ceremonial "finally getting around to putting some plant info in the brochure box that a boy scout so nicely built several years ago." I guess I wanted to make sure the box was going to withstand the test of time before putting it to use.

Thanks also to Jim for the previous "To touch a butterfly" photo.

The Farmer and the Horse--movie premier

A movie about ditching the tractor in favor of a horse-drawn plow will be showing this Friday at Howell History Farm. More info at www.princetonproject.org, and on the Howell History Farm website.

Peak Bloom at the High School Wetland

If peak bloom falls on a week when there's no one at the school to appreciate it, does it make a sound? They say the composer Scriabin could see colors in music, so it's not farfetched to hear a fusion of rock and jazz in this blooming frenzy, a foretelling of what will emanate from the building just beyond it come September.

In full voice, for anyone passing by on Walnut Street, are Hibiscus moscheutos (white or pink), boneset and daisy fleabane (white), cutleaf coneflower, sunflower and black-eyed susan (yellow), cardinal flower (red), and pickerel weed (blue).

Revised Trail Map for Mountain Lakes

Hikers and joggers heading to Mountain Lakes Preserve can find a map showing which trails remain open during the dam restoration by going to
http://www.princetontwp.org/mountain_lakes_preserve.html and scrolling down.

Canal Wildflower Walk, Saturday, July 31

As any self-respecting pollinator could tell you, this is prime time for summer wildflowers down along the towpath between the D&R Canal and Carnegie Lake.

I'll be leading a wildflower walk there on Saturday, July 31, at 9:30 am.

Background: The closeness of water and the mixture of sun and shade helps make the canal a linear refuge for more than 30 species of native wildflowers. Back in 2006, seeing the flowers getting mowed down as part of regular maintenance, I encouraged D&R Canal State Park staff to change their mowing regime between Washington Rd. and Harrison St. The result has been an abundant crop of diverse wildflowers to reward hardy Princetonians who stay in town through mid-summer.

Meet on the canal towpath at Washington Rd. (not Washington St, which is in Kingston). Parking is available just to the south of the canal. Latecomers can find us heading downstream towards Harrison St.

Ten Tree Tour Tops

Jim Consolloy (left), recently retired head of grounds at Princeton University, handed us a list of the ten trees he was about to introduce us to on a short walk along Williams and Olden Streets. Jim is gaining an encyclopedic knowledge of local street trees in the process of conducting a detailed inventory for the borough.

The walk, organized by the Princeton borough shade tree commission, began behind Thomas Sweets Ice Cream, which provided 2 for 1 coupons to participants.

My daughter liked the coupon aspect in particular, and also brought home some souvenirs. The large leaf comes from one of two cucumber magnolias known to be growing in Princeton. (A NJ native, the other specimen can be admired at Marquand Park.) The tiger swallowtail had left its wings behind, as a kind of artistic legacy after donating its body to the food chain.

In order, we saw an American elm, a London Plane Tree, Cucumber Magnolia, Tulip Tree, Willow Oak, Kashmir Cedar, Shingle Oak, Ginkgo, thornless Honey Locust, and little leaf Greenspire Linden.

Walking Tour of Trees Tonight

Just learned there will be a walking tour of trees tonight on the Princeton University campus and town. The tour will be led by Jim Consolloy, recently retired head of grounds at the university. Jim has a wealth of knowledge, and is currently conducting an inventory of street trees in Princeton borough.

Meet at 6:30 pm at the Williams Street Parking lot located just behind Thomas Sweet Ice Cream. The tour will last aprox 1 1/2 - 2 hours.

Catfish and Eels

Catfish and eels, catfish and eels. Wish they could tell us just how it feels, to have the water pulled out from over them.

There had been doubts that the upper lake at Mountain Lakes, filled with 7 feet of sediment and only 6 inches of water, was still sustaining anything beyond minnows and and miniature sunfish. But on July 11, I stopped by the drained lake and found these foot-long catfish clustered just below a homemade dam. They had tried to escape the drained lake by swimming up one of the feeder creeks.

They were joined by a two foot long eel, whose long dorsal fin was visible through the glare.

The previous week, before the lake was drained, workers from Princeton Hydro with a smelly generator and small flatbed boat had paddled around trying to shock and collect fish.

But a far more effective and cost-effective method was later demonstrated by neighborhood kids, who hauled bucket after bucket of fish out of the muddy, shrunken waters, to be carried off to private ponds or dumped in the lower lake, which has yet to be drained.

Mixed in with the multitudes of miniature sunfish were a minnow of some sort,

and a sucker.

A Sphynx in the Backyard

One of the most elegant pollenators to visit the backyard is a moth that looks and acts like a small hummingbird.

These beebalm flowers, a bit wiped out by the heat, attract both the real hummingbirds and what looks to be the Hummingbird Clearwing Moth (Hemaris thysbe).

They're also called hawkmoths, in the Sphynx moth family.

Mountain Lakes Dam Restoration Begins

The official groundbreaking ceremony for the dam restoration at Mountain Lakes took place today. The photo includes township staff, elected officials, members of Friends of Princeton Open Space and the Princeton Historic Preservation Commission, consulting engineers, and the contractor who has agreed to take on all the work.

Hybridized Time and Plants Meet at the Battlefield

Under the spreading hican tree (a grafting of a hickory/pecan hybrid to the rootstock of a hickory), John Mills hybridized past and present at his annual reading of the Declaration of Independence. The reading, along with some shootings of cannons and cooking of colonial foods, took place as they always do on July 4 at Princeton Battlefield. Soldiers explained the difference between a musket and a rifle, and said the rifles' better accuracy made it possible for the colonists to pick off British officers--something the British took as a breach of their gentlemanly rules of warfare.

The battlefield grounds now have a few new hybrids--four young chestnut trees that are 15/16th American Chestnut and 1/16th Japanese. The trees have three things going for them: a sunny spot to grow, the t.l.c. of Princetonian Bill Sachs, who planted them and is now keeping them watered through the extended drought, and immunity from Chestnut Blight that the Japanese portion of their genetic makeup will hopefully confer. The trees are part of a larger effort to reintroduce native chestnuts into the American landscape.

(You can read more about American chestnut tree reintroductions in Princeton by typing "chestnut" into the search box at the upper left hand corner of this blog.

Being a promoter of habitat for wildlife, I was a bit chagrined to see that the battlefield meadow (back left in the photo), which is normally allowed to grow through the summer, has been mowed down. A long-range goal of the Friends of the battlefield is to restore a more authentic landscape, which would likely mean replacing some of the mowed grass with orchards and meadows.

Sustainable Jazz Ensemble--7/7 at 7

If you can take a break from keeping plants alive through this drought, come hear some freshly grown jazz compositions this Wednesday, 7/7 at 7pm. The Sustainable Jazz Ensemble will perform in the Princeton Public Library's community room--a great room for hearing live music.

Since our debut there last summer, we've continued to add new original compositions.
The latest crop has names like Riff in Z (composed in the rarely used key of Z minor), Cheery in Theory (which would make a good title for a book on overly aggressive ornamental plants that look great in the garden until they start taking over), and The Caged Bird Swings (with apologies to Maya Angelou, a tune I wrote in 1984 that traces a confined musical theme's escape to freedom).

The band features Phil Orr on piano, Jerry D'Anna on bass, and me on saxophone. I call it sustainable because the music is all locally grown, with notes that have been used before, albeit in a different, even fresh, order and rhythm. No virgin timbres were harvested in the making of this music.

The performance is free.