Native American Chestnut in Princeton

It's been a long time since healthy leaves of an American chestnut were last seen in Princeton. True, there are a few remnant specimens of the species still sprouting from ancient roots, and these new ones are actually 1/16 asian, to confer resistance to the blight that devastated the American chestnut more than 100 years ago, but they're about as native as we're likely to get with the blight still around.

Nut tree expert Bill Sachs obtained the seedlings last year from an associate in Connecticut, planted them, and served as one man bucket brigade during the two month long drought last summer. His reward: the trees are flourishing this year, with one at Mountain Lakes having grown three feet this spring.

A Manmade Wildlife Sanctuary on Walnut Street

 One of my favorite spots to stop on a summer evening is the ecolab wetland at Princeton High School. Most detention basins are mowed, making for curious grass pits of little use for wildlife, but this one we managed to transform into a glorious display of native plants, teaming with frogs, crayfish and birds.

The basin was designed to receive water from the highschool's roofs and a parking lot or two, but the unusual plant diversity is sustained by the high school's sump pump. "Old Faithful", I call it, because it pumps water from the basement year round, every fifteen minutes or so.

The biggest threat to the wetland, other than loss of that wonderfully consistent water source, may come as a surprise. The weeded out plant debris in the foreground of the photo is cattail, which is the native plant people most commonly associate with wetlands. Yet, it is so aggressive that, if we were to allow it to grow here, it would soon dominate to the exclusion of 20 or 30 other native species.

Liking cattails, we allow them to grow in one corner,

and also planted a less aggressive species of cattail--narrow-leaved cattail, which is also native but rarely encountered in the wild.

Stop by sometime when you're on Walnut Street, on the back side of the school. It can be fun to watch the goldfinches and sparrows bomb around, ducking into the cover of a willow, eating seeds, feeding their fledglings and singing their proud songs atop last year's dried stalks of hibiscus.

Historic Ice Ramp Discovered at Mountain Lakes

The draining of the lower Mountain Lake, while work  is done to restore and enlarge the lower dam, has led to some interesting discoveries in the 100 years accumulation of sediment. Various rusty saws and pry bars were found, harkening back to the early 1900s when the ice was harvested for Princeton's iceboxes.

 

And just this past week workers came upon an old ramp used to transport the big blocks of ice from the lake and lift them up into three story barns just down from the dam. The dams, insulated with hay between double walls, could reportedly store ice for up to two years.

I hear that the plan is to rebury the wooden and steel ramp, in place, since the wood would rapidly decay if not buried in the ooze. Archeologists carefully uncovered, measured and photographed the remnant--a snapshot from a bygone and more earth-friendly era, when refrigeration was imperfect but left little or no carbon footprint.

Mysterious Ant Behavior Underfoot

When I was a kid, as part of my rigorous early training as a naturalist, I used to put black ants and red ants in a bottle and watch them fight. The black ants were bigger, but the red ants were more energetic.

One day, I came across a major battle being waged by the red and black ant kingdoms in the backyard. Being partial to black ants, I quickly stomped out all the red ones, only to realize that it would have been much more interesting to have watched the battle unfold.

Recently, on the way home from the Princeton Shopping Center, I noticed a similar "Where's Waldo" spectacle at the edge of the sidewalk. This time, I got down and took a closer look. On top of the pile was a frenzy of movement, but the ants near the bottom were nearly motionless.

Many of them were paired off, in some sort of mandible to mandible gridlock. The tiny ants all looked like the same kind, but there were also a few dead bodies being dragged off the field of mysterious endeavor. It was either war or some wild and crazy cultural tradition.

Below is a video that may help get a sense of the multilayered dimension.

(Note: As noted in the video and the comment, these are pavement ants, introduced from Europe. The similarly small ants that show up in people's houses during the summer tend to be odorous house ants, which according to Wikipedia are native.)

Unsentimental About Sediment

One thing gardening teaches is to extrapolate from the present what the future will likely bring. A gardener looks at a 3 inch tomato seedling and sees the mature bountiful plant it will become. A gardener, too, pulls a weed before it goes to seed, happy to be spared all the future weeds those seeds would bring.

Look at Pettoranello Pond, and it's clear that a plume of sediment is growing at the inlet, where the incoming water slows and drops whatever dirt it's carrying from upstream. If one digs this sediment out periodically, the sediment won't spread to the rest of the pond, and an expensive dredging operation can be avoided. I've mentioned this to the township, but the response seems to be that the state Dept. of Environmental Protection imposes regulatory barriers to this sort of proactive pond maintenance.

Farming Princeton

The gradual conversion of Princeton's lawns to food production continues.

Community Park Elementary just got a new fence, paid for by the school district, to expand its school garden project and outdoor classroom. In the background, Dorothy Mullen, best known for her garden project at Riverside Elementary, is teaching a class.

Long in the making, the fence expansion provides more space for raised beds and a small orchard.

Meanwhile, passing by an Italian neighbor's sideyard farmlet on the other side of town, I noticed a strange-looking green and purple flower. He emerged from his productive jungle of vegetables and fruit trees to tell me it's a persimmon tree he started growing twenty five years ago. Over the years, he said, they've grown taller, and he's grown shorter.

Gravity Plus Rainwater= Backyard Waterfall

Garrison Keillor  made a disparaging remark about drainage during his show at McCarter Theater this past winter, but for many Princetonians, what seems like a mundane subject can raise considerable passion, particularly when the runoff is coming from the neighbor just up the hill, or results in basement flooding.

My advice is to give the water a good ride through the yard. Don't spurn it, or consign it to underground pipes. Water can be mischievous, but its obedience to gravity is absolute. Herded away from the foundation, it can flow on the surface to make attractive ephemeral streams and waterfalls, and feed plantings.

There's no reason, for instance, why water must fall from roof gutters in the obscure confines of a downspout. In this project, water emerges from a gutter (obscured by the shrub) in a small waterfall that is carried away from the house on a rockstrewn "streambed" underlain by black plastic.

The roof runoff flows down the rocks some 20 feet into a small raingarden (not in photo), where it collects and seeps into the ground, feeding nearby trees and any roots that reach it from the vegetable garden. In a deluge, the raingarden in turn overflows onto the lawn, where the water continues downhill as sheetflow. Whatever doesn't get absorbed eventually flows between the two neighboring houses down the slope and into a storm drain.

Maintaining Meadows at Tusculum

Drive up Cherry Hill Road from 206 and you'll see on your left the picturesque meadows of historic Tusculum, where John Witherspoon once lived. The landscape was preserved through the work of FOPOS, DR Greenway, Princeton Township and others. Some is still privately owned and managed for hay. 

The rest is publicly owned and is supposed to be mowed annually to maintain the meadows. But wet conditions and staff shortages over the past two years have made it hard for the township to do the mowing. Exotic invasive species like multiflora rose (the white bloom in the photo) and autumn olive have spread. If they spread into the adjoining hayfield, the quality of the hay harvest will be diminished.

An effort is underway to better manage the field for the prairie grasses and wildflowers that could be prospering there.

To access the trails through Tusculum from Cherry Hill Road, walk downhill to the end of the white fence and follow the trail along the edge of the field. The meadows can also be accessed from Mountain Lakes and Community Park North (see njtrails.org map).

White On Green

 White must be a cheap and easy color for nature to produce, because there are so many white-flowered shrubs and trees this time of year. Among the natives, elderberry and silky dogwood have been blooming lately, having followed the Viburnums and flowering dogwoods that got the white theme going earlier in the spring.

Most thoroughly white is the Korean dogwood (Cornus kousa), which two weeks back was at its peak.

It blooms later than the native Cornus florida (florida as in florid), and this year was so prolific that the blooms completely obscured the green leaves underneath.

Prescribed Burning in NJ

Drive 30 miles north on Route 206 to Schiff Nature Preserve, and you will be greeted by a kid looking at you through a very bug-eyed pair of binoculars.

Inside, watch your step, lest you bump into the resident box turtle out for a stroll.

I was there for a management planning workshop that included a walk through their fields and woods, both of which, by the way, are managed with prescribed fire. Historically, fire was a natural and largely beneficial form of disturbance throughout North America.

Here, in a photo supplied by the Schiff preserve manager, is what the meadow looked like on March 21, when professional fire crews conducted the prescribed burn.

Unmentioned in nearly all media coverage is that destructive forest fires often follow decades of fire suppression, during which fuels accumulate to dangerous levels. As you can see on the back of this forest service truck, Smokey the Bear approved of this intentional and carefully planned burn.

Periodic, low-level fires help keep fuel levels low, recycle nutrients, and aid seed germination by exposing mineral soil. Prairie grasses promote fire by leaving considerable dead foliage standing from the previous year. If the grassland isn't burned or mowed, those dead stems can have a suffocating effect, shading out new growth.

In a woodland, low-level fires are aided by the persistent leaves of oaks, which have also adapted to fire by evolving thick fire-resistant bark. This picture shows how elegant fire can be as a management tool when carefully applied. Native species are sprouting amidst the dead stems of exotic invasive shrubs.

It may seem shocking at first that fire would be allowed so close to a building, but the crew knew what they were doing. You can see how low the flames are, as they burn through leaf litter from the year before.

The result over time is the park-like landscape early western explorers of North America told of, with broad expanses of Pennsylvania sedge and wildflowers like black cohosh.

You'd think the neighbors living in expensive homes just down the hill from this woods would have raised concerns about danger and smoke, but the spring burns are a tradition at Schiff. Information is distributed beforehand to all neighbors, and the burns are conducted by trained forest service crews, with the local fire department standing by.

As one who has participated in prescribed prairie burns in Michigan and North Carolina, I was glad to see fire being used to good effect in New Jersey as well.

Nature Walks This Weekend

June 11, 10am: Marquand Park Tree Walk -- This should be a very informative and enjoyable walk through Princeton borough's park/arboretum, led by devoted park supporters Roland and Pam Machold. Rain date, June 12. For details, click here.

Walking tour of D&R Canal slated for Sunday, June 12, 10am --

If you've never explored the scenic towpath that extends north from Princeton, here's an event that can serve as motivation. The guided walk begins downstream of Princeton in South Bound Brook, near the treatment plant that provides Princeton with its drinking water, and ends in East Millstone, where there's a nice cafe next to the canal (see previous post about canoeing the same stretch). A full description of the walk can be found here. There will be some carpooling available. It's also possible to bike down the towpath from Princeton, then walk partway back with the group. For further information and weather-related updates, call Mr. Barth at 201-401-3121 .

Playin' Jazz For Free at the Labyrinth Bookstore This Friday

For those wondering what happened to the usually steady stream of posts on this blog, I have been collecting photos in my usual way--of odd ant behavior on a sidewalk, a NJ forest being restored by fire, a turtle freely ranging through a forest of legs at a habitat management meeting, a neighbor's persimmon orchard, a piedmont prairie--but for some reason have not managed to launch them into the ether. I will, but in the meantime want to let everyone know about other creations to be launched in a free performance tomorrow evening, Friday, from 6:30 to 8.

In addition to growing wildflowers, I grow jazz compositions, mostly at the baby grand piano in our living room. We'll be performing some of them tomorrow at the Labyrinth Bookstore on Nassau Street, which has a nice space in the basement for literary and musical performances. Ron Connor will be playing piano, with Jerry D'Anna on bass. I'll be playing saxophone and clarinet.


So, tell your friends and come on down. Labyrinth will provide coffee and tea. Otherwise, b.y.o.


More information about the group, and links to some compositions, can be found at www.sustainablejazz.com.

Beavers

 The killing of two beavers at Pettoranello Pond two weeks ago brought into the spotlight two sharply contrasting views of the animals. Beavers are adorable, and impressive in their craftsmanship. One of my most serene memories is watching a beaver swim peacefully across a moonlit pond. Their approach to living--find an auspicious spot, transform it to your needs, and make a living there--has parallels with ours, and so can serve as a bridge of kinship between people and nature.

Their inclination to change their surroundings, as in the sticks and mud they were using to obstruct water flow under this bridge, also triggers a distinctly negative view of beavers as nuisance animals. People get a pond just the way they want it, plant some pretty trees, and then a beaver comes along, changes the water level and starts eating the trees. That's what was happening at Pettoranello Pond. Of course, if beavers are stigmatized for changing the environment, imagine what an animal community that could form and hold opinions would be thinking about us.

Beavers have been living in the canal and Lake Carnegie for a long time, and I had been wondering why they hadn't made it up Mountain Brook to Mountain Lakes and Pettoranello Gardens. Now that they have, I'd expect more will come. My hope would be that some way could be found to accommodate the beavers while keeping the pond level stable and any valuable trees protected. There are devices that allow water through dams without the beavers being aware. In my opinion, the beavers would do Pettoranello Gardens at least one favor by thinning out its thick stands of alder along the water's edge. If the beaver's additions to the dam obstructed storm flow, then a spillway for heavy runoff could be dug somewhere along the bank. The pond already has a bypass upstream of it for storm surges.

A Visit To Mercer Educational Gardens

I finally got out to the Mercer Educational Gardens for their annual plant sale. It's out past Terhune Orchards a ways, and features well-tended gardens and various useful demonstrations.

For instance, a variety of rainbarrels are on display. The giant white cistern, which looks like it holds a thousand gallons, is what you'd actually need several of if you were serious about capturing all the runoff from your roof.

I've been starting to see these lately--plastic rainbarrels made to look like pottery. These two are in tandem. The second one has an overflow pipe if they both fill up.

This appears to be a compost bin that actually converts the decompositional energy inside into classical decompositions which, if played backwards through the speaker on top, sound like music. Devotees of this obscure genre may be familiar with some of the more accomplished and experienced decomposers like Nevohteeb and Levar.

This sign explains how 41% of our "household trash" is compostable.

Maybe if more homeowners in Princeton read this sign,

(warning: pet peeve about to be taken for a walk)

they wouldn't keep dumping their high-nitrogen grass clippings on the street, where they create a mess and pollute the local waterways.

Thanks to the Mercer County Extension for encouraging people to do right by their gardens and their local streams, and showing them the way..

Stalking the Rare Horsteria Westnut

What kind of tree could this be, so bright and fragrant a week or two ago,

with two kinds of flowers--some white, some lavender? Closer inspection showed it to be a horsteria westnut, that is, a horse chestnut being engulfed by wisteria vines.

If one's going to kill a tree--the likely outcome--this is one of the prettier ways to do it.

Lesser Celandine

Among invasive species, the most intimidating are not the giants like kudzu but instead the diminutive species that quietly multiply into millions, defying anyone to pull them all up. Lesser celandine, which has engulfed large areas at Pettoranello Gardens, cannot even be successfully pulled up, as each plant forms many bulblets underground that remain even if the plant itself is pulled. The species, which turns yellow this time of year as it goes into dormancy until next spring, continues to spread downstream into Mountain Lakes and beyond.

I've heard many testimonials from gardeners who love its yellow flower when it first shows up, then become distressed as it begins to take over the garden. Spraying with a low toxicity herbicide like 2% glyphosate (the active ingredient in Roundup) is the only way to get rid of it over time, unless one can cover it all up with a layer cake of cardboard and mulch when it first appears in the spring, robbing it of energy. Leave one plant, however, and the problem begins anew.

My Parents' Garden

One thing I did on May 8, the first Mothers' Day since my mother passed at the age of 94 earlier this year, is to pull garlic mustard at Mountain Lakes Preserve. The logic of this is rooted in my parents' backyard, in the '70s in Ann Arbor. They had just bought an old Tudor house, previously owned by a mathematician. That first spring, yellow primrose popped up along the garden paths, with swaths of pulmonaria, mayapples, solomons seal, bloodroot and trillium grading into a small woods. There was little difference between the cultivated and wild areas, the gardens being little more than a steering of nature's already fortuitous and ornamental energies, with a few gentle introductions like primrose and pulmonaria thrown in.

That order, which seemed timeless at first, began to slowly unravel year to year. A patriarch elm, its graceful arms spreading in a protective arc over the center of the garden, succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease. Myrtle, wisteria and bishop's weed (snow on the mountain) began their relentless expansions. Hours were spent in hand-to-root combat, as rock walls and less aggressive species came under ongoing threat of being engulfed by a monotonous, weedy tide. Garlic mustard slipped into the mix somehow, at first seeming ornamental enough to leave, then turning into brown skeletons later in the summer, flinging its seeds about before I thought to react.

The fight to save a valued balance was not against exotics, but instead against the aggressive plants, the preponderance of which happened to be exotic species introduced into the garden by chance or with the best of intentions. The wildflowers continued to bloom along the path edges, and one year a pawpaw sprouted mysteriously in one of the beds, eventually bearing tropical-tasting fruit. But the beauty and serendipity that make a garden a joy were under constant threat from a subset of plants with imperialistic tendencies.

That garden taught me more than could have been guessed about the forces that tilt the world towards imbalance, and the work required to counter them.

FOPOS Annual Meeting and Walk

Friends of Princeton Open Space had its annual meeting May 1 at Mountain Lakes House. Here, president Wendy Mager is pointing out the window to where the newly restored upper dam is now operational. The upper lake, which had become filled with eight feet of sediment over the past 100 years, has regained its original depth.

Water flows in a glistening curtain over the full length of the new spillway.

Guest speaker Bob Martin, who is Commissioner of the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and lives in Princeton, told an attentive audience about state environmental policy. During QandA, he was asked about the state's continued desire to dismantle the DR Canal Commission, despite compelling arguments and strong public support for its continued existence.

Afterwards, I led a walk around Mountain Lakes, pointing out various species, including this flowering bladdernut

and the woven bark of butternut (also called white walnut). Both of these species are rarely encountered in Princeton's forests, though there's an effort underway at Mountain Lakes to find and propagate native butternuts.

With the upper lake and dam restored, the lower Mountain Lake will be the focus of work this summer, as the dam gets rebuilt and enlarged, and the historic spillway is reconstructed from a jumble of rocks.

 In the meantime, the great blue heron is trying to go about business as usual.

Flying Seeds and Soaring "C"s

These are the days when seeds take wing, as a spring breeze sends the maples' winged achenes helicoptering across the sky. In the midst of this blizzard of genes searching for a new scene, I received a call from further down the piedmont, in North Carolina, where the 13 year cicadas are singing. My friend, sitting on his back porch, reported that they sound to him more musical than the calls of the annual cicadas. I could hear their drone in the background and checked the pitch on the piano. "C," I informed him, so he would know he's living through the time of the soaring "C"s.

Tickling the Tiger's Belly

It was probably in my 20s when, in a dream, as I was riding in an open truck cab down a street in the neighborhood, a large wild feline--let's call it a tiger--ran up and leaped upon me. In the next moment, I and the cat had tumbled down out of the truck, the tiger had shrunk into a docile kitten lying on its back, and I was tickling its belly.

I thought of that dream this past Sunday as a volunteer and I plucked garlic mustard weeds out of a wooded slope near Mountain Lakes House. Volunteers have been pulling garlic mustard there for years now before the invasive plant has a chance to go to seed, and as the soil's reserve of weed seeds diminishes, our work has become progressively lighter. This year the pulling was easy, the soil soft from rains, the weeds scattered and few, which meant more attention could be paid to the peaceful spring morning, and the native diversity springing up all around--Pennsylvania sedge, solomon's seal, Jack-in-the-pulpit.

In a world often short on sense, with so much of nature thrown out of balance, I tend to look upon a rich gathering of native species as a refuge of sanity. What a pleasure to feel time echoing through that woods, our work made easy by those who had come before, surrounded by plant species that had achieved balanced association over millennia of co-evolution. This is a habitat restorationist's dream--a wild order relieved of past traumas, where the riches of a land's history speak to the future, and nature calls out for nothing more than a scratch on its belly.

Spotted Salamander at Mountain Lakes

Most of us haven't seen a spotted salamander. They shun the light, spending their time under logs and leaf litter. Some people have a knack for finding them, like the Princeton Hydro biologist who found one at Mountain Lakes Preserve, just up from the Upper Settling Pond. The pond was built in the 1950s, probably to catch sediment coming downstream before it could get to the upper Mountain Lake.

The pond did its job so well that it became filled with sediment, except for one section whose shallow water allows spring peepers, and apparently a few salamanders, a place to lay their eggs each spring. Wikipedia describes a symbiotic relationship in which a green alga lives in each clear, bubble-shaped egg alongside the developing salamander. The alga produces oxygen for the salamander, and the salamander in turn provides carbon dioxide for the alga with each breath. It reminds me of a miniature Biosphere--the three acre greenhouse in Arizona where eight people lived for a time, sealed off from the outside world, in complete co-dependency with the greenhouse plants.

Since the pond is going to be dredged, and the combination of fish and deeper water will not suit the needs of amphibians, a search began recently for places to dig vernal pools. We found places for three, including a field that once had a swimming pool. If all goes well, the frogs will still sing every spring, and there will still be a chance for the lucky few among us to find a salamander under a log.