This Saturday: Clarinet, Harp, and Walks Across Princeton

Those who participate in this Saturday's Walks Across Princeton event may hear some music wafting across the grounds at Mountain Lakes House between 2:15 and 3:15. I'll be playing clarinet, with Janet Vertesi accompanying on harp. While hikers enjoy refreshments, we'll play mostly my own compositions, with some jazz standards with a spring theme thrown in. For more information and to register for the free event, visit fopos.org.

The setting will take me back to the beginnings of my music improvisation, which coincided with botanical studies a few decades ago, playing clarinet outdoors, listening to the echo of notes off a distant hill. Janet's day gig involves managing robotic space missions, which is like leading restless robots on space walks across the solar system.

Native Tuber Harvest

If it's spring, it must be time to do all the things that didn't get done over the winter (or whatever season that was), like harvest the tubers before they all sprout.

Lower left in the photo: Sunchokes (which is short for "SUNflower that's native and grows edible tubers that someone decided to mis-name Jerusalem artiCHOKE") are a wild and crazy plant that grows to ten feet high, has dazzling yellow flowers on top and forms enough tubers underneath to fill your refrigerator.

It's dangerous for heavily distracted people to plant, because one plant will develop a root system ten feet wide, and send up 50 new sprouts the next year if the tubers aren't harvested. Which is why I tried growing it in big black plastic pots last year, to see if its rambunctiousness could be contained. The experiment was a success, with 130 tubers of varying size, weighing about 10 pounds total, harvested from a single pot 2 feet wide and 2 feet deep.

Now, it's just a matter of getting in the habit of eating them. Peeled (or much more easily not peeled) and eaten raw, they have a nutty flavor about as tame as that of a carrot.

Upper right in the photo are groundnuts (Apios americana), a native legume that produces green beans on top and strings of edible tubers underground. A friend sent me a link to an excellent article on this little known plant in Orion Magazine. It, too, can spread underground, and seemed happy enough to be in a container last year. These experiments are related to the (save the) Veblen House project, which could include a native foods/permaculture dimension.

Fresh Unfoldings

Near where the coconut hens bend their springy necks to eye the ground,

star-shaped leaves of a sweetgum tree fan out to catch the sun,

fresh leaves of a Japanese maple make airborne sculptures with the flowers,

and a dogwood unfolds its elegant offerings to the eye.

The "Second Forest"

This is a good time to see the "second forest"--the layer of exotic shrubs underlying the native tree canopy. Honeysuckle, multiflora rose and privet, having evolved on other continents and under different climate constraints, all leaf out earlier than the native species.

Historically, an eastern forest would have been carpeted with spring ephemeral wildflowers of great variety, flowering and collecting another year's energy stores before the trees leaf out and grab all the sunlight. The exotic shrubs throw a wrench into the works, leafing out early and shading the native wildflowers before they have a chance to store enough solar energy for the next year.

Random Spring Weed Identification

Most gardeners will have encountered a small weed this spring with tiny white flowers that have already bloomed. The thick circle of basal leaves suggests it's the non-native Hairy Bittercress, rather than the native Pennsylvania Bittercress.

The plants produce seeds that will fly up at you as you try to pull the plants out. That's how you know you have, yet again, procrastinated too long before weeding them out of the garden. I was moved to pull many of them from my yard in time this year, but only because I was expecting company. There's a lesson in there somewhere.

Another non-native is Veronica (probably V. persica), which forms low clumps in the lawn with many tiny blue flowers. Lovely flowers when viewed up close. It shows up in lawns, but I haven't seen it being as aggressive as some weeds. Update, spring, 2022: Veronica is spreading like crazy across my lawn. As with so many yard weeds, this is way too much of a good thing.

Japanese knotweed pops up like asparagus from among last year's dried stalks. It is a common non-native invasive along rivers, forming dense, exclusionary clones. This one's part of a patch just upstream of Pettoranello Pond.

An increasingly common weed in lawns and gardens is lesser celandine, mentioned in a previous post.

It spreads quickly to form dense masses that are pretty for a couple weeks but don't leave much room for other wildflowers to grow. If wildlife don't like the taste of it, and as far as I know none of them do, they have to seek food elsewhere. This is a big reason why even a beautiful exotic flower can be a concern, because it doesn't support a foodchain of diverse organisms, i.e.  is slowly making the landscape inedible.

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This is an aquatic plant at Pettoranello Gardens that I first noticed showing up last year, most likely called pond water starwort (Callitriche sp.).

From Europe and northern Africa, it's considered an exotic invasive in Connecticut.

It might be mistaken for the native duckweed, but a clump of duckweed consists of thousands of individual plants, each with a pair of leaves.

(Thanks to Chris Doyle for help with identification)

SOME OTHER POSTS ON WEEDS:

An Explosion of Spring Weeds

Weeds That Launch an Underground Insurgency

Leaning Towards Learning To Lean

It was a lean year for skating on Carnegie Lake this past winter. Just in case anyone was tempted, the red flag has stood at the ready at the Harrison Street crossing. In coming years and decades, maybe the flag's meaning will be redefined as "No walking on the water."

It was a better winter for leaning, particularly if you're a river birch. One could postulate a competitive advantage for a tree that "learns" to lean deeply but not fall, given all the uncontested sunlight to be had out there over the water.

In addition to their classic posture next to rivers, river birches have an attractive, distinctive bark.

The DR Canal State Park crews have done their annual mowing of the wildflower meadows between the lake and the canal. The mowing does a pretty good job of imitating low-level natural fires that might once have swept through, clearing the previous year's growth and leaving the oaks with their thick bark undamaged.

The mowing is particularly beneficial for switchgrass (the light brown area in the foreground). Its persistent stems from last year, pictured in a previous post, would serve ecologically as fuel to carry a fire across a field, to give the flames something to lean into and keep going. Other native prairie grasses, like big and little bluestems and the more common Indian grass, have similar adaptations. But if no fire, or mowing crew, sweeps through over the winter, the dead stems work to the plant's disadvantage by shading the new year's growth.

For leaning as play, leaning as life, read Robert Frost's poem "Birches", about swinging the white birches of more northern forests.

Shadbush and the Shad Run

The fishermen at Princeton township's Pettoranello Gardens are at loose ends these days. Ever since someone stole their fishing rods, life just hasn't been the same. This time of year, I bet they're wondering if the shad have started their spring run up the Delaware River to spawn.

That's easy enough to tell, even if your island doesn't come with an internet connection. Just take a look around to see if the shadbush is in bloom.

Shadbush, also called serviceberry, is in the Amelanchier genus. Though native, they're hard to find around here in the wild. I cut a bunch of stems off this one before moving it to a sunnier spot in my backyard, and stuck them in water like one would do with forsythia. The berries are tasty, depending on the cultivar. The one in my yard is a wild, unbred variety purchased years back at Pinelands Nursery, a wholesaler 20 miles from Princeton. Maybe it will produce better berries in full sun.

The rainbows in the photos, by the way, are generated by our home's powerful solar array, which drives duel prisms capable of generating enough rainbows to supply 100 living rooms with good luck.

Westerly Road Church Teens Help the Habitat

It's now three years running that Robert Olszewski and the Westerly Road Church youth group have helped out at Mountain Lakes Preserve. This past Saturday, they helped remove invasive honeysuckle shrubs along the driveway,

leaving the native spicebush and blackhaw viburnums (tagged with blue tape) to prosper. The cut shrubs were stacked in piles for habitat.

One highlight was the discovery of a garter snake,

which was a good sport about being held,

and whose slithery charisma won over even those who were at first afraid.

Many thanks to Rob and the youth group for all their help. For writeups on their past workdays at Mountain Lakes, type "westerly" in the search box at the upper left of this website.

Three of us helped supervise: AeLin Compton, Andrew Thornton and myself.

Litter Turned Terrarium

Every once in awhile, a piece of litter turns into habitat. A partially broken bottle, though hazardous for the feet, can be a refuge for plants. This one formed a microhabitat for a sedge and a moss, perhaps by collecting and retaining rainwater in a way that adds just enough extra moisture for these species to survive.

April 14 Event: Walks Across Princeton

Whether you know and love Mountain Lakes, or have somehow managed to remain unaware of Princeton's "central park", Saturday April 14 would be a great time to visit.

The Friends of Princeton Open Space--the quiet nonprofit that has done so much to preserve and manage nature preserves in Princeton--will host a series of walks on April 14 to celebrate Princeton's natural areas.

Three guided walks of differing lengths will be offered, all of which plan to converge at Mountain Lakes House at 2pm for refreshments.

The event is free and all are welcome. To register or get more info, go to fopos.org.

To Identify Trees, Look Down

Long ago, when winters were winters, and codglings were young men, and I was being trained to teach shivering 6th graders about nature in the depths of a New Hampshire winter, one of my mentors told us that even at night, walking through the woods, it's possible to identify trees simply by the sound the wind makes overhead, blowing through the canopy.

A similar approach can be used during the day, walking through town. This has been the week of the red maple blossoms, dotting the sidewalks with red.

Before falling, they look like this.

A scattering of sweetgum balls on the ground tell you what you'll see overhead,

without having to crane your neck.

The Vine That Ate an Observatory

 Down at the Princeton football stadium, apex predators seek to intimidate all who dare challenge the orange and black. When I first moved to Princeton, these felines had ivy growing in their torsos. The combination of teeth and foliage was probably intended to send a message of Ivy League fierceness, but the effect was a bit odd. Now, with ivy relegated to the ground, they look more lean and mean.

In the field next to the stadium, geese graze peacefully,

unfazed by the local dentition.

Visions of migrations long past dance in their heads as they feast on the turf. Surely their distant ancestors once filled the sky like constellations on a thousand mile journey. Now they puddle jump from field to field around town.

I heard once that the origin of the non-migratory geese was a government farm in New Jersey where they were raised to supply hunters with targets. Then, when the farm closed, the geese were released, having lost the habit of long-distance migration. This explanation, having long hidden out in the pre-google part of my brain, has in the process of being written down just now caught the attention of newer, post-google brain cells that immediately called for a search to check its validity. Turns out that at least part of the story may be true. According to a post by someone with Connecticut Audubon, a non-migratory subspecies was discovered in Missouri in 1962. Government breeding programs helped increase the population to better insure its survival, and then spread them all over the country. That last part may be where good intentions went wrong.

 Just down from the grazing geese, next to the parking lot for Jadwin Gym, stands another entity whose range has become limited. Because of light pollution, most any observatory hereabouts cannot journey very deep into the universe.

This one, the FitzRandolph Observatory, has by default gained a new purpose as substrate for what appear to be Virginia creeper vines,

whose stems and berries ornament the walls.

Judging from growth patterns, the dome hasn't been rotated in at least a year. The monthly observing nights the astronomy department holds for the public are now conducted elsewhere on campus.

Hopefully, the writing on the door is not a metaphor for the building's future, or our own for that matter, given what we're doing to our lonely oasis in a harsh, unforgiving universe.

A website offers a link to the Friends of FitzRandolph Observatory, which leads to a blank page. Either the future hasn't been written yet, or the writing is on the wall.

By coincidence, Princeton Future had a meeting this morning about repurposing various buildings in town, though university buildings weren't included. Another building, county-owned, that sits quietly growing vines is the Veblen House. It at least has a few of us friends trying to give it a new life.

Lesser Celandine Blooming, But Mostly Spreading

 I wish I could go back to the first time I saw this flower and could appreciate its beauty without being worried it would take over all of Princeton. At Pettoranello Gardens it grows like green pavement next to the paths, blooms beautifully, but is radically invasive. Since becoming established at Pettoranello Gardens, it has spread downstream and has now become established in floodplains at Mountain Lakes Preserve. It displaces native plants, is apparently inedible to wildlife, and though it's pretty for a couple weeks, the rest of the time it's busy making natural areas less supportive of plant diversity and wildlife.

 In a suburban yard, it first appears as a couple plants, with small, roundish, shiny leaves.

It displaces the grass over time, then dies back in late spring to leave bare spots in the lawn. Its many underground bulbules make it hard to eradicate by pulling.

Lesser Celandine has started to show up in my former home of Durham, NC, where I've been trying to help eradicate small populations before they spread downstream.

Planting the Shore

If St. Patrick's Day is the traditional day for planting peas, then March 8th must be the traditional date when rushes are planted next to a pond. The dredging of the upper Mountain Lake in Princeton left the shoreline bare. A fence effectively kept the geese from congregating, but didn't quite do the trick appearance-wise.

FOPOS board member Tim Patrick-Miller at some point realized that the solution was growing just downstream, where thousands of native rushes and sedges had sprouted in the drained lakebed of the lower lake. Clark Lennon and Tim are working with new FOPOS natural resources manager AeLin Compton to transplant the natives along the shoreline.

Soft rush (Juncas effusus) is a very tough native plant whose evergreen stems and vaselike shape give it an ornamental appearance once it's established.

Which Witch Hazel?

A witch hazel of Asian origin (probably a cross between Japanese and Chinese species) has been making its customary pitch on campus over the past couple weeks,

in varying shades of orange and red.

Here's the overall effect.

The native witch hazel, which typically grows on slopes near streams in Herrontown Woods, Mountain Lakes, Woodfield Reservation and elsewhere around Princeton, blooms in the fall. Last year's post on the subject can be found at http://princetonnaturenotes.blogspot.com/2011/03/witch-hazel-in-bloom.html.