Dig For Victory

A postcard from England, maybe 70 years ago, when growing a vegetable garden was seen as a way to help your country. May it be seen that way again.

The Leo King

Earthday in our neighborhood: Leo, having vanquished the evil Scar, climbs atop Pride Rock to survey his kingdom, as the rains returned that night to heal the land.

Whither Romance? Wisteria Meets Horse Chestnut

 It was just one of those things.
Just one of those crazy flings.

A trip to the moon on gossamer wings.
Just one of those things.

If they'd thought a bit about the end of it,
When they let the wisteria start climbin' round,
They'd have been aware that this love affair
Was too hot not

to fall down. (Stay tuned.)

--Lyrics mostly by Cole Porter

Walks Across Princeton A Big Success

On a glorious day last Saturday, perfectly timed with the emergence of dogwood flowers,

hikers converged on Mountain Lakes House

to partake of good company and food,

as the sounds of clarinet and harp (that's Janet Vertesi on harp, yours truly on licorice stick)

floated out across the water of Mountain Lake.

Sophie Glovier, who conceived the idea of having guided hikes of different lengths all converge at Mountain Lakes at 2pm for a social interlude, thanked everyone for coming. Sophie, the author of a popular guide to Princeton's nature trails, is on the board of Friends of Princeton Open Space, which hosted the event. With 150 people participating, it looks like the beginning of a Princeton tradition.

Thanks to Ivy de Leon for the photos.

Mapleton Preserve Hosts Annual Arbor Day Celebration Saturday, April 21

The preserved Princeton Nursery lands in Kingston continue their steady transformation. Saturday's celebration, 2-4pm, will include a dedication of 6 new interpretive signs, and a guided walk. The signs, which feature the historic and cultural significance of the former Princeton Nurseries buildings and site, were conceived and researched by Friends of Princeton Nursery Lands. There will be an annual tree planting, and free tree seedlings for attendees.

Further information: www.fpnl.org or 609-683-0483

Barberry Slaps Bee

A little "man bites dog" journalism here. The barberries are in bloom, which means a bit of fun can be had triggering the slapping reflex in the stamens. Take a blade of grass or something else very narrow and slip it in between the stigma at the middle of the flower and one of the five stamens. If you tickle the bottom of the stamen (at the base of the filament), the stamen will "slap" your blade of grass.

The logic is that a pollinator visiting the flower will cause the stamen to slap the insect, in the process conveying pollen that the insect will then transport to other flowers.

Women and Wildlife Awards Event Today

The Conserve Wildlife Foundation is having its annual awards event today in Stockton, from 2-5pm. My group, the Sustainable Jazz Ensemble, will be performing as part of the event. Information about the three women receiving awards for their work to preserve New Jersey's threatened wildlife can be found at http://www.conservewildlifenj.org/getinvolved/women/.

One of the women, Jackie Kashmer, has been doing heroic work to save bats, which are being devastated by White Nose Syndrome. The fungus, which was recently determined to have been introduced some years back from Europe, disturbs the bats' hibernation, causing them to run out of stored energy before spring arrives.

Jackie's 16 hour days devoted to helping bats survive the winter, detailed in a conservewildlifenj.org blogpost, are an example of the extraordinary amount of work and devotion required to counteract to any extent the destructive impact of imported organisms.

By coincidence, the NY Times article reporting on the fungus's European origins was accompanied by an article on the reintroduction of the American chestnut in Appalachia. It has taken many decades for breeding programs to develop native chestnut trees resistant to the Asian fungus that began wiping out the American chestnut tree more than a century ago. These are the sorts of quiet, awe-inspiring efforts that seldom make it into the news, but make all the difference in what sort of world we'll have in the future.

Trees On the March

Something's going on in the field down next to Faculty Drive, across Washington Road from the boathouse at Carnegie Lake.

The troops are assembled, like high-stepping Clydsdales poised for the Arbor Day parade. Ready, forward, march!

But where to? The man assigned to water these 20 foot tall specimens said they're all headed into the woods to grow in the shadow of their granddad's generation, just across Faculty Drive, where the university is finishing up its stream restoration in the valley next to the new Chemistry building. (To see a history of the project, type "stream" into the search box at the upper left corner of this website). The university had to take down a few big trees last year (some possibly 200 years old) as part of the restoration of the heavily eroded stream corridor, and looks determined to give their replacements a head start.

The stream restoration is extraordinary in terms of how they created a lovely and hopefully durable streambed, but the botanical side of the project would have been more enlightened if it had included rescue of high quality native wildflowers prior to construction, and invasive species removal on the adjacent slopes.

And though they're putting in the same species of trees they took out--tupelo, pin oak and white ash--the chances the white ash in this photo will survive for more than a decade are pretty remote, given the near certain arrival in coming years of the exotic Emerald Ash Borer now spreading eastward through Pennsylvania.

I was craning my neck to see the thick, paired twigs that identify the tree as an ash, when I realized I could just look at the tag.

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.