Weedful, Needful Sidewalk

After I posted an expose on an overgrown sidewalk in my neighborhood, a friend emailed to report another sidewalk in town whose copious foliage she does daily battle with on her way to work.

Upon arriving at the scene a mere two weeks later, my first impression was that there was no problem, because there was no sidewalk.

But closer inspection revealed evidence of a strip of asphalt originally intended for pedestrians. Could it be a remnant of the Indian trading route upon which Bayard Lane (206) is said to be built? Presence of a well-aged realty sign suggested no owner present to keep the trail clear. It being a state road, jurisdiction for maintenance could be even more muddled.

Given that I had come equipped with a camera rather than loppers, I decided my role was to document rather than resolve the problem, and provide tips on how to make the best of the situation until the party responsible for maintenance could be found. Here is my virtual guided tour of a nearly unnavigable sidewalk:

As you head south along the trail from Mountain Ave, acknowledge the hearty greetings of the foliage.

Shake hands with an overly friendly American elm.

As cars and trucks speed by just a few feet away, take time to smell the privet.

While sidestepping the poison ivy,

take note of the rich variety of leaf shapes--

Norway maple

and mugwort.

Be glad this bindweed isn't growing over the shrubs in your backyard.

Daydream of evening primrose flowers to come in late summer.

Sigh at the intimate intertwining of Japanese honeysuckle and Rose of Sharon.

Show proper respect for the thorns of barberry

and black locust.

Thrashing your way towards daylight, you may occasionally catch glimpses of a Shell station across the road. If you begin running low on provisions, it's good to know that help is nearby.

Some liquid sustenance may be obtained from these Japanese honeysuckle blossoms.

If slow progress forces you to camp for the night, nettle soup could be an option for dinner,

along with garlic mustard pesto.

Your campsite comes complete with television. Traffic should keep the bears away, though this is not guaranteed.

Beating the odds with a mixture of effort and luck, you'll make it through the toughest section with plenty of daylight hours left to reach your intended destination, and can look back with some pride at having conquered one of the most challenging stretches of sidewalk New Jersey has to offer.

Level of Difficulty: Class 4 (large standing waves of foliage, some precise maneuvering may be needed)

Korean Dogwoods Were No-Shows This Year

There was a dramatic difference in the blooms on Korean dogwoods this year compared to 2011. Last year, the Korean dogwoods in town were completely covered with white flowers, exemplified by this tree on Snowden Lane.

This year, whole sections of the tree were bare, a condition replicated elsewhere in town.
(Photo taken May 30)

I have yet to find any information on why there'd be such a dramatic difference. Oaks vary year to year in how many acorns they produce. The die-off of white pines and other conifers last year was said to be due to a severe drought the year before. Trauma can be delayed in its expression. It could be that the heavy investment in flowering last year left this and other Korean dogwoods with fewer resources this spring.

Garden Event This Saturday at Riverside School

It's family fun day this Saturday at Riverside Elementary, with garden tours, music performances, a plant sale, exhibits, environmental film showings and a silent auction, all part of Healthy Children, Healthy Planet 2012. I've been asked to again man a table to help gardeners with weed identification, so bring your favorite, or least favorite, mystery weed along as fodder for discussion. The address is 58 Riverside Drive in Princeton. More info at  http://www.rspto.org/events/garden-committee.

Tall Indigo Bush

One of the more unusually colored flowers in town is produced by the tall indigo bush (Amorpha fruticosa), which can be found growing wild next to Mountain Lakes and Lake Carnegie.

The flowers combine deep purple with orange anthers.

With this spring seeming more silent than usual when it came to pollinators, I was greatly relieved to find a large specimen of tall indigo bush, in full bloom and warmed by the afternoon sun, hosting a vibrant metropolis of insect life.

Bumble bees spiraled round and round the blooms in pollen-collecting gyres, like frenzied wind-up toys.

This may be a so-called metallic green bee.

Tall indigo bush flowers and leaves mixed with the verticals of soft rush.

Honey bees mingled with the native bees.

While a solitary ladybug,

and others among the great unknowns of the insect world

called the shrub home for an aft

This native shrub may be hard to find for sale. Along the shores of Mountain Lakes, it appears to spread underground, like sumac, but when transplanted into new locations I've also seen it remain for many years a single stemmed bush with attractive form and foliage, and a late spring feast for pollinators.

White Mulberry

It's hard to notice this blob of a tree on Hamilton Ave. just up from Linden Lane.

When the sidewalk beneath it gets littered this time of year, it looks like any other detritus a tree might shed now and then.

I've been riding a bike this way for years, but only now noticed that the tree is a white mulberry (Morus alba, native to China), which means edible berries in profusion.

If it were the native red mulberry, the berries would be black when ripe. But the white mulberry ripens without much change of color, going from light green to a slight pinkish hue.

While we're busy buying strawberries from California or grapes from Chile, the local mulberry crop rots on the ground.

Why don't mulberries get any respect? Even though they taste good, their presentation quickly triggers feelings of surfeit. The tree dares our appetite to compete against its bounty, and we know we'll lose every time.

Too, the maps in our minds associate food with the local store, not trees in the landscape. With fruits available year-round in stores, there seems no urgency to exploit the sudden and passing gift of a neighborhood tree.

The same dilemma faces anyone who considers using public transportation. Why go through the planning and uncertainty of catching a bus when the car is ever at the ready?

For now, a mulberry is a bit of serendipity on the way into town, a roadside stand, quietly spilling bounty in our path.

Note: A friend noted that birds take advantage of at least a portion of the mulberry's bounty. Researching the red mulberry (not the white mulberry in this post) I found that the Wisconsin-based Wild Ones website counts 44 bird species that eat the red mulberry's fruit. The red mulberry's role as a food source for insects, which are a vital part of birds' diet, is less impressive. The bringingnaturehome.net site has downloadable data on how many lepidoptera species were found on various plant species. For example, oaks feed 534 different butterfly/moth species, blueberry supports 288, while red mulberries support 10.

Bovinity in the Vicinity

People ask me all the time. Sure, Princeton has lots of intellectual stars, but how about cows? Is there any bovinity in the vicinity? Can Princeton do cow bells like it does Nobels?

The answer came, as most answers do, while I was doing something else, driving down the Great Road past Coventry Farm. In past years, the preserved farm had appeared to host little more than a few horses and noisy flocks of semi-wild geese. Long gone are the days when the owner successfully attracted hundreds of circling vultures by having Princeton's once copious roadkill of deer delivered to the farm.

But the other day I glanced in passing and was surprised.

There they were. Cows, or more rightly cattle, frolicking in a field, young, old, mooing, mounting, gorgeous golden brown as far as the eye could see.

This was no high brow cow pie in the sky fantasy. This was a Princeton where cows can be cows, where kids can be kids and farmers can be farmers, where intellect can take you to the stars or where a pasture on the west side of town can, at least in my case, bring back memories of a childhood visit to a farm in Kansas, dodging cowpies to get to the fishing hole and then returning at dusk to watch, on a little black and white TV, the first man step on the moon. Thank you, cattle, for that.

After such a dose of unreal reality, it was a shock to return to the road, where the machine world pounded by, in a hurry to be somewhere else than where it was a minute ago.

I clambered back up the bank for one last glance.
If this be a return of Princetons past,

Then we're no longer the type
To be stereotyped.

Step aside Texas.
We're the new nexus,

With fields tread
By grass-fed tawny reds,

And still endemic
Fodder academic

To perplex us.

Quite White

Plantings of oak-leaved hydrangia and Virginia sweetspire (narrow spires in foreground) are making long arcs of white in the courtyard at the Princeton Shopping Center. Both are native to the U.S., though mostly in the southeast. According to the USDA plant website, oak-leaved hydrangia's natural range is centered around Mississippi and Alabama, though it's a common sight in northern plant nurseries and gardens.

If you're ever curious about where a plant grows in the wild, find the plant on the USDA site, scroll down to the range map for the U.S., then click on one state or another to see in which counties the plant has been documented growing.

Light Green, Dark Green

Three weeks ago, new leaves were contrasting beautifully with last year's on evergreens around town. Photos of this have collected, aged, and if they age anymore all that new growth will have become overgrowth and then, as seems the ultimate condition, yardwaste. So without further procrastination:

a laurel (at various times called skip laurel or cherry laurel, not native but also not invasive),

spruce,

english ivy,

probably a yew bush,

a native mountain laurel.

And in an effort to make the deciduous less anonymous,

a hackberry (lining Walnut St. across from JW Middleschool, and occasionally found in the woods)

poison ivy popping up through a privet hedge, like a bandit seeking to steal away domestic tranquility,

a native blackhaw Viburnum (note tiny leaf along stems in upper left of photo--a common characteristic),

a native hazelnut, which judging from the holes in the leaves donates early and often to support-your-local-insect charities,

and last but not least, a tulip poplar pulls a new leaf out of its hat in a long-running magic trick.

A Black Bear Visits Princeton

With the spotting of a "teenage" black bear in Princeton yesterday, it's time to brush up on bear facts. Princeton township has useful info from the NJ Dept. of Environmental Protection on how to behave if you encounter a black bear. For anyone heading out west into grizzly country this summer, it's good to know that the appropriate response to a black bear is completely different from what to do when happening upon a grizzly.

A photo of the bear and more information on its stroll through town can be found at Planet Princeton. I doubt it expected to go from a life of anonymity to celebrity status in a day, with a crowd gathering to watch it over at the Princeton Cemetery while news helicopters hovered overhead.

Can-Do Bamboo Control

A photo of the offspring of the Mercer Oak at the Princeton Battlefield would be appropriate for Memorial Day, but lacking that, a post on bamboo will have to do. My understanding is that the Revolutionary War was a war of attrition. The Continental army won few battles, but managed to sap the will of the British over the course of eight years.

You may never completely win the battle against bamboo, but conducting a war of attrition can turn an advancing monster into a minor nuisance. The goal is to starve the massive root system of energy, in other words, to lay siege. Cutting down all the stems immediately shuts down any solar energy collection, forcing the root system to use its reserves to sustain normal metabolism.

The roots then commit additional energy reserves to sending up new shoots. These can reach six or more feet before they start sprouting leaves. As these bare stems grow, be patient. Keep those loppers at the ready, then cut the long, still-soft stems down just as those solar collecting leaves begin to appear. Proper timing will cheat the roots of any return on a substantial investment in new infrastructure. As the roots weaken, each new set of sprouts will be smaller than the last.

For battles waged on the property line, an alliance with the neighbor will be critical.