Elderberry Season

The development of an environmental ethic is much facilitated by the annual consumption of elderberry pie. This year, with the rest of the family out of town, I was able to pass along this family tradition to my older daughter. That tradition, which I became a part of growing up in the midwest, involves seeking out elderberry bushes growing along lakes or sunny streamsides, being lucky enough to find some ripe berries before the birds eat them all, and then rinsing and patiently stripping the berries off the stems.

My daughter stripped the berries while watching a movie on the laptop--an interesting integration of tactile tradition with the media-rich present. Having lost, or never learned, the time-honored  family recipe, we found one on the internet.

Elderberry is a lanky shrub that needs lots of room to grow, usually in low, wet, sunny ground. Unlike most shrubs, it can be easily propagated by cutting a two foot length of stem during the winter, and sticking it halfway into the ground. If placed right side up, the "live stake" will sprout roots and leaves in the appropriate places and, if kept moist the first year, soon produce enough berries to feed the next generation of environmentalists.

Note: A friend expressed concern that people might confuse elderberry with the poisonous berries of pokeweed. Anyone eating wild foods should do their research beforehand. I had the benefit of parents and teachers who could serve as guides. If schools put more value on learning plant identification (what a great way to learn to see subtle distinctions in pattern--a skill with many applications beyond botany), kids would feel much more empowered and comfortable out in the woods. I posted photos of pokeweed on September 8. At least this year, it matured a month after elderberry, which will also help distinguish between the two.

YMCA Camp Kids Take A Walk on the (Mildly) Wild Side

When I arrived at Pettoranello Gardens to help out with a nature walk for kids in a YMCA camp, AeLin Compton of Friends of Princeton Open Space had already started them on a walk of discovery around the pond.

Next on the list of discoveries to be made was the empty shell of a cicada, of which they found many in a tree next to the pond.

The kids already had a photograph of the cicada shell on their clipboards (prepared by walk organizer Martha Friend), which helped them in their search for this and other treasures.

A post on the adult cicada's magical night-time emergence from the shell, and the dangers they face as slow-flying protein in Princeton, can be found here: http://princetonnaturenotes.blogspot.com/2008/07/cicadas-rise-from-depths.html.

While the group headed towards its final stop, I was distracted by leaves that were a ghost of their former selves.

The leaves had been meticulously nibbled, leaving the veins intact, looking like fine lacework.

The craftsmen, boxelder leafrollers, were working nearby on a fresh leaf.

Box elder is not as statuesque as its close relatives in the maple family, but my respect for it has been growing, not for its beauty but for its hospitality to wildlife. This leaf (three leaflets per leaf) has been made ragged by its generous contributions to faunal appetites.

The trunk is typically knobby and riddled with holes that provide fine havens for birds and other creatures. Boxelder's "trashy" qualities of low-grade wood, awkward profile and short lifespan can be seen as an auspicious weakness that serves the woodland community well.

When I caught up, AeLin was showing the kids how a jewelweed's leaf gains a metallic sheen when put underwater.

After a cup of lemonade and a stirring "thank you" to their guides, the campers headed back across 206, framed by counselors fore and aft, carrying their mementos from a walk on the mildly wild side of Princeton's Community Park.

Walk organizer Martha Friend, science teacher at Little Brook Elementary during the school year, put considerable initiative into making this one-time walk happen. Given how close various summer camps at Community Park and the Y are to the preserved woodlands of Pettoranello Gardens and beyond, and a naturalist just down the driveway at Mountain Lakes House, maybe there's a way, without too much extra effort, for these guided walks to become a regular part of the camp experience.

Looking Down On a Lawn

A lot of people, if they could see it, would look down on the nature of my backyard lawn. It at least meets one of the criteria of a lawn, in that it is regularly mowed. When looking down on a lawn, or "lawn", one might as well identify the plants growing there. Warning: The photographs you are about to see may appall those who take pride in a lawn's appearance and pedigree. There is True Green, and then there is the Green Truth, herein depicted in unflinching detail.

Broadleaf plantain (Plantago major),

 a mixture of white clover and violet (human grazers will find the violet leaves and flowers more tasty than turfgrass),

 wood sorrel (each leaflet is heart-shaped, while clover's are round). Wood sorrel has a taste made sour by oxalic acid, and is different from sorrel.

If mock strawberry, an inedible strawberry from India, is allowed to spread, it creates a kind of green pavement, growing low enough to survive beneath the mowing blades.

Three-seeded mercury, along the edges of the lawn.

Lest anyone think the lawn entirely devoid of grass, there are patches of Japanese stiltgrass, with its broad leaf blades--the same annual species that carpets woodlands--

and nimblewill, a blueish green, narrow-bladed grass.

The yellow-green blades that become prominent in lawns in late summer are nutsedge, another non-native.

Nutsedge is very easy to pull out, but if allowed to grow to maturity, it looks like this.

Another prosperous weed that has made surprising inroads into the lawn this year is heal-all, a prostrate plant in the mint family that likely originated in Europe (rudely left out of the photo shoot).

All of these excel at playing Lawnmower Limbo.

People Meet Native Plants Along Manhattan's High Line

If you want to feel grounded on Manhattan's West Side, climb the stairs to take a walk along the High Line. This elevated ribbon of native exuberance has proven its early skeptics wrong as people flock to the native meadow superimposed over the urban grays and grime 30 feet below.

The baseline observation, for anyone smitten by the beauty and rich diversity of native plants, is that they are almost completely missing from the world of concrete, turf and trees most people move through. Even a walk in the woods may not provide many encounters with native wildflowers, due to historic plowing, the appetites of deer, and competition from invasive species.

One of the more seductive visions for bringing this natural heritage back to the people is an urban trail bordered by native species. Locally, this concept plays out along the towpath and in a circular fashion at the Princeton High School wetland on Walnut Lane.

Back in 2000 in Durham, N.C., I organized an "adopt a trail" program in which each volunteer would tend a 20 foot section of paved trail for native species. Their work was supported by an online manual describing which plants to leave and which to weed out. The result was dazzling, but the plant knowledge and consistency of attention required was a lot to ask of volunteers.

The conversion of the elevated railroad bed into the High Line trail, from what I've heard, was publicly financed, and the private funding of maintenance insures that the plants will prosper while leaving room for everyone to walk. Adding to the buzz was a recent column by Frank Bruni of the New York Times, about government's beneficial role in the greening of New York.

This switch grass is reminiscent of a scene along the towpath in Princeton.

Looks like a particularly appealing Rudbeckia.

This bottlebrush buckeye in the canyonlands of Manhattan also grows in front of Mountain Lakes House in Princeton.

Contrast the diversity of the artificially sustained High Line with many an untended wetland, in this case the Meadowlands of NJ, which has become a monoculture of invasive Phragmitis grass. For now, as long as botanical bullies rule over large swaths of terra firma, the safest place for a native plants can end up being in unlikely spots like the High Line.

The Sky Tells A Story

People who toil to change the world become so used to pushing against walls that they forget to adequately savor the small victories that come along now and then. That happens to be the first person singular form of "they", but it's a common tendency. Add to that the frenetic tempo of life and, truth be told, you find a lot of lawn chairs, hammocks and other shrines to relaxation attracting little more than bird droppings and tree litter in the backyard.

In recent weeks, though, I've occasionally been inclined to recline, abetted by the acquisition of some chaise lounges. I snatched them off the curb one night, worried that they might otherwise fall into the wrong hands and lead a more vulnerable soul into a life of elegant indolence.

The other evening, satisfied with the results of a project just completed, I decided some repose was in order, and put the new acquisition's reclining capabilities to the test.

The sky, with its subtlety and vastness, came as a surprise.If not for fatigue and a reclining chair, the sky might go unnoticed altogether. Its symphonic works of cloud and color are largely blotted out by tree canopy, chopped into fragments of little meaning or power, while we busy the eyes and mind with matters beneath the trees. How are we to be reminded of being mere specks in a big, big universe if we have no vista by which to see it?

There, before me, framed by trees, was the evening's unexpected cinema. Very experimental, with no clear plot, action or character development. It's best to have no expectations and be pleasantly surprised. Small winged characters passed across, clearly in a hurry to be somewhere else--a loose pack of blackbirds, and at some point a pair of birds with a distinctive pulsing flight rhythm, a flutter and glide, flutter and glide, until they disappeared beyond the trees. Woodpeckers and their relations fly like that.

Large solitary dragon flies passed overhead, some high up and headed straight to unknown destinations. Others flew lower, turning on a dime, using an Etch a Sketch flight pattern to snatch this or that. Cicadas sang their first songs of summer somewhere down among the trees.

I had expected bats to play a starring role in this evening sky, as they have in past summers, but not a single one appeared to patrol the tree-lined opening at dusk. Since New Jersey's resident bats have been succumbing to a fungus that attacks them during hibernation in the couple caves they all gravitate to for the winter, it's easy to be worried by their absence.

I later contacted Margaret O'Gorman of the NJ Conserve Wildlife Foundation, which has been doing heroic work to save bats from this introduced fungus. Her biologists say the relatively few bats that have survived the past two winters may have some immunity to the White Nose Syndrome, offering hope that the populations can recover. She mentioned an August 4 event about bats at the Allaire Nature Center.

All this takes us far from that little opening in the trees, but that's what a patch of sky can do. Shifting colors imply a distant sunset; winged cameo appearances and no-shows give clues about happenings far off. Leaning back, relaxing, it's still possible to do quite a bit of travel. No seatbelts are needed, just a serendipitous piece of outdoor furniture and a portal to the sky.

Canal Walk This Sunday, 10am

For those in town this weekend, I'll be leading my annual canal wildflower walk this Sunday on the towpath running along the D and R Canal State Park, beginning at Washington Rd and heading towards Harrison Street, where a loop trail winds through a savanna landscape of mature oaks and rich understory. All are welcome.

Some parking is just off Washington Road on the West Windsor side of the canal.

If there's time afterwards, we'll make a quick visit to the university's stream restoration, on the other side of Carnegie Lake from the towpath.

Quiet Botanical Battles Staged at Princeton Battlefield

July 19, and it's a quiet scene at the Princeton Battlefield on a weekday afternoon. The Mercer Oak is looking robust in its corral of sacred ground. The immense lawn is getting mowed.

The flag in the distance is at half mast, but I don't suppose it has anything to do with the quiet botanical battles going on.

American chestnut, sacked by an imported sac fungus 100 years ago, has been making a slow comeback thanks to breeders who have been patiently breeding native trees with resistance. Four of these hybrids (15/16th native, 1/16 Japanese chestnut) were planted at the Battlefield two years ago by local nut tree specialist Bill Sachs.

He said their chances of being resistant to the fungus are about 50/50, and as it turns out two of the trees have developed the symptoms of chestnut blight.

Here's what the stem with the canker looks like. (Thanks to Bill for these two photos.)

The two others continue to prosper, and have grown to 12 feet tall. That they are growing near infected trees gives some hope that they will prove to have inherited resistance.

Several mature non-native chestnuts grow near the Clark House. The shiny leaf on the right is likely a Chinese chestnut, compared to the duller surface of the native species.

Flipped over, the Chinese chestnut leaf has a silvery tinge.

Another battle is going on where two flowering dogwood trees grow along woods' edge to the left of the pillars. If they haven't flowered as profusely in recent years, it may be because they are being completely overwhelmed by what I call "the kudzu of the north", porcelain berry.

Judging from this one small branch reaching out from the thronging vines, like a hand pleading for help, the dogwoods are not far from a full surrender.

Another dogwood close by is getting overwhelmed by wild grape.

Three beautiful dogwoods could be saved by five minutes of horticultural heroism with a pair of loppers, but I doubt anyone has even noticed this botanical battle in full swing. We see here a theme reenacted endlessly on our public lands. The voluminous grass gets mowed, some weeds get whipped, but any maintenance task requiring plant knowledge is left to chance.

A fuller story of chestnuts in Princeton can be found by searching this blog for "chestnut", or clicking on this: http://princetonnaturenotes.blogspot.com/search?q=chestnut.

Joe-Pye at Princeton High

On lazy summer days, music wafting out of the Princeton high school's music rooms mixes with the plunky sound of green frogs in the wetland ecolab. With a science wing on one side and the performing arts center on the other, the flower-packed wetland serves as translator of biology into music.

Joe Pye Weed is looking highly floristic right now, and if you look closely at the shapes of the flower heads you'll see two kinds. The more flat-topped is probably spotted Joe Pye Weed (Eupatorium maculatum).

The more rounded, graceful flower head is hollow-stemmed Joe Pye Weed.

Here are the contrasting stems, with the hollow stem on the left.

Also in bloom now are a native sunflower (photo), swamp milkweed, cardinal flower, cutleaf coneflower, rose mallow hibiscus, wild senna,

 wild rice,

 water plantain, whose flower heads are so diffuse they seem impossible to photograph,

and boneset.

Two Less Lindens On Linden Lane

Linden-lined Linden Lane
Found its lindens in retreat.
Tagged and trimmed
Of life and limb,
Now two less to stem the heat.

Kentucky Coffee Tree Leaf

The size of Kentucky Coffee Tree leaves continues to amaze. Dog, looking unexpectedly Einsteinian, added for scale, next to a single leaf.

Here's another way of getting a sense for the size of the leaf, which is bipinnately compound.