Kayaking Up the Mighty Millstone Marsh

If you ever tire of land, Princeton offers a complex of waterways that can be easily navigated by kayak or canoe. There's Carnegie Lake, of course, but also the canal, Stony Brook, and the Millstone River, which flows through a beautiful marsh just a few paddle strokes upstream of Carnegie Lake. A friend, who in the acting world goes by the name of Basha, had been singing the praises of the marsh this year, and we finally headed over there this past Saturday in late afternoon. The put-in is over towards Plainsboro, off Mapleton Road, next to the aquaduct parking lot.

If you've lived in Princeton for ten years without knowing where the aquaduct is, it's where the Millstone River ducks under the DR Canal, downstream of the Harrison Street crossing. Near this "aquaduck" is a pair of mute swans (a species of Eurasian origin, easily distinguised from indigenous trumpeter and tundra swans by its orange bill) that have become the DR Canal's version of rock stars since they had three babies, properly called cygnets. They quickly realized we had no food to offer. Body language here is suggesting which adult is the mother.

The wilder world of native plants and wildlife is accessed by paddling to the left, through a channel bordered by masses of spadderdock,

then under the newish Route 1 bridge.

The channel begins to narrow. The slim profiles of egrets, standing still in the water, become masses of pure white as they spread their wings to fly off. The native rose mallow hibiscus lines the banks in full bloom.

Along the banks and extending deep into the shadows are cardinal flowers, thriving in this year's rains.

Always on the lookout for something new, I found a marsh St. Johnswort (Triadenum virginicum), blooming on the bank.

This, too, was a welcome sight: partridge pea, apparently planted in a restoration site on the east bank. It used to have an easier latin name until someone changed it to Chamaecrista fasciculata. It's closely related to the sensitive pea (smaller) and wild senna (larger), both of which can also be found growing wild in Princeton, particularly along the canal.

One battle I fought for awhile was to get departments of transportation and other governmental entities to stop using the highly invasive Sericea lespedeza for erosion control and start using less obnoxious plants like partridge pea. Sericea lespedeza, also called Chinese bushclover or Lespedeza cuneata, is now taking over the gas pipeline right of way in Princeton, and is a big problem in tallgrass prairies in Kansas and elsewhere.

More successful was the battle fought by Basha and others against the Millstone Bypass, a road that would have been routed close to the Millstone marsh. She's keeping her files, knowing that bad ideas never die.

Another wildflower common in the marsh and along the canal is climbing hempvine. No relation to hemp.

One remarkable sight was wild string beans, produced by the native groundnut. In my garden, it has begun to take over since a tree was taken down and the extra sun fueled this vine's ambitions. Groundnut tends to produce lots of flowers but no beans, as if the flowers were a front organization distracting attention from the underground spread of its tubers. In the wild, it needs that aggressiveness to compete with the other aggressive species along the shores. The tubers, by the way, are said to be edible, and some efforts have been made to breed this plant for commercial food production.

It's a good year for arrowwood Viburnum berries. Note the toothed leaves, thus Viburnum dentatum.

Nearly all the buttonbushes had finished with their golfball sized blooms. Some had improbably oversized leaves. Buttonbush grows well in standing water along the shore, but can also prosper in wet ground in the backyard. In fact, many of the native plants flourishing in the marsh also do well in constructed raingardens in town.

Once you're up in the narrower portion of the marsh, it's best to keep right. Basha showed where heading to the left leads to a deadend. There's a low fallen tree you'll need to duck under at one point.

Mysterious but cleanish looking fluids spill from a pipe with Sarnoff's name and phone number printed above. Just out from this outfall, the surface of the stream is broken by periodic upwellings of water from down below. A faint smell of treated sewage can be detected.

Paddling further up would lead eventually to the overpass for the NJ Transit train, but even a brief visit to the lower end of the marsh has a wild feel to it. Among other sightings were great blue herons, a weasel, turtles, ironweed, and some less charismatic native plants like tearthumb. Beavers like the area, and have been known to slap their tails on the water to warn anyone getting too close.

Even a pile of branches rewards, or warrants, closer inspection.

On the way out, we again passed the resident egrets. A bald eagle flew overhead on its way down Carnegie Lake. Though we could have lingered longer and continued upstream, the whole trip took less than two hours. What a treat to have such habitat so easily accessed just outside of town, and thanks to Basha for the tour.

Housing Authority Apologizes for Raingarden Bulldozing

A quick note to readers that on August 19, after a week of tense exchanges with the Housing Authority, I received an email from the Housing Authority's executive director stating the following:

"First and foremost, I, along with my staff and Board of Commissioners want to offer our sincere apology to you and the community at large for destroying an ecologically friendly community gift. The Princeton Housing Authority and the board certainly appreciate your hard work and dedication in donating your time and effort in the landscaping project. " 

The email goes on to express a desire to move forward in correcting the situation. The email was an important step towards healing, and I look forward to working with Housing staff and board members towards making something positive out of this unfortunate event. I will be posting more on this as time goes on.

"Open Raingarden" Event Tomorrow

It's like an open house, except outside the house. The raingardens here at our urban oasis (by "urban" I mean a busy street in Princeton) are in full bloom, and I'd like people to have a chance to see them. Come by this Sunday, Aug. 17, 3-5pm. I know it's short notice, so email me if you'd like to stop by some other time. The address is 139 N. Harrison St in Princeton. Best to park on Ewing Street or Franklin Ave. if driving. Much of our backyard is fed by runoff from uphill neighbors, which feeds gardens full of native wildflowers, sedges and rushes.

Of the two raingardens in the front yard, one catches water from the neighbor's driveway. The other receives water from one of the front downspouts. The backyard is a reconstructed streambed--what once was a small tributary of Harry's Brook, visible on old maps--with a series of miniponds enveloped in all the native plant growth evidenced in the photo. The ponds vary from full to empty, depending on the rains.

You may also encounter a few charismatic chickens and ducks, and a "fillable/spillable" rainwater duck pond (patent pending). Included is a small "yard" sale, consisting of native wildflowers from the yard that have been potted up. Nearly all are local genotypes. 

And please bring any empty plastic flower pots you don't need. There are native volunteer plants sprouting out all over, and I've run out of pots.

Searching for Monarchs in Princeton

The monarch butterfly, as most people know, is in trouble, due in part to a radical decimation of milkweed on more than one hundred million acres of farmland in the U.S. in recent years. Thus far this summer, I had seen a grand total of two monarchs, one having visited the raingarden in my front yard on Harrison Street. Another raingarden on Harrison Street, at the Spruce Circle senior housing, had just been bulldozed while in full flower.

With that traumatic step backwards in mind, I set out yesterday on my bike to check out a few spots elsewhere in Princeton. If a monarch were to travel around town at about the speed of a bike, wings warmed by the sun after a recent rain, would it find any prospective mates?

First stop was the meadow at the corner of Mountain Ave and the Great Road. The Joe-Pye-Weed was blooming as it does every year, but no monarchs to be seen.

Then a ride up the Great Road to Farmview Fields, where I had hooked the town up with Partners for Fish and Wildlife--a federal agency--to plant a meadow of warm-season native grasses in a stormwater detention basin that had previously been mowed as turf. More habitat, less mowing. Everyone was happy. I had added some native wildflowers, and others had seeded in. When I checked last year it was doing great. Yesterday, however, I was surprised to find the grasses stunted and the wildflowers gone. It hadn't been bulldozed, but something's wrong with the mowing regime, which should be just once a year during the dormant season.

Again, there's a sign that should signal that this is a special area, requiring a different management.

The heavy equipment had left some patches of ground scarred and bare. Mowing crews are so used to mowing these detention basins elsewhere that they may have started regularly mowing this one, out of habit. I had a job mowing a golf course one summer. It's not the kind of work that encourages thinking outside the box.

An unmowed area nearby showed what the basin should have looked like, with the "turkey feet" of big bluestem rising to the sky.

There was a swallowtail butterfly sampling the basin's meagre offerings, but still no monarchs.

Back down the Great Road to the opening in the fence, near Pretty Brook Rd, to take the boardwalk across the bottom of Coventry Farm over to Mountain Lakes. Lots of common milkweed in the field, but no signs of their being munched on by monarch caterpillars.

Finally, along the boardwalk near a big wet meadow of ironweed (the hydrologic conditions a raingarden imitates), I saw a lone monarch, flying about but not landing. As the monarch numbers have dwindled since the 1990's, the question arises, how do they find each other? They start each year in a small enclave in the mountains of Mexico, then spread out across vast areas of the U.S. and Canada. This migration, with one generation succeeding another as they move northward, is predicated on having sufficient numbers for individuals to find each other and mate. The lone monarch and the uneaten milkweeds offered little reason for optimism.

At Mountain Lakes House, a popular place for weddings and other gatherings, and also home base for Friends of Princeton Open Space, the raingarden I designed was prospering.

Lots of color there,

and in another rain garden in the driveway, but no monarchs to be seen.

There was still one spot to look, though, in the fields of Tusculum, preserved by Friends of Princeton Open Space and others, and packed with milkweed. To get there meant maneuvering through the now tattered evergreen forest of Community Park North. High winds in recent years have knocked down most of the pines and spruce, which really aren't natural to this area but had provided a deep forest feel that was enjoyable to walk through. Now, fallen trees have opened up the canopy, energizing an understory of invasive stiltgrass and honeysuckle.

Some trails are lined by young ash trees that will likely be attacked by the emerald ash borer when it reaches Princeton. This strangest of woods was not feeding optimism either.

The fields of Tusculum also looked different than in past years, perhaps again due to a mowing regime that might not be the best for wildlife habitat. Mountain mint, once a common wildflower there, was nowhere to be seen. And no monarchs.

But then, near Cherry Hill Road, next to a purple patch of tick trefoil and Indian grass,

monarchs, a pair, mating!

They flew over into the meadow to continue. Part naturalist, part voyeur, I lingered, wishing to document how long such pivotal acts take. It became clear that this was no brief rendezvous, so I moved on,

to the next field over, where common milkweed sprawled over more than an acre.  And there, another monarch, showing off its brilliant, speedy flight, ducking in and out among the milkweeds, as if in a hurry yet undecided as to where to land. It did land a few times, briefly, perhaps to lay an egg? I checked the undersides of leaves, but it was hard to tell from a distance where it had landed.

I biked home more hopeful than two hours prior. Those monarchs were starting the last generation of the year, the one that will fly all the way back to Mexico. On the way back, I passed the Princeton High School's detention basin just north of the performing arts center on Walnut Street. Now wouldn't that be a fine gesture, an act of generosity and belief in the future, if the school were to turn that empty, unused basin into a monarch meadow.

A Raingarden's Quiet Riot of Wildflowers

Half of my backyard is raingarden, and this is what it looks like right now. it could not be mistaken for evergreen shrubs trimmed to look like cannonballs. It's a celebration of life, and the party's in full swing right now. Most of these grow wild along the canal and a few other spots in town.

Joe-Pye-Weed is the tall one with the pompom blooms. Rose Mallow (Hibiscus moscheutos) is the large white flower.

Cutleaf coneflower (you can see why it used to be called green-headed coneflower)

The rose mallow hibiscus is variable--sometimes white with a rose center, sometimes pink.

If you kayak up the Millstone River from Carnegie Lake, you'll see these lining the banks.

A bit of an optical illusion here. Cardinal flower isn't that big. Green bullrush is the sedge in the foreground, just to the right of the cardinal flower, with hibiscus in the background and boneset on the back right. Boneset is the king of pollinator attractors. To the left of the huge-looking cardinal flower is purple loosestrife (a non-native that seeded in and can be invasive, but which I'm leaving in for now).

Ironweed has clusters of small flowers at the top of a tall stalk.

There are lots of different yellow flowers. This one is cup-plant, which can grow ten feet high. I found it growing next to the dumpster at Mark Twain's house in Hartford, CT. It doesn't grow wild in the Princeton area, but is a native. The small white flowers are late-flowering boneset.

Though they do fine in regular garden soil, these native wildflowers also thrive in parts of the garden that are scooped out a bit and have runoff directed to them, from downspouts, driveways, or patios. That's basically what a raingarden is.

Public Raingarden Bulldozed

(See followup post for an update.)

You know, it's been a beautiful summer, and I really don't feel like being upset. But this past Thursday, on August 7, the raingarden at the Princeton Housing Authority's Spruce Circle on Harrison Street was bulldozed. Just like that. Gone. For six years it provided beauty to passersby, and food and habitat for wildlife. This time of year is peak flowering, with Joe-Pye-Weed, cutleaf coneflower, boneset and swamp milkweed providing color and feeding pollinators that find precious little to feed on elsewhere. In an urban landscape dominated by trees and turf, the raingarden offered an oasis for the dwindling numbers of monarch butterflies that come our way each year.

When I discovered the destruction, the sign was still there. It would have been thoughtful if the head of maintenance, whoever that may be, had read the sign first, to find out what the garden's function was, and who planted it. The next day, the sign too had been ripped out.

I called the Housing Authority, and was told by an assistant administrator, who could not have been more indifferent, that anything planted on their property is under their control, and can be destroyed at will. I explained that it had been planted and maintained for six years by volunteers, and asked if she might feel any regret? She said she would be lying if she were to say she did. Since I had called a few minutes after the office closed, she said she was doing me a favor by answering the phone.

It's true the housing authority has control over its property, but not completely true. That land is public land. It's not owned by the recently hired maintenance supervisor. The raingarden was approved in 2008 by the executive director, Scott Parsons, and the Princeton Housing Authority board. It was faithfully maintained by volunteers. Such decisions can't be reversed on someone's whim, or so you would think.

Having planted a lot of raingardens on public land, in three different towns, I've developed a thick skin. The first time one was accidentally mowed by a new and uninformed employee, in Durham, NC, it felt like a punch to the gut. I discovered, however, that gardens are resilient. They grow back from a mowing. So two years ago when I came upon a man trimming the Harrison St. raingarden with a chainsaw, I calmly explained that the wildflowers are not a hedge, and we joked about it later. But bulldozing represents a new level of ignorance and indifference.

One of the ironies is that I had just received an invitation from Princeton's mayor to a Volunteer Thank You Party. Well, the raingarden was a volunteer of sorts, doing everything right. In addition to the interest, beauty and habitat it provided, it also capturing runoff from the roofs to reduce downstream flooding. What a nice thank you it received, from a bulldozer. 

And here, flashing back to 2008, is an example of community volunteers doing everything right. When Curtis Helm told me about his idea of planting a demonstration raingarden at Spruce Circle, I helped choose the spot and facilitated the permission process. Curtis carefully regraded the soil to hold just the right amount of runoff, so the water would seep into the ground after a day or two, feeding the plants but killing any hapless mosquito larvae before they could mature. By tempting mosquitoes to lay their eggs in ephemeral water, a raingarden actually reduces the urban mosquito population.

Surrounded by buildings and streets whose imperviousness displaces nature and contributes to downstream flooding, and whose emissions contribute to destabilizing climate, the raingarden acts as a buffer, welcoming nature and slowing the water down. In a time of increasing extremes, we need more raingardening, not less.

Curtis arranged a generous donation of plants from Pinelands Nursery, and paid for the sign with his own money. The raingarden was part of a Green Home and Garden Tour that year. Photos of the garden were used in presentations at conferences, and also appear in the Rain Garden Manual of New Jersey (pp. 14 and 50), which is accessible on websites in NJ, Connecticut, Maine and elsewhere. When Curtis left town to take a position with Philadelphia's parks department, I weeded the garden each year and made sure the roof downspouts were still feeding it water.

It takes a certain breed of person to keep a garden going, year after year. So many distractions in life, so many demands, and the weeds take advantage. There are some successes in Princeton. The gardens that serve as an attractive entryway to the town pool and the recreation building thrive because of the volunteer t.l.c. of Vikki Caines, a rec. dept. employee, and the Dogwood Garden Club. But other gardens have recently lost their longtime stewards. The splendid gardens at Riverside Elementary are losing Dorothy Mullen after so many years of devotion. The Barbara Sigmund memorial park on Hamilton Ave. lost Polly Burlingham's stewardship, in part due to a lack of volunteer help. Other plantings have gone for years without adequate attention. The memorial dogwoods at Princeton Battlefield languish beneath a tyranny of freeloading vines while acres of ahistoric lawn get mowed. The Harrison Street Park plantings got a burst of volunteer attention their first year, but then most of those gardens were left to the weeds and the unskilled grounds crew.

The lack of botanical training for employees charged with caring for our public spaces has always been hard to fathom. Princeton has an arborist, but no one versed in plants that happen to lack cellulose. Usually, the lack of training expresses itself through the steady decline of any planting other than trees and turf. But now we find that this lack of knowledge and training has expressed itself as a willingness to destroy even those gardens well cared for by volunteers.

What we end up with is "greenery", for example this mound of invasive Japanese honeysuckle vine that suffocated whatever shrub was planted there long ago, and now survives by being sufficiently boring and mindless.

The Princeton Housing Authority has been incommunicado this week as it moves into new offices. Their executive director only works one day a week, and has yet to reply to requests for information. All indications, however, suggest that this was a pointless act of destruction.

So, really, what does Princeton value? Does it value the time, passion, knowledge, and energy its volunteers give to the community? Does it value the stream--Harry's Brook--that this raingarden was aiding by holding back runoff? Whoever destroyed this garden thought no one would care, that the Housing Authority Board and town council would simply make excuses or look the other way. We'll find out soon whether the town rebuilds this raingarden, or if public spiritedness is to be turned into a slurry of mud headed towards Harry's Brook.

Update, 8/14: The Housing Authority's executive director, Scott Parsons, responded soon after this post was written. He explained that there was a misunderstanding with his maintenance staff, but that there wasn't much that could be done. He apologized for the misunderstanding.

Peregrine Falcon Watching Over Princeton

Fine Hall, the newer math building not to be confused with Old Fine Hall, has perhaps the finest view of all in Princeton. I've never been up there to confirm, but a Peregrine falcon has, and was spotted twice this weekend by local birders Lee and Melinda Varian.

This photo, with the falcon's favorite ledges circled, was taken a couple years ago by Ben Schweinhart.

Not clear if it has a favorite side of the building to perch on, but these two photos taken by Lee are on the east and south-facing sides.

Though the bird has been spotted thus far between 7:30 and 9:30 in the morning, it may be there other times as well.

First Monarch Seen

The raingarden in the front yard yesterday, next to busy Harrison Street, was where I saw my first monarch of the season in Princeton.

I had been concerned that the cool summer, pleasant as it is for us, could reduce the reproduction of the monarchs as they build their population from one generation to the next through the summer. But I see no mention of that as a factor in a detailed update on the monarch's status by Chip Taylor, at http://monarchwatch.org/blog/. The website also provides a means to report sightings of monarchs, and there's an email discussion group one can also sign up for. Taylor is predicting somewhat larger numbers than last year, but a fuller recovery will require restoring milkweed to the landscape, particularly to farmland in the midwest, where it has been decimated by Roundup Ready corn and soybeans.

From a slightly different angle, the monarch's wings look pretty beaten up. Hopefully it hasn't had to work too hard to find other monarchs.

Feel free to enter your sightings in the comment section below.