George Washington Battles the Bindweed

Some may think the battle is long over, carved into stone at Battle Monument, but while George is looking the other way, the bindweed is growing, growing, extending its reach every which way. First it mobs the iris. What could be next?

OMG, it's headed straight towards Monument Hall! Won't someone do something? George, we know you and all those other founding fathers were into plants. You had "a vision for the capital city of the United States that included a botanic garden that would demonstrate and promote the importance of plants to the young nation." It says right there on the website. Congress put the U.S. Botanic Garden a stone's throw away from the capitol building, for heaven's sake. But somehow we all got on a high horse and decided plants didn't matter.

No, that white flower is not bindweed's flag of surrender.

Where George is looking, everything's fine. The left flank is holding. Wild indigo and inkberry continue to grow unmolested.

But wait, what's this? Oriental bittersweet, overwhelming the right flank? What audacity.

Clearly, the wild indigo is calling for reinforcements, albeit very quietly. Don't be so stonefaced, George. Loosen up, take a look around you. Mobilize the troops. That was a great battle you won there, but the battle continues. We need you now more than ever.

Fireworks That Feed the Fauna

Flowers are like slow-motion fireworks, rising up, up, then bursting forth in radiant colors. Hardly noticing the slow build, I was surprised at the sudden unleashing of color soon after the official onset of summer. Behind the purple coneflowers in the photo are the red of beebalm and the white spires of bottlebrush buckeye, whose tubular flowers have been attracting sphinx moths and hummingbirds.

The 4th of July fireworks were impressive, particularly when reflected in Lake Carnegie,

but the slow bloom of a garden has more lasting appeal. It's also more edible, at least for the pollinators. Buttonbush, a favorite of bumblebees, is doing a pretty good imitation of fireworks. Tall meadowrue and Queen-of-the-Prairie (Filipendula rubra) have been adding clouds of white and pink.

Used Pot Thank You

Thanks to all who dropped off plastic plant pots at my house in recent weeks! They're quickly getting put to use for planting up natives, like this soft rush, woodland phlox and rose mallow.

I'm always glad for more, at 139 N. Harrison St. Put them next to the driveway, in from the sidewalk.

Raingarden in June--Whole Earth Center

Mr. Frog gave me a report on how the little raingarden along Nassau Street in front of the Whole Earth Center is doing. The report got lost under some papers on my desk, so don't blame the frog if the report is surfacing a month late. He said the oak-leafed hydrangea is having a splendid blooming season. The button bush is bouncing back big time from a trimming it got from whatever maintenance crew the landlord employs to breeze through in the spring, leaving dark, ornamental mulch in their wake. Mr. Frog's predicting a big show of cutleaf coneflowers in July, and that solitary tall meadowrue is hanging in there amidst all the enthusiastic growing going on.

Mr. Frog is pretty proud of all the non-standard plantings that are doing so well at the other end. That corralberry (Symphoricarpos orbiculatus)
is thriving beyond all expectation, and that mound of fringed sedge (Carex crinita) is doing a good imitation of the big hair of a country western singer.

Tucked close to the ground amidst the opulence is the diminutive blue-eyed grass (Sisyrhinchium sp.), which is really an iris doing a grass imitation.

The mulch, combined with some proactive weeding, makes maintenance a breeze. But Mr. Frog pointed out a few small matters to attend to. There's that pesky nut sedge (one tiny one at top of photo) that can gain momentum and spread throughout a garden if it's not pulled out as soon as it appears. Some weedy, sprawling grass (lower right) needed to be pulled out, too. That left a few little deertongue grass seedlings (lower left, with broader leaves) and a mistflower in the upper right to let grow.

The deertongue grass seedlings will make good transplants later on, because they'd otherwise grow out onto the sidewalk if allowed to mature in place.

Deertongue grass (Dichanthelium clandestinum) along the edge of a building? Its native habitat is in the floodplain down along the canal, but it actually provides an attractive mound of green and the texture of its tongue-sized leaves.

Whenever it rains, roof runoff comes through this narrow garden via a buried perforated pipe that's connected to a nearby downspout. I like to think that the plants have tapped into that supply, and are thriving as a result.

Complex Nature in a Parking Lot

Tended urban landscapes can be categorized as simple or complex. Simple landscapes are composed of lawn, trees, hedges and mulch. Care of this sort of landscape requires mowing grass and trimming the hedge--both of which keep plants in a stunted, infantile state. The plants play the role of something nonliving: the lawn a living rug, the hedge a living wall. This outdoor space is managed more like it were indoors, with the accompanying cleaning requirements, cheating nature of its well-honed modus operandi of recycle-in-place. Whatever the trees drop is alien to this landscape and must be hauled away. Application of broadleaf herbicide simplifies the lawn further, foiling nature's inclination to diversify with a host of weeds. The enforcers of simplified landscapes cruise around town in rigs that can approach the size of semis, to hold all the cleaning and grooming machinery required to keep nature from being natural.

Now and then there's an exception to this rule. A homeowner may plant a perennial border, or a memorial garden is planted in a park, or the idea of a raingarden appeals.

At Westminster Choir College, these vegetated swales, essentially raingardens, were planted because the concept of native swales filtering polluted parking lot runoff penetrated into the regulatory framework controlling new development. Regs dictate a vegetated swale, the landscape architect chooses what plants are to be put in, and a complex urban landscape is born.

And who will take care of this landscape? Typically, it will be crews that, if they had ever encountered switchgrass or cardinal flower or milkweed before, would have thought them a weed to pull out. If you mow lawns and trim hedges all day, the idea that a plant could mature, flower and go to seed is entirely alien.

There is, then, a disconnect between installation and maintenance. To maintain such a landscape requires not a trailer full of machinery but knowledge, not only of the twenty intended species but also the twenty or thirty species of weeds that will happily spring up and compete for space.

The maintenance crew finds itself in a game of botanical To Tell the Truth, where the mystery guest speaks a foreign language of opposite or alternate branching, dentated or entire leaves, stigmas and styles, lemmas and paleas. Each plant must be known not only by its flowers, but also by other characteristics so one doesn't pull it out by mistake after the flowers fade. So, will the real intended plant please stand up?

Is this plant (velvet leaf) intended? It looks distinctive.

How about this (pigweed)?

This vine (bindweed) has a nice flower, but it's climbing over something else (curly dock). Is any of this intended or not? It's almost certain the person told to visit this site with a weed whipper now and then hasn't a clue.

How about these (smartweed on the left, lambs quarters on the right)?

Finally, a flower (crown vetch)! It looks intended, but if one wants to maintain a balanced, diverse planting, it would be the first one to be pulled out.

Finally, an intended plant, swamp milkweed, but chances are 50/50 it will be pulled out by mistake. It's got "weed" in its name, after all.

The appearance of these particular vegetated swales is being saved by switchgrass, which is filling in nicely with its luxuriant mass that shrugs off the weedy wannabes, and the blackgum and redbud trees are flourishing in this inverted, naturally watered space. But until the knowledge that went into its planting also informs the maintenance, these complex landscapes will not be nearly as attractive as they could be.

Trees as Local Characters

Some can't see the forest for the trees, but for me, it's harder to see the trees, to really look at one or another rather than merely be aware of some vague mass overhead as I pass by. There's so much to take in, so many branches to follow to their logical or illogical conclusions. Easier to glance at the bark, summon a name, and assume the rest.

But that won't do for the chair of the Shade Tree Commission, who you'd think could offer sage advice on what sort of tree to plant. Shall I recommend a silver maple, which has a reputation for dropping limbs, which is to say it grows lots of branches, then loses interest in some of them for no clear reason. They're a bit like people in that respect, who take up a fitness regime or a musical instrument, then end up dropping one or another for lack of time or sustained interest. Dropping a limb sounds scarier than dropping guitar lessons, but I've lived with silver maples in front yards in multiple towns with no consequence other than some very agreeable open shade, so I'm starting to scrutinize the local tree population to see if the reputations some trees have is really deserved.

Princeton has a lot of characters, and the same goes for its trees. Maples can become richly drawn with age, all gnarled and quirky, like this silver maple on Madison. Somehow I think of the ruddy face of a pipe-smoking english professor from college days.

Here's one on Spruce that looks like it's an Olympian discus thrower releasing a mighty throw.

I could say some unflattering things about black walnuts--the messy husks they drop or the juglone they exude through their roots--but what tree doesn't have something about it one could wish were different. Here's a black walnut I'd never seen, flourishing along a hidden alley I'd never noticed, off of Park Place.

Its dark, meandering limbs and long pendant leaves lend a tropical feel to this otherwise plain alley, evoking memories of jacarandas in Buenos Aires.

Even a tree presiding over one of the most traveled spots in town, next to McCaffery's, is felt rather than seen unless one makes a conscious effort to look up. How strange to be a honey locust in the modern world, its thorns gratuitous in an America stripped of megafauna, the fleeting, sweet inner lining of its pods forced to compete with year-round Ben and Jerry's, and no advertising budget to grab the attention of all who pass below.

One day I'll find a pod that's just right--these look too immature--and give the inner lining a taste, while someone else is complaining about the mess the tree is making, scattering pods all over the ground, if they even notice.

In the search for a perfect tree to recommend, I'm starting to think that trees are characters first and types second, each responding in an individual way to inner promptings and outer circumstance, tending to serve well despite their imperfections.

Note: There's a new page on this blog, a list of native trees of Princeton, with brief descriptions (not exactly recommendations) based on ten years of observation. Pages should be found along the top of the homepage.

A Milkweed-Lined Bicycle Ride To DR Greenway

I broke through one of those self-imposed glass ceilings the other day. No broken glass scattered everywhere, just a new feeling of empowerment, in that pedal power conveyed me with surprising ease to a destination I would normally jump in a car to reach. The destination was a reception for a new art exhibit entitled Color in Nature, at DR Greenway out Rosedale Road. The bikeride unexpectedly offered a nice warmup to the theme of the exhibit, with milkweed drawing the camera's eye.

Interesting to see how common milkweed, which normally toughs it out in fields and along road embankments, is being featured in front of a million dollar home on Cleveland Lane, mixing it up with tonier perennials with a well-groomed boxwood hedge as background. Maybe the homeowner is expecting some distinguished guests--royalty perhaps, or a Monarch.

Even without a tailwind, it seemed a breeze to get out to Greenway Meadows, and with a bike one can get off Rosedale early and take the scenic route through the park, with the rec department's pile of mulch standing guard over the vista just beyond.

With cool season grasses maturing in early summer, the milkweed stands out. Monarch butterflies depend on favorable winds to make their cross-continental migrations, but it's the strength and resilience of the common milkweed that has served as a metaphorical and nutritional "wind beneath their wings" through the millenia.

They line the pathway, like cheering crowds.

No monarchs yet, but a beetle or two.

Lower slung and less common is another milkweed, the butterflyweed (Asclepias tuberosa), which has a growth habit akin to orange broccoli.

No habitat restorationist can look at a meadow and not see something that needs tending to, like this incipient presence of porcelainberry, but maybe an annual mowing limits its spread.

And at the destination, art, a cool drink, some familiar faces. Bicycling has a reputation as being secondary in convenience to cars, but sometimes it feels first class.

(Check out another edge-of-town destination this Sunday, June 28 from 1-4pm, as they close off Quaker Road for the annual Ciclovia.)

Volcanoes on Harrison Street

The landscape service for the house two doors down gave the street tree maple a little love. Tucked it in like you might tuck a child into bed. All nice and snug with some mulch around its trunk.

Looks so right, and yet everyone knows it's the wrong thing to do--everyone except the workers charged with taking care of people's yards. It just goes to show, once again, how much land is left in the hands of people who don't know anything about plants. Cut the grass, trim the hedge, spread the mulch--what more could there be to know? It's like dispensing with doctors and nurses, and turning the medical profession over to barbers.

Now, I actually feel a lot of sympathy for the guys who are charged with going out there and mowing grass all day. Grass is a hippy after all. It wants to grow its hair long and make love in the sunshine. Keeping all those proclivities in check is a major production. I put in my time, mowing yards as a kid, and then a brief stint as a groundskeeper at a golf course, perched on a tractor, pulling the gang mowers up and down the fairways. I love the smell of fresh-cut grass, and spent much of my youth playing one grass-tread sport or another, or just feeling the joy of running full tilt across a field of green. Summer evenings we'd have pickup games. When it got too dark to see the softball, we'd switch to soccer--the ball being bigger--and play some more, then find our ways home in the pitch black, by distant glimmers of light and instinct, as if navigating across constellations.

But all those memories are far removed from current realities, where so many lawns are neither used nor taken care of by the inhabitants of the house, and essentially serve as obligatory, sterile frames for the buildings they surround, their tidiness enforced by roving crews wielding pesticides, whirling steel, and raucous leaf blowers. So many barren hours spent tending to barren landscapes. At least it's an outdoor activity.

Suburbia tells us we must have yards, but what are they for exactly? It can get pretty existential. Native plants is one answer, for me at least. Give them a place to grow and show off their stuff. And chickens. Chickens know what to do with a yard, examining every little speck to see if it's food. They have no existential quandaries to grapple with.

So, really, I don't get too worked up over mulch volcanoes. It just seems way too easy. True, they are annoying, but they are only the pesky peak perched atop an implacable mountain of convention and indifference. Nature is often counter-intuitive. It takes awhile to get to know. Trees don't like to be hugged by mulch.

In this case, it was easy enough to pull the mulch back from the bark and be on my way. If only the underlying problem were as easy to fix.

Johnny Elderberrystem

When Johnny Elderberrystem had to remove a big pin oak tree in his backyard that was sitting on a drainage tile and shading his neighbor's vegetable garden, one thing he did with all that extra sunlight was, not surprisingly, grow some elderberry bushes. Johnny acquired his love for elderberries way back when, during jaunts with his parents each fall to harvest elderberries along the streams of Wisconsin. All those berries turned into delicious preserves and pies. Decades later, he learned that elderberry bushes, like buttonbush and silky dogwood, could be propagated by cutting a section of dormant stem in late winter and pushing it into the ground. Couldn't be easier. Johnny Elderberrystem was off and running.

And when those now ten foot high shrubs hold forth with disks of white flowers, Johnny knows it's time to venture out and see how all the other elderberries he's planted in Princeton over the years are doing.

This one in the raingarden at Mountain Lakes House probably grew from one of those live stakes he started in the greenhouse.

And this one along the Mountain Lakes driveway is one he planted and actually remembered to water through its first, precarious year. (You've got to wonder what sort of survival rate Johnny Appleseed got, planting apples here and there while he waltzed from county to county, leaving all those seedlings to the whims of the weather.) Other elderberries are living the good life at the Princeton High School ecolab wetland, their thirst well quenched by the sump pump's steady offerings.

This spring, Johnny Elderberrystem remembered to go down to the canal just west of the Harrison Street bridge, to mark elderberries with red tape so that the state parks crew that does the annual mowing of the fields there would mow around them. He missed one, and though new stems are popping up, they won't bloom and thus won't offer wildlife any flowers or berries to feast on. He did manage to mark about ten, though (he lost count at three, being easily distracted from counting) and the crew mowed around them, which means a little more dining pleasure for the pollinators and the birds.

Now, if only the birds could be trained to use the elderberry feast to bomb the visiting coxwains as they bark orders at their crews in ivy league regattas this fall, Johnny might be able to get some funding for all of this proactive stewardship.

Barely A Shadbush Berry to Eat

It's been another bad year for shadbush berries. You know, those tasty red berries borne by our native shrub that blooms when the shad migrate up the mighty Delaware River to spawn? Don't recognize the name "shadbush"? Maybe serviceberry or Amelanchier rings a bell. Oh, well. To not be familiar with shadbush is to be saved the dismay of witnessing the corruption of its bounty by cedar apple rust.

How sweet the memory, though, of going to what was once Kinko's out on Route 1 and finding a shadbush loaded with ripe berries at the front door--a secret feast in plain sight.

That memory seems more like a dream now, as nearly all the shadbush berries I encounter are a study in disfigurement, as if each berry had donned a grotesque Halloween costume. Even the catbird, so grateful for the berry bushes I've planted in the backyard, seems to have lost interest. If the fruit of a shadbush were a drupe, one could say "Berries, berries, everywhere, but not a drupe to eat."

There's a nice grove of shadbush next to Frist Center on campus, where at least a few berries aren't affected.

The name of this fungal disease implies that it alternates most notoriously between apple trees and cedars, which may explain why there were these garish growths on an arborvita two blocks from my house a couple weeks ago.

Some treatment recommendations can be found on the web, such as here and here, and there may be resistant shadbush varieties out there, but half the pleasure of eating them was the serendipity, the surprise gift recognizable to only a few.

Water, Water, Everywhere

Water's everywhere in Princeton, but it's not always easy to get it to where it's needed. Take the raised beds at the Princeton High School as a for instance--seventeen beds, installed in a sunny patch behind the school in the fall of 2009 with great spirit and optimism. There must have been thirty of us, kids and adults, cutting, nailing, hauling, filling. Piles of lumber and rich soil, a table with hot cider and chili on a cool autumn morning. It takes a village to make a school garden. And the designers made sure to put the gardens close to a spigot.

Only one problem. No one could get the spigot to work. Facilities staff tried to fix it, but it could only be accessed through some long tunnel deep in the bowels of the building, and somehow the fix never happened. For lack of water, many of the beds went unplanted, students came and went, interest rose but mostly fell, and except for some planting by the horticulture class, most of the beds grew weeds.

Fast forward six years, my younger daughter is a freshman, expresses some interest, and so she and a friend plant one of the beds with native wildflowers. I check the spigot. Still not working. I figure, why not try one more time. So I email facilities staff, and boom. They have a guy, Dan Galatro, crawl into the tunnel. He was apparently unfazed by whatever had proved intimidating before, because a day later, he emails that the spigot's fixed. How great is that? From my experience, once the water's flowing in the right place, all sorts of good things can flow from that.

So, the moral of that story is that good things can happen when people forget to be discouraged.

Meanwhile, there's the water situation at Potts Park, the little pocket park on Tee-Ar Place.

(I google "T R Potts princeton", thinking Tee-Ar Place and Potts Park are named after the developer of the neighborhood, who I'm guessing had daughters named Dorothy and Ann, because there's also a street called Dorann Avenue, and up pops a page from an ebook entitled "The Ancestry, Life, and Times of Hon. Henry Hastings Sibley", by Nathaniel West. It appears to say that T.R. Potts was brother of a director of the Princeton Theological Seminary, Rev. George Potts, a man of "majestic presence" and "universal esteem". The wife of the Dr. T.R. Potts in the book was named Abbie Ann.) 

Note, 9.9.2018: Just researched this further. There's a Dorothy Ann Potts living in Florida who appears to be related to Dorothea S. Potts and Theodore R. Potts, and lived in Princeton at one time. Theodore's development firm built the shopping center in 1954, and was called Clearview Associates, which explains the street named "Clearview," which may well have had a clear view southward across Princeton back in the 1950s when it was built. ("Relict" means widow.)

But I was writing about the drinking water issue at Potts Park, where children love to put sand from the sandbox into the bowl of the drinking fountain, thereby gumming up, or sanding up, the works and causing the parks dept. to turn off the water and leave an "out of order" sign posted nearby.

This has been going on for years, so my idea is, buy a drinking fountain that doesn't have a bowl, but instead drains to a raingarden. Here's one that drains down a ramp where kids presumably can put sand and see the water flow through it. Here's one that flows first to where dogs can take a sip, before draining into the ground.

The fountain will cost more, but maintenance will be less, kids will be able to play with sand and water in a positive way, and everyone will see how drainage can be used to grow native wildflowers. Call me an armchair optimist on a lazy Sunday morning, but I'm cooling down that bottle of "Wyn, Wyn, Wyn" champaign, and preparing a toast to working with gravity, nature, and children's nature, rather than struggling against them.