What a Little Dew Can Do

Here's a bit of serendipity. Shadows play upon the grounds of Princeton Battlefield, charmed with dew on a Saturday morning.

Ever the resident tourist, a shadow selfie with Mercer Oak II. Had no luck getting the shadow to smile.

Sorry, but you can't look at any screen--TV or computer--without at least one obligatory car commercial popping up. The sound track runs something like, "If George Washington were alive today, ...", though he might eschew fossil fuel altogether and stick with a horse. Those founding fathers thought about long term consequence. What ever happened to that kind of thinking?

The original motivation for stopping during a drive by of the Battlefield was documentation, not aesthetics: to photograph the invasive porcelainberry overgrowing flowering dogwoods planted as part of the nation's bicentennial celebrations in 1976.

One of my recurrent cause celebres is to save the Dogwood Garden Club's dogwood legacy from the aggressive vine growth. From the green/yellow of the porcelainberry vines crawling over the red leaves of the dogwoods, you can see who won this year's skirmish. The Dogwood Garden Club doesn't know who I am, and for all I know they've forgotten that they ever planted these trees along the field's edge in the first place.

There was also an obligatory photo of the great disappearing bamboo patch. Two years ago, this was a thick clone of bamboo growing out over the path down to the Quaker Meeting House, but a series of well-timed cuttings with magic loppers over the past couple years have sapped vigor from the bamboo's giant root system. The decisive strategic intervention came this past June, when Kip Cherry and I cut down the regrowth from a cutting in the spring. It was some inconvenient toil, but deprived of any payback from that big investment in regrowth--two years in a row--the bamboo has nearly given up. A visit next spring should be light work, followed by a refreshing beverage on the Clark House porch.

Dew was also working some magic on the vista on Quaker Road near the towpath. Scattered pin oaks in a field of goldenrods.

Thanks goes to my daughter Anna for getting me out that way early on a Saturday, to drop her off for a busride to Philadelphia to do some canvassing. Otherwise, that encounter with morning dew would have never happened. Finally, a reason to be thankful for this election season.

An Unexpected Halloween Visitor

When my daughters came in the house yesterday evening to report that a raccoon had scared them en route to closing up the chicken coop, it didn't even occur to me that it happened to be Halloween night.

True, there had been a curious masked visitor in the backyard earlier in the day, someone wearing a wig and his favorite CD. That two minute selfie session with a cellphone had been the full extent of our observance of Halloween, other than the white plastic pumpkin decorating the "Wishing the Earth Well" leaf corral out front next to the sidewalk. Our street is not popular with trick or treaters to begin with, and we did nothing to lure them.

The lack of lights and decoration did not deter the night's one trick or treater from showing up, however, not at the front door but behind the house. Though raccoons are considered ubiquitous urban denizens, we had not seen one in the neighborhood since 2004, when a confused specimen passed through our backyard, looking lost.

My daughter's sighting didn't come as a complete surprise, though.

First, it explained what, or who, had been bending the wire fencing of one of my backyard leaf corrals, in a recurrent and unsuccessful attempt to get at its inner core of kitchen scraps. The rotting lettuce and old dogfood, out of reach behind hardware cloth, was the treat, and it was surprising the raccoon hadn't figure out a trick to get at it.

Second, there was the question of whether the raccoon's interest went beyond kitchen scraps to include our four chickens, two of which had taken to roosting in nearby evergreens and bushes rather than taking shelter in the coop. The assumption is that, come winter, if winter comes, the chickens would drop their summer dalliance with self-sufficiency and take refuge in the coop at night.

The girls gave me the flashlight, to lead the daring expedition back to where the raccoon had been spotted.

"Do you think it has rabies?", one of my daughters asked from behind me, not understanding why I wasn't more fearful. When I see a raccoon, I'm cautious of course, but inside, my heart begins to melt. My thoughts return to when they would visit my childhood home, surrounded by woods at the end of a road on the outskirts of a small Wisconsin town. They had been getting into our garbage cans, and all attempts to keep them out had failed.

One day, in broad daylight, a raccoon showed up in our side yard, sad looking, weak, clearly a reject from raccoon society. We named it Rangy, for its bedraggled appearance, took pity on it and gave it some food.

It may have been about this time that my father realized that, if we put our food scraps in a pan next to the woods, the raccoons would leave our garbage cans alone. This proved to be the beginning of a wonderful friendship. As the raccoons began to visit the pan, we decided to install a light to illuminate the edge of the woods, the better to see them. Soon we were tossing them peanuts in the shell from an open window. Closer they came, caution slowly yielding on both sides, until we reached the point where we could step out onto the back patio, hold a peanut out, and they would approach. They'd stand up gracefully and reach for it with those wonderful, delicate paws, take the peanut gently and scoot a short distance away to feast upon it. More and more came. The grownups would bring their young the next year. One night we counted 16. Rangy the Reject had spawned a coming together of human and raccoon society.

This was the era of books like Rascal, and Raccoons are the Smartest People. We knew what rabies was, had seen it occasionally in the odd behavior of an animal--like the groundhog that confronted me on a town street while biking home from school--and we respected the wildness of raccoons too much to consider having one as a pet. But that didn't deter us from appreciating all that is wonderful about them. One evening, we opened the kitchen door to see four raccoon cubs climbing on the screen door, their mother on the porch behind them. The mother was Whitey, the tamest and most gentle of them all, named for the beautiful white fur on her underside. She had brought her new family to meet us. By then, we were actually letting her come in the kitchen door a few feet to get peanuts. Somewhere, there's a photo of her reaching up to touch the knob on our little black and white TV. Of course, we always made sure she had an escape route, so as not to feel trapped. No one ever dared get between her and the open door.

The raccoon that visited us last night, like Rangy long ago, also seemed like a reject. It didn't run away at our approach, but instead remained perched on the fence, looking at us. Though large, it seemed weak and slow. Finally, it climbed awkwardly down the fence and disappeared into the dark.

To be on the safe side, we decided to pluck Buffy, the last of our first batch of chickens from five years ago, from her perch in a nearby lilac bush, and put her in the coop with two others. We closed the coop and headed back in.

To some extent, our free range chickens offer a similar experience to what I had as a child. We feed them, but mostly they forage for themselves, tame and yet living their own lives. Where once I delighted as the wild became more tame, with the chickens we watch as the tame explore aspects of the wild. Last night, those two worlds intersected next to the chicken coop. I thought of leaving some food out for the raccoon in nights to come, but then thought again. How to handle this convergence, for the good of all involved, is not at all clear. I don't expect any reprise of a childhood in small town Wisconsin. Whether the answer is trick or treat, our backyard Halloween is just beginning.

Wawa Grows a Prairie

Wawhat's the Wawa growing? A bit shaggy for a butch cut. The proof is in the roof. Clearly, the Wawa at the Dinky station has gone green, or tawny, depending on the season. Take the building out of the picture, and you have a prairie out in big sky country. For a botanist, the question is not how all those prairie grasses got there--Princeton University has been designing green roofs into, or onto, a number of buildings in recent years--but whether the grass is little bluestem or broomsedge. Time to pull out the ladder for closer inspection. A vegetated roof reduces stormwater runoff from the building, and also provides insulation.

Another aspect of the Dinky Station's landscaping: Most of the trees are Kentucky coffee trees and a thornless version of honey locust. Both of these species tend to leaf out late in spring and drop their leaves early in the fall. Both are relatively rare in local woodlands, in part because their seedpods were in the deep past eaten and spread mostly by America's now-extinct megafauna. They make great landscape trees, though, because they leaf out late in spring and drop their leaves early in the fall. That means they shade the pavement and buildings only during the warmest months, then generously allow the sunlight's warmth to reach the ground during fall, winter and spring. Some research might show that the trees' internal clocks and large seedpods evolved in an ice-age world of short summers and big animals with fur the length of the Wawa's roof.

The bark of the Kentucky coffee tree has a characteristic chipped appearance,

in contrast to the smooth bark of the honey locusts.

Here's a grove of honey locusts letting October sunlight reach the south-facing windows of the Dinky Station.



Found a past post about Dinky wildlife, and a post in which the vibrations of the Dinky's approach makes the trees dream of megafauna past.

Gratifying Restoration Work Near Herrontown Woods

Just down the hill from Princeton Community Village, not far from Bunn Drive, there's a clearing in the forest. The gap in the canopy has allowed sunlight to reach the ground, and the non-woody plant community has responded with billions of white flowers generated by a sprawling wildflower with a sprawling name, late-flowering thoroughwort. Built into the slope you can see what looks like a little dwelling. In fact, the structure and the giant berm its built into were constructed to help protect downstream land and houses from the rainwater that rushes off of Princeton Community Village's streets and roofs during storms. The field of pollinator-friendly wildflowers is some serendipity that our Friends of Herrontown Woods group has informally adopted. We were here to do some weeding, to proactively ward off a takeover by invasive nonnative species.

Mixed with the weeding was some appreciation of the engineering that makes this detention basin serve an ecological and flood-control function. As water enters the basin from Community Village and Copperwood, the aim is for it to seep into the ground, to serve as an underground reservoir to sustain Harry's Brook. But if water remains in the basin for a long time, it will drown the vegetation, so there needs to be a way for excess water to be slowly drained from the basin.

At the bottom of the tower is a small opening for slow release, protected from blockage by the bars.

In a big inundation, a larger hole further up the tower allows faster release of excess water. And then if a megastorm fills the basin close to overflowing, water pours into the big opening at the top of the tower, to keep water from overtopping the berm. Whether much runoff actually reaches this basin from the nearby housing would require stopping by after a deluge.





Cattails and a pretty sedge called woolgrass (Scirpus cyperinus) thrive in the moist soil at the bottom of the basin, intersecting with the thoroughwort on the berm.

Here's a closeup of the woolgrass's ornamental seedhead.









It looks like a peaceful scene,

but along the pipeline right of way nearby, one can see the invasive power of two nonnative species on display. Mugwort, along with the newer arrival, Chinese bushclover, have claimed large sections of the pipeline land, and the same process is at work on the basin's berm. Why the Chinese bushclover is problematic ecologically is described at the bottom of another recent post.

Kurt Tazelaar joined me at the basin with an hour or two to spend and a clear mission: to dig up and remove all the Chinese bushclover we could find before its seeds matured. Our timing was pretty good. The seeds weren't loose, and we were catching the invasion early, when complete removal was still possible.

Here's the incredible root system of a Chinese bushclover--great for erosion control, but awful for biodiversity as the species spreads and outcompetes native species.

Though we achieved our goal, the elephant in the clearing was the mugwort, which is far more numerous and will require a far more ambitious intervention.

There was some good news to be seen with another invasive species at the basin--purple loosestrife. It showed clear signs of deer browse, which means the deer in this case may be helping limit its capacity to dominate the wet areas.

Two hours spent with shovel and clippers, two bags filled, we decided to declare victory and head home.

Some Autumn Splendor

Time to paint the town red

(with black gum leaves). Probably a sugar maple in orange on the right.

A thornless variety of honey locust keeps yellow in the game.

This brilliant red winged euonymus (burning bush), is the same species that has spread into Princeton's woodlands, where the shade diminishes its color to pink, or even ghostly white, in the fall.

A picturesque patch of poison ivy growing safely away from foot traffic, beneath evergreens where the Westminster Choir College grounds extend down to Hamilton Ave.

Winged euonymus can turn a rich orange or burgundy.

Enjoy the ashes while they're still around. The mix of purple and yellow hues on a whole tree can seem almost to pulsate.

Lots of variety in ash leaf color.

Hard to know why the top half of this maple on Aiken Ave. would turn long before the bottom. A tree across the street may have been shading the lower half, delaying its shift to fall color.

Each leaf on a redbud or spicebush can have its own schedule.

The big bluestem grasses planted at our new native meadow at Smoyer Park look to be a midwestern variety. In the midwest, the prairie grasses can turn such brilliant colors that they appear to be on fire, mimicking the prairie fires that help them to prosper. Local members of the same species are much more muted, for some reason.

Woodgrass, actually a sedge, ornaments a constructed wetland.

Feeding Raingardens: When Disconnection is a Good Thing

This post is about two different kinds of disconnection, one good, the other not so good. Now, every time I start saying what something is "about", I am stopped in my tracks by the memory of an english professor, Russell Fraser, who would say emphatically that a poem is not "about" any one thing, in that a good poem comes from a place so deep and works at so many levels that it's naive for the conscious mind to declare what the poem is actually about.

Take as a for instance this newly constructed raingarden behind the PNC's new bank at Princeton Shopping Center. Not exactly a poem, but what is it about? For the designer, who may not have even visited the site, it was about satisfying regulations, at least on paper--regulations that require that newly paved areas not add runoff to local streams. For the contractor, it was a matter of nominally following the design, installing the called for curbcuts and greenery, and being done with it.

At a deeper level, this raingarden demonstrates what happens when people are disconnected from the underlying meaning of their work. The whole idea here is to direct runoff into the raingarden, where the water can be filtered and seep into the ground, essentially "disconnecting" that portion of pavement from the matrix of stormsewer pipes that would otherwise send untreated runoff pouring directly into nearby Harry's Brook, adding to downstream flooding. Look closely, and you'll see how this good sort of disconnection was foiled by a lack of empathy for the basic processes of nature, one of which is that water flows downhill. The runoff can't reach the raingarden because the turf and stone around it are higher than the pavement.

At another level, then, this raingarden is about how a big investment in regulation, design and installation, well intended on its face, can come to nothing.

A bit shadowy here in the photo, but you can see the surprisingly small amount of pavement uphill of the raingarden. The plants really need what little runoff the pavement can provide.

This second curbcut is the most obviously dysfunctional one. A visit during a rain will show runoff simply flowing past it, as if the curb had no cut at all. I suppose as parents we sometimes expect of kids what their nature does not allow, and this curbcut is expecting water to flow uphill. Not likely. It comes down to empathy for the physical world--being able to imagine the flow of water, and the consequences of gravity.

Meanwhile, up Bunn Drive from the Shopping Center, in the parking lot for Stone Hill Church, the raingardens were designed with much more care. The mounds of green and gold are switchgrass--one of the native prairie grasses that works well as an ornamental.

The long raingarden is lower than the pavement, and the curbcuts actually let the water in.

This last photo, back at the Shopping Center, shows how the best way to disconnect can be simply not to connect in the first place. Where no curb was built, the grass meets the pavement directly and runoff can flow into the turf, then be absorbed into the ground. Where the curb ends, where the informality of curbless streets are allowed, better runoff management begins. A chance configuration, with pavement higher than the lawn next to it, is working better than the fancy design of curbcuts and raingarden just a hundred feet away. Here's to the serendipity that sometimes comes from "not doing", and here's to PNC being required to call the contractor back in to make their raingarden actually work.

This Fall, Corral Those Leaves

I'll never understand why the human race throws certain things away, be it leaves or a hospitable climate. The two seem far different, but it's all one needless and tragic purging, a throwing away of nature's gifts while curiously courting danger, present and future. Some of my most vivid and happy memories from childhood involve leaves. One year I took the white oak leaves in our yard and raked them into rows to make a house, then rode my tricycle through the various rooms. Some leaves we burned, perfuming the autumn air. We'd throw acorns into the embers and wait for them to pop. And there's the memory of the whole family raking leaves down the hill, a row of leaves, dancing before us in bright sunlight, growing in size, to make a big pile at the edge of the woods. With my friends, I'd run down the hill, launch myself into the pile, to be enveloped in its crisp embrace. My walk to school was essentially a nature walk, through woods, down a mix of narrow paved and unpaved roads. One maple tree had particularly bright leaves with orange, yellow and red, to pick up and take to art class.

Now I live in a larger small town, a Little Big Town (like the Dustin Hoffman movie Little Big Man), on a busy street, and though I cannot stem the odd and hazardous tradition of piling leaves in the way of cars, bicyclists and pedestrians, or the stampede of traffic spilling gases into the air, I can toss leaves into a leaf corral, in what seems to me a more sustaining and spiritual approach to the physical world. The leaf corrals are an experiment in no-work, no carbon footprint composting. This fall, the corrals' contents, decomposing passively all summer, were inspected to see the results. This particular corral--called a Wishing the Earth Well because it's a well that works in reverse, giving nutrients back to the earth--includes a central cylinder made of critter-proof hardware cloth, where food scraps can be thrown and allowed to decompose, surrounded and disguised by a donut-shaped column of leaves. Yield of this 3 foot diameter corral was one and a half big tubs of compost, and a retrieved teaspoon from the kitchen that somehow got mixed in with the food scraps. There was also an effort to grow potatoes and nasturiums, which showed some promise. A botanist, by the way, will watch a movie like Young Frankenstein and come away wondering what Gene Wilder meant when he said "Never be nasty to nasturiums." Was he speaking metaphorically, or was it just something that needed to be said?

A larger corral, six feet wide and called the OK Leaf Corral, yielded five big tubs of compost ready for incorporation into the garden beds.

Here's a closeup of the compost, soft and spongy, dark and rich. Ah, the rewards of all that non-labor and non-burning of fossil fuels.

A neighbor who tried this leaf corral approach said his leaves didn't decompose, which probably meant they were dry. I, too, noticed in midsummer some pockets of undecomposed leaves in the piles, and came up with a novel approach to improving decomposition without having to turn the pile. This root feeder, normally used for fertilizing trees, can inject water into the leaf pile while also making channels for rainwater to penetrate. A few minutes of poking around was all it took to get the interior of the pile moist, and enable the decomposition of the red oak leaves by end of summer. Moisture, along with all the decomposing fungi, bacteria and insects, also enter from the ground beneath the pile.

Here's the prettiest leaf corral, which you'll have to take my word for because it's completely disguised by a dogwood tree. In other words, leaf corrals can blend into the yard, disguised by foliage while they quietly work their decomposing magic. A nice surprise last fall and winter was how the leaves would quickly settle in the corrals, after just a few days, allowing more leaves to be added as the trees slowly let them go. A leaf corral performs, then, as a bottomless receptacle for leaves.

In its simplest form, a leaf corral is made of green wire fencing, 3-4 feet high, with a couple stakes to hold it in place. Some folks in town have asked me to make leaf corrals for them, which I'm happy to do at cost, along with a donation to our Friends of Herrontown Woods.