A Tipi Sprouts in Princeton

Where are we? Camping in our tipi under a giant cottonwood next to the Little Bighorn River in Montana?

The tree's big enough to date back to when American Indians still roamed freely across the Great Plains, but it's a tulip poplar--an eastern species--and that skyline behind it is not exactly the Rocky Mountains. We're actually on Princeton University campus during November, which President George H.W. Bush in 1990 proclaimed to be National American Indian Heritage Month, also known as Native American Heritage Month (I notice that the museum in Washington, DC is called the National Museum of the American Indian, so am going with that terminology).

In recognition thereof, according to a facebook page dedicated to the event, two members of the Apsaalooke tribe of Montana raised the tipi earlier in the month, with help from a grounds crew and students. The event included a talk "about the significance of the tipi to the Plains Indian and how it is used in a modern context.", as well as "the Native significance of Prospect House and the University in general." The event was co-sponsored by the Natives at Princeton and the Carl A. Field Center.

A tipi is one of my all-time favorite structures in the world, elegant in look and function, portable but comfortable enough for long stays. I built one once out of three old tents and some young trees stripped of their bark, while working at Camp Innisfree overlooking Lake Michigan in the 1970s. You see those poles that angle up along the outside? Those control the flaps for the hole at the top, where the smoke escapes. The flaps can be adjusted for wind direction, and closed if it starts to rain.

A tipi marries the indoors and the outdoors, a protective enclosure with the romance of a campfire and a view of the stars. Anyone who has sat around a campfire knows that the wind can continuously shift, making the smoke hard to avoid. But there's no wind inside a tipi, so the fire built in the middle of it can be better enjoyed. At night, seen from the outside, a tipi with a fire inside glows like a chinese lantern, casting shadows of the occupants on the walls, like shadow puppets.

The circle of poles rising above a tipi appears allied to the trees nearby, in this case a gingko tree in full autumn color.

I suspect that tipis began as a bunch of poles leaned against a tree, like you see kids make in the woods. Then, with the bison of the great, treeless plains beckoning, someone figured out that the tree wasn't necessary if all the poles are set just right.

There is so much that is fortuitous about a tipi's design. When I lived in one, first in Michigan and then briefly near Black Duck, Minnesota, I would be lying in my sleeping bag, gazing up at this wonderful confluence, and the sky beyond. What better way to represent the closely knit community of tribal living, with each person an individual and yet tightly linked, playing a vital role in something larger than oneself. Take one pole away, and the structure begins to weaken.

The tipi on campus has a basic frame composed of four poles tied firmly together with rope, which I recalled from my 1970s tipi book means it's of Crow origin. The design for my tipi had a three pole frame--a Sioux design. Turns out that "Crow" is an outdated term for Apsáalooke.

So the four pole core is raised and set in place, and then all but one of the individual poles are added, like the ribs of a whale, making this matrix. The long rope that tied the first four poles together is then wrapped around the poles, to hold them tightly together.

The fabric is tied to the last and largest pole, and that pole is then raised up and set in place on the backside of the tipi. (the pole at the top in this photo)

Then the fabric is wrapped around the framework and tied in front, not unlike clothing that buttons up in front. Is a tipi symbolic of a tree, or a tribe, or a person, or all three?

I like this view of the giant tulip poplar out the front door,

though a SUV or pickup truck might be a more common site now, wherever tipis are used. Notice that the fabric is stretched into place with stakes. When I first made a tipi, I didn't bother with putting many stakes in. Then I was sleeping in it one night and a big storm blew in across our bluff overlooking Lake Michigan. I was lying there all cozy, as the winds howled and the rain pelted down, congratulating myself on how dry the tipi was keeping me even in such a phenomenal downpour, when a big, blustery gust came and ripped my paltry staking out of the ground. The tipi pivoted, the back poles flew up and over my head, and my protective enclosure vanished from above me in an instant, as if setting sail in the darkness. One moment, comfortable and dry, the next, completely exposed and drenched to the bone.

I made haste to the farmhouse nearby, and sat in the living room for awhile, not sure what to do at 3 in the morning. A book lay on the table, which turned out to be the story of the Cherokee's forced march from their beloved Carolina to a bleak exile in Oklahoma. I learned of the Trail of Tears as water dripped from my hair, my own forced eviction adding an extra layer of meaning to a sad chapter in American history.

My tipi survived its short flight in the night, to rise again the next day, with better staking. And it's good to see this most elegant and practical design-for-the-ages grace the Princeton campus, even if only for a month.

The Plainsboro Preserve is Anything But Plain

(This is an elaboration of a previous post.) A trip to the Audubon Society's Plainsboro Preserve this fall turned a number of notions on their heads. Plain became rich. Far became near. Small became large, and down became up. Reattach the "s" to "plain", and you get "plains", as in fruited plains, and a better sense of how Plainsboro got its name. For those of us who seldom venture beyond Princeton's bubble, it's a surprise to learn that New Jersey's inner coastal plain begins just across Route 1 from the hilly last hurrah of Princeton's piedmont. And with that geologic transition comes a floristic transition I had mistakenly thought would begin much farther south, not within the fifteen minutes it takes to pull into the Plainsboro Preserve's parking lot.

Witness fall colors like these, reflected in an improbably large lake, and any lingering notions of "plain" as in plainness quickly dissipate.

My intrepid guide for this journey of discovery was James Degnen, who has been visiting the preserve for years and has informally adopted a lesser known trail around the lake's eastern side. The trail fades at times, but it's impossible to get lost if one keeps the lake close on one's left.

The first surprise came with a glance down at the ground. Sand and gravel--strange to find so close to Princeton's clay.

He showed me a series of sandy beaches (a sandy beach in inland NJ?), which would be an inviting place to swim, if not

for the sheer dropoff just a few feet out. The quarry operation, now long gone, cut some 60 feet down into the sandy plains.

Though those little bluestem grasses in the photo can be found growing in Princeton,

this bushy bluestem cannot. Also known as Andropogon glomeratus, it's a resident of coastal plains and can be distinguished by its swollen plume on top.

Nor does Princeton host a field like this, radiant with blueberry bushes. Why haven't the trees shaded these blueberries out long ago?

Credit or blame goes to the beavers, whose habitat work is evident everywhere along the edges of the lake.

We may love sweetgum trees for their fall color,

but the beavers love them for their inner bark laden with sweet gum. Their preference is so strong, and the sweetgums so numerous, that we saw no other species of tree being touched by the beavers.

Some sweetgums they leave standing, to cling to life with only small strands of intact bark to maintain flow between root and canopy. One could say this is detrimental, but by sabotaging the normal progression to mature forest, the beavers are maintaining a younger landscape of shrubs and forbs that is every bit as important and beautiful a habitat.

At water's edge, the green of alder mixed with the yellow of summersweet (Clethra) and the sweetgum's bright red.

We found a few freshwater clams, or at least the remains, whose identity might be found in the master plan recently completed for the preserve.

In the gravel near the shore, the impressions left from fish nesting in the spring are still evident.

And what's this glistening white along the shore? Feathers, of geese, of which skilled bird counters counted 25,000 one evening a year or two ago. Through the winter, they use the lake as an overnight refuge after foraging all day in corporate landscapes that dot the NJ landscape.

Two winters ago, when an extended cold snap froze most open water to the north, 2000 snow geese took up brief residence on the lake, an awe inspiring sight, with their brilliant white against the dark background of winter woods.

On our visit, only four Canada geese gave the slightest hint of such abundance.

Plainsboro Preserve is a study in contrasts, between thick woods and open field, and most of all between areas that have been radically altered and those that have not. We walked through mounded landscapes, where dirt was piled up, back in quarry days. Some might point to the trees as evidence that the disturbed areas are now mended, but the area remains stripped of its plant diversity, with little more than Japanese stiltgrass to populate the ground.

In low ground, made passable by dry weather, tussock sedges build their pedestals,

remnant cables sprout and big steel boxes once used as anchors now anchor themselves as permanent mementos of a bygone era.

One anchor actually looks like an anchor, now being slowly grown over and around by a tree.

In contrast to the radically altered areas, a beautiful glade on the far side of the lake sprouted wildflowers rather than cables, and the same lichen that grows an hour south in the pine barrens.

Add to these the summersweet, blueberries, bushy bluestem, the sandy soil, and this field of switch grass, and you have a pine barren in miniature, albeit without the pines, just fifteen minutes from Princeton.

Further around the lake is the outlet, where pipes have been added over time to deal with the overflow from ever larger storms. It's interesting to check out google maps, and learn that the water that leaves this lake in Plainsboro Preserve travels westward, ultimately draining into Lake Carnegie. In this way, Plainsboro is connected hydrologically to Princeton, even though it's closer to the ocean and in a different geologic zone. The Princeton Environmental Resource Inventory , a book I helped to write, provides some useful related info on p. 17.

One sight that rankled a bit, after a glorious walk most of the way around the lake, was Chinese bushclover, which lines the trail on the west side of the lake. Its small seeds are said to be indigestible by wildlife, so the plant's aggressive displacement of native species creates a largely inedible landscape. A big, big problem in North Carolina, where it has escaped from erosion control plantings, it's becoming more numerous in NJ.

There was some evidence that land managers are taking a cue from the beavers and cutting down invasive shrubs like autumn olive.

This plant looked really familiar, seen decades ago in the northeast.

This is where most people walk--a wide path leading back to the visitors' center,

where a row of bee hives

begets rows of honey.

Always nice to have informative signage,

and a good harvest of color in the mind, to last us through winter.

Check out the programming, like monthly moonlit walks, on their website.

The Not So Scary Leaf Pile

For some reason, a pile of leaves can trigger fear in people. There are all sorts of scary rumors about what happens when you make a pile of leaves. Might the leaves attract rats, or catch fire from the heat of decomposition, or cut off oxygen and water to the ground underneath and thereby harm nearby trees? My experience provides these answers: no, no, and no. Then there are scary stories about what a leaf pile won't do. My radio alarm woke me up one weekend morning to a segment of You Bet Your Garden, the entertaining and informative gardening program out of Philadelphia. There was our normally spot-on Mike McGrath warning listeners that a pile of unshredded leaves will not decompose nor reduce in size. Come on, Mike. Just because shredded leaves are a handy item in the yard doesn't mean whole leaves are not.

Still, a scientific background will train your mind not to take any knowledge fully for granted, so I decided to put whole leaves to the test. This past spring, I "corralled" some wet, red oak leaves left over from winter in a circular corral made of green garden fencing. By early August, the pile was 2/3rds its original size.

By October, they had settled to a third the original bulk, and it was time to check inside the pile to see what sort of decomposition had taken place, and also to check what the soil and tree roots looked like underneath the pile.

On the outside, the leaves didn't appear to have decomposed, but that proved to be just a facade disguising the transformation the pile had undergone inside. Peeling away the outer layer of leaves revealed a core of rich, moist compost--enough to fill a large plant pot.

A three foot diameter leaf corral produced twenty pounds of compost, without any effort expended beyond tossing the original filling of the leaf corral this past spring. I may have tossed a shovel full of dirt on the leaves, to "seed" the pile with the micro flora and fauna that do the decomposing, but those would have migrated upward from underneath the pile anyway. There was no mixing of the leaves--the pile did all the transformative work on its own.

And did the pile of leaves, originally three feet high, cut off water and air to the soil underneath? The soil underneath the pile was moist and thick with tree roots. The leaf pile was not killing trees but instead feeding them. Just as the decompositional flora and fauna migrate upward into the pile from the soil underneath, groundwater will "wick" upwards in the soil to keep the underside of a leaf pile moist.

Red oak leaves are some of the more decay-resistant leaves homeowners encounter, and yet they broke down in an untended pile in less than a year. It may have helped that they were wet when they were made into a pile, so the next experiment may be to fill a leaf corral with dry leaves, and see what happens. Hypothesis: Rain, snow, and soil moisture will seep into the pile from above and below, and the pile will decompose in a way that is beneficial to all living things around it.

A leaf pile like this is about as sustainable as you can get. Instead of piling leaves in the street, where they must then be trucked to a composting site, ground, mixed in windrows, turned, screened, re-piled, then carted back into town, with fossil fuel burned for every step, make a pile in your own yard and let nature do all the work. And to model good behavior for your neighbors, integrate a leaf corral into your front yard landscaping rather than hide it in the back.

Make use of the resulting compost, or leave it all for the trees to feast on, so that the leaf corral becomes a bottomless channel for transitioning leaves back into soil. If enough people do this, government expense will go down, and the quality and permeability of urban soils will go up.

A Chicken's First Egg!

We've been without egg production in our backyard for awhile. Daisy the duck, who had laid one egg daily like clockwork for several years, suddenly stopped some months ago. And Buffy, the white Aracana on the left, also decided her egg laying days were done. The three new Aracanas, bought as chicks from Rosedale Mills in the spring, were keeping us in suspense as to whether they'd start laying before winter comes. For the first time in years, I found myself in the grocery store facing shelves stacked high with eggs, trying to make sense of all the cagefree, natural, hormone-free, organic, brown or white, plastic or paper possibilities.

But over the weekend I did a full cleaning and rearrangement of their coop, and changed up the yard a bit, installing my own design of a leaf-corral/food-scrap-composter in a few spots. (More on these nifty devices in a future post.)

Maybe one of the birds took the changes as a cue. Or maybe there's some magic in the date, 11/11--that being the number I see on digital clocks far more often than chance would suggest likely--because the first egg in months appeared in a back corner of the coop this morning.

Now the question is which chicken laid the egg, and will the other two follow suit, ushering in a new era of fresh eggs from the backyard.

Who Put the Honey in Honey Locust?

A quick tidbit here about the pods that fall from honey locust trees around town. There's a honey locust near the old gas station at the Princeton Shopping Center, and another at the entry to the Princeton Healthcare Center just up Harrison Street. Each produces lots of pods that fall and sit on the ground uneaten.

The tree's scientific name, Gleditsia triacanthos, has always jumped immediately to mind since field botany days. Maybe sweetness helps the memory, a sweetness that can be found in the inner lining of the pod. I finally tried it this fall, and found it tasted very strongly of something very familiar, but I couldn't say what. Some flavor of bubble gum? My younger daughter tried it and supplied the answer.

Dried mango.

Of course, do your research and make a positive identification before you try eating anything out there, and there's not a whole lot of it when you break open the pod, but it's fun to think there's a taste treat akin to dried mango going begging in well-traveled spots all over Princeton.

Update, Nov. 9: I forgot to answer the question posed in the title. The answer as to why something sweet is not being eaten, by wildlife or people, is the same as when I posted about the honey locust's seemingly useless thorns two years ago, and is most finely stated in this succinct article: The Trees That Miss the Mammoths. The article will be transformative for many, and comes with a warning:

Warning: Reading this article may cause a whiplash-inducing paradigm shift. You will no longer view wild areas the same way. Your concepts of “pristine wilderness” and “the balance of nature” will be forever compromised. You may even start to see ghosts.

The article bases its view in part on the research of Dan Janzen, whose course on ecology I took back in the '70s. Megafauna like mammoths, giant sloths and mastodons would have eaten massive amounts of vegetation, certainly creating much more open habitats than we have currently. Rereading the article, the thought occurs that the American Indians', who certainly helped bring about the extinction of America's megafauna, may have learned to do frequent burnings of the landscape in part to sustain the more open habitats that would otherwise have been lost after megafauna disappeared.

Thus, in a scattering of seed pods across a groomed piece of turf, can be seen the challenge of defining what is natural as the pieces of the earth's great ecological puzzle continue to be lost.