PHS Ecolab Gets Some Timely Help

Thanks to Bay Daily of Cranbury for some timely help with steering growth at Princeton High School's ecolab wetland. To finish his freshman year in horticulturist Paula Jakowlew's class, Bay chose a hands-on project, which meant wading into the high school's thriving wetland hidden between the arts and sciences wings of the school on Walnut Street.

His interest got me--one of the founders of this ecolab planting--in there as well, to supervise and do work that had long been needed to keep the wetland's 35 native plant species growing in harmony. You could call him a steward, or a weed warrior, but I like the term "plant keeper", because we're helping the plants to keep on keepin' on. Plants don't actively call out for attention. Most people see only an undifferentiated mass of green, and assume everything must be fine. A plantkeeper looks more closely, and takes action to encourage the good trends and discourage the bad, ultimately sustaining an aesthetic and ecological balance.

The first task, oddly enough, was to cut back the plant species most associated with wetlands: cattails. The ecolab has two kinds: broadleaf and narrowleaf. I planted the narrowleaf cattail in a shady corner years ago, where it remained well-behaved until some of it got established where there was lots of sun. With all that extra energy to drive its growth, this species that I had thought to be docile began to run rampant over other native species--sedges, rushes, and wildflowers like the hibiscus in this photo.

The cattail expands its domain via rhizomes that send up new stems as they spread underground. Much of the work we do to maintain a balance of native species involves cutting back the aggressors that have rhizomes. Cattails, and the floodplain versions of sunflower and goldenrod, live in highly competitive environments in the wild, where their aggressiveness is necessary for survival. Put them in the tamer environs of a manmade wetland and they will take over if not held in check.

This is the trap we gardeners fall into over and over. A new garden has lots of space to fill, so one puts in plants that will spread to cover the bare ground, only to later regret their aggressive behavior. Many homeowners have experienced this with nonnative plants like english ivy, myrtle, or bamboo, but the same imbalance can happen in an all-native garden.

In two after-school sessions, we cut down hundreds of cattail stems to weaken the roots and provide sunlight to other species. One interesting notion is that American Indians took advantage of the cattail's aggressiveness by harvesting it for food. Many parts of the plant are edible, and steady harvest would have curbed the cattail's tendency to take over.

Then there was some trimming back of the opulence to keep sidewalks clear. One of the great things about this wetland is that there's an elevated walkway all around it, allowing people to look down at this watery world of wildflowers, crayfish and frogs.

The other nice aspect of the planting is its isolation, so that problematic species that would tend to throw things out of balance can be prevented from becoming established. A single native Virginia creeper vine growing up the wall got this preventative treatment.

We came upon what's likely a nonnative species--pond water starwort, which will slowly blanket the wet areas unless it's removed next winter.

Here's a closeup of this plant, which looks like the native duckweed but has a stem.

Above ground, there's a similar blanketing threat. Though bindweed, a nonnative morning glory vine, has been less of a problem than I would have predicted, it still needs to be discouraged to keep it from growing over everything.

Bay and I found time to appreciate and weed around some of the plants that are staying where they were planted. Retiring science teacher Tim Anderson planted this Atlantic white cedar donated by a Princeton resident, Bill Sachs.

A snail, apparently with a hitchhiker in tow, navigated the hairy leaves of boneset.

A cup-plant and a persimmon are flourishing along the wetland's edge, on higher ground but still able to tap into the water just below the surface.

A few swamp milkweeds have persisted, hopefully to feed monarch butterfly caterpillars later in the summer.

The cattail has a soft inner core whose edibility I was confident enough of to try some. Not bad.

A glance down at the water shows that it's a good year for elderberry blossoms.

And making it all possible, the high school's sump pump, which so fortuitously spills its year-round beneficence into this improbable wetland.

It was great working with Bay to keep this wetland keepin' on.

Debut of "Turf Therapy"

Our Climate Cabaret troupe will be debuting a new piece at our June 18 performance this Saturday at the Labyrinth Bookstore. The performance is at 3pm on the lower level, and is free. We'll be portraying various characters, animating the inanimate, and reanimating the animate. There's a car and its driver, a climate cowboy who will try to sell you on his OK Leaf Corral, a Captain and Crew on the space station orbiting earth, and then there's a turf therapist and his patient, the lawn.

I'll be the lawn, and I have to say that I am honored and humbled to serve as spokesman, or, if I can get the wig to fit, a spokeswoman, for all those super neat, really messed up lawns out there that live empty but opulently indolent and drug-addicted lives as basically kept women for their respective Houses. Finally, we'll find out what lawns have been feeling all this time.

If you want to get the full whammy, my band, the Sustainable Jazz Ensemble, will be performing the evening before, this Friday, June 17, from 7-9 on Hinds Plaza next to the Princeton Public Library.

Below is an early, unisex rendering of me as a lawn, concerned about some leaves that are marring my beautiful green expanse.

Central Park in Spring

Central Park back in April, where a glorious nature is framed by a Manhattan skyline, like a verdant postage stamp in the Forever series, 50 blocks long and 3 long blocks wide.

The land's mix of rock outcroppings and swamps, a desire to emulate parks in European countries, and a healthy dose of 20/20 foresight (short history here) all played a role in sparing this ground from economic imperatives, a place where nature can have its day, every day.

Central Park is ringed by museums of art and history, but Central Park's history is of the living sort, etched in infinite varieties of green and blue, enduring but ever changing, bottomless in its imagination, needing no roof other than the sky.

Spring migratory birds, shuttling like ambassadors between earth and sky, continent and continent, drew a crowd of admirers welcoming their return, cheering their journey, as if the birds were sailers just off the ship.

The warblers gobbled down proteins and energizing fat in the form of insects nourished by a patron oak's foliage,

while a raccoon's interest in the tree was more structural. Indifferent to our earthbound attention, it snoozed through the day in its high rise apartment (no elevator but rent controlled) in the crotch of the tree.

I could count on one hand, well, maybe two, my visits to Central Park, and yet it strikes deep chords within. Buildings are usually framed by nature, but in Central Park, its the buildings that do the framing. Get to know plants on a first name basis, and they will become like old friends you run into wherever you go. Central Park is like seeing an old friend all dressed up in a suit for the first time.

The habitat restoration being done along the trails of the Ramble are not yet Shakespearian in depth--Shakespearian here defined as the more you look, the more you see. But the restoration of expanses of native wildflowers, grasses, sedges and ferns on the forest floor is sufficient to trigger memories of the rich understory many eastern forests had just a few decades ago. Though ringed by concrete and highrise buildings, Central Park has in some ways a better chance to be natural than more rural areas thrown out of ecological balance by intense browsing pressure and unfettered invasive species.

I know of only one bluebell growing in Princeton's preserved open spaces. Central Park has many, protected from their primary threat, straying pedestrians.

A cool-season grass, presumably native, is being used on slopes for erosion control.

One reason why prospects are good for native plant restoration in Central Park is the vast pool of potential volunteers to draw on, given the auspicious ratio of NY's residents per acre of greenspace.

Not that one needs any additional evidence of the shear scale of human numbers in NY, but the Run-As-One fundraiser that day in Central Park drew 8000 participants, royally served by a row of Royal Flushes extending as far as the eye could see, that might rival some nearby buildings if stacked one upon another. Might this be an irreverent artist's vision of infinity?

How does one capture the scale of the operation, all of which must be periodically latched to stretched out trailers and hauled away for a bit of refreshing? Clearly, I digress, but then again, how many nature posts are thoughtful enough to provide a bathroom break midway through?

Segueing smoothly back into nature, here, a Fothergilla ornamenting some snazzy bins.

Park volunteers were spending a beautiful spring afternoon immersed in their own sort of marathon, pulling weeds, including the lesser celandine, that pretty but very rapidly spreading plant that had a post devoted to it earlier this spring.

The leader explained that herbicide use is not allowed in the park, so they're having to pull each lesser celandine individually. They showed me the tuberous roots. Pretty slow going, but fortunately, there isn't much of it in the park.

A few places in the park benefit from a thoughtful lack of intervention. These spent daffodils are being left unmowed so the post-bloom leaves have a chance to feed their roots for the next year.

There was some conspicuous smooching between a tree and boulder, familiar to anyone hiking the Sourlands or the Princeton Ridge. Nature has always thrived on an intimate relationship between the animate and the inanimate.

A gentle breeze propelled sailboats and memories of daysailer days.

Princeton has a couple of these Carolina bells (Halesia), one on Snowden, one on South Harrison. Strangely, almost no dogwoods were to be found in Central Park.

A frame within a frame, as nature, framed by the city, frames a sculpted shelter.

A grove of elm trees brings back memories of what American streets used to look like before Dutch elm disease swept through.

Leaving the park, we found Teddy Roosevelt in good company at the entryway to the Natural History Museum. Might he offer them horses as well? Looks like they're all trying to get back to the nature in Central Park.

Just inside the Natural History Museum, there appeared to be an allegorical confrontation between Truth and Towering Ignorance. Might Congress's high dome be accommodating something similar? Nice to see that T-rexian Truth had a nice set of choppers, though it wasn't clear who was going to win.

Bamboo at the Battlefield--Year 2

Whatever purpose this bamboo patch at Princeton Battlefield was originally supposed to serve--screening?, poles?, bamboo shoots?--its expansionist tendencies have led to ongoing attempts to eliminate it. Last year marked a turning point in the battle to prevent the giant clone from blocking the old trail between Clark House and the Stony Brook Meeting House. Because of strategic interventions in both spring and early summer by the Battlefield friends, all that remained this spring of the mighty stand were low, grassy clumps of bamboo leaves huddled near the ground. However, as expected, the root system still had enough energy to launch a new generation of strong vertical shoots this year, aspiring to regain its lost ground and resume its expansion into the trail and the area where a barn once stood.

Protecting these historic features of the Battlefield means returning again this June to cut down the new stems before they can start collecting solar energy. Since expansionist plants can be so daunting to counter, it's satisfying to intervene when the stems are soft and easily cut with a pair of loppers.

Just across the path, the volunteers left a big pile of porcelainberry vines cleared from a patch of ground they wish to reclaim from the "kudzu of the north".

There's a native plant mixed in. Beneath the grape-like leaves of the porcelainberry is a sea of the lighter green leaves of jewelweed, whose tubular orange flowers attract hummingbirds.

Acting to Define an Arboreal Future

When it comes to trees in Princeton, there's often a frontyard/backyard dichotomy, exemplified by this yard, across from Potts Park. A corner lot, its quartet of mature pin oaks extend their limbs well out over the pavement, providing shade even though they're on the north side of the street. The combination of their encompassing shade and their transpiration keep the house and street much cooler in the summer, and oaks support a broad diversity of insect species. While many pin and red oaks are losing a battle with bacterial leaf scorch, these appear healthy, perhaps due in part to not being constricted by a sidewalk.

The planting of those four trees, perhaps 60 years ago, was an intentional act, based on the premise that the future would come, and is worth influencing. Whoever planted them would be proud of having left such a legacy.

The back fenceline of the same property, though, tells a different story. As with so many back fencelines in Princeton, the next generation of trees is being decided not by intentional action but by default. In this case, that means Norway maples, which are adapted to grow in the shade and eventually displace the native species. The Norway maples cast a very dense shade that discourages anything from growing underneath them, and their leaves are largely inedible to insects.

Particularly in this time of political paralysis, when our future is being defined by unintended consequences, it can be satisfying to actively manage a yard's arboreal future. If homeowners lack the time or knowledge to act on their own, maybe there should be another class of arborists, armed not with chainsaws and cranes but loppers and handsaws, called in to intervene not when trees are large and failing, but when the next generation is just beginning to take shape along the fenceline.

The Leaning Tower of Pizza Crusts

What could cast a shadow like this on the front sidewalk, on the other side of the year from Halloween?

A Wishing (The Earth) Well, of course--encouraging passersby to drop a leaf in and make a wish. It's placed prominently in the front yard not because I think it's so beautiful, but because it's time for solutions to be made as visible as the problems they're meant to solve. Princeton spends an estimated $800,000 per year picking up piles of leaves and brush, some of which lingered on the street for two months this spring, like scabs on wounds that refuse to heal. People imitate what their neighbors do, so the highly visible leaf piles proliferate, with no regard for the town's complicated pickup schedule, making a nearly year-round street mess and increasing municipal expenses. It's nice to think all the collected leaves and brush are nicely composted at the Ecological Center out Princeton Pike, but the operation is energy-intensive and loses money. The less material that has to go there, the better.

Meanwhile, a big part of the solution--piling leaves not on the street but in a corner of the backyard to complete nature's cycling of nutrients back into the soil--is hidden from view and therefore not imitated by neighbors. Besides, it's fun to do something a little different with the front yard to break up the suburban monotony. It will be interesting to see if the nasturtiums, planted in a mix of soil and leaves on top of the leaf pile, find sustenance in last fall's rotting leaves and grow to make a flattering curtain of green and orange over the sides of the corral.

This leaf corral design includes a central cylinder for kitchen scraps, capped with a stray hubcap that washed up on the shores of Harrison Street one day. The leaves and foodscraps decompose aerobically, so there's no odor, and no need to turn the pile. Recently the foodscrap cylinder began to lean a bit. "Some settling of contents will occur." Hard to know whether to push the cylinder back upright or promote it as a tourist attraction: the Leaning Tower of Pizza Crusts.

The Bees in Your Backyard--A talk by Olivia Carril

Interesting talk at the Princeton Public Library on bees, by Olivia Carril, co-author of a new book on North American bees called "The Bees in Your Backyard". Most engaging was her clear passion for the subject, which is expansive, given the 4000 species of bees in this part of the world. Each species has its own story, its own special approach to living a bee's life, and new ones are being discovered all the time. Just in the process of doing her doctoral work in Utah, she found 46 new species, and a new species of bee was recently verified in Central Park.

She began with speculation about how bees came into being back in the days of dinosaurs, when primitive magnolia flowers served as the stage where early predatory wasps could evolve into bees that used nectar and pollen for food. Making the transition easier was the similar nutrients content of insects and pollen.

Along with explanations of how to distinguish bees from other insects and from each other, she gave some insights into the myriad lifestyles bees have evolved: where various bees sleep through the night, and the underground preparations for spring.

I asked about how the presence or absence of various species of bees could affect habitat restoration efforts. She said that the first bee species to be lost when habitat is disturbed are the ground-nesting bees and those that are highly specialized and therefore specific about which flowers they pollinate. The specialist pollinators are highly vulnerable when the particular native plant species they've adapted to utilize are lost. Plant species reintroduced to an area after a long absence, and whose specialized pollinators have long since disappeared, will likely still get pollinated, she said, by generalists--bees that pollinate a great variety of flowers.

When asked about what to plant to accommodate the needs of bees, she listed three of the best plant families for attracting bees: sunflower (Composite), mint and pea families. I mentioned the phenomenal insect community (50+ species of insects and spiders) that comes together on our disks of boneset flowers each August, and a woman suggested that narrow-leaved mountain mint, a local wildflower found in meadows, also draws a very diverse insect crowd. Many posts having to do with boneset can be found on this website by typing the word boneset into the search box. Here's an example of the diversity to be found if one looks closely.

Some other notes:

• More bee diversity in dry climates, due to there being fewer fungi to prey on the bees. Southeast U.S., which has a hot, humid climate, has relatively low numbers of bee species.
• Carpenter bees use the same galleries year after year, enlarging them each time
• Bumble bees prefer abandoned rodent holes for building their nests
• Miner bees dig "gopher" holes in the ground. Most of their lives is spent underground. 
• Cuckoo bees parasitize miner bees, using a strategy similar to that of cowbirds. 
• Bee wolves paralyze bees and take them back to their nests for food

Master Gardeners of Mercer County are hosting a June 18 event on bees. 

Chickens Star at Littlebrook Science Day

Our four chickens emerged from the box yesterday morning with the realization that they weren't in the backyard anymore. This was new territory, the courtyard of Littlebrook Elementary, and they were about to bring the joys of their charismatic chickenhood to a steady stream of 5-12 year olds as part of Science Day. Each year, Littlebrook has parents and others in the community come on Science Day to share their scientific knowledge with the students in 20 minute bursts at stations located all over the school.

On a day graced by gorgeous weather, the kids came to the courtyard to hear the story of how my daughter, a Littlebrook grad years back, had come home one day from middle school wanting to get chickens. Her parents were not exactly thrilled with the idea. My one experience with caring for birds had been an ill-fated attempt, as a kid, to save an injured robin. I had concluded that birds were mysterious creatures whose needs I could never understand nor provide for other than through restoring habitat. My daughter persisted, however, and we finally made a springtime trip out to Rosedale Mills to buy two-week old Araucana chicks.

After graduating from bathtub to backyard and quickly growing to adulthood, they started laying eggs in the fall. Over the ensuing four years, the chickens have proven to be wonderful, healthy, resourceful, even soulful "pets-with-benefits", requiring little more than food, water, and a homemade coop to provide shelter at night. This year, they and the resident duck have been discovered by neighborhood kids, who peer at them through the fence from little Potts Park on Tee-Ar Street just behind our house. The trip to Littlebrook was their first road gig.

After the kids had spent some time following the chickens around the courtyard, we regathered at the table to look at the unusual colors of the Araucana's "Easter Eggs", and see how one can roughly tell the age of an egg. If it drops to the bottom of a pan of water and lays flat, it's fresh. If it stand upright, with one end lighter than the other, then it's been around for awhile. Liquid slowly escapes through the shell over time, to be replaced by air that makes the egg more buoyant. The older eggs are good for hard-boiling, since the air inside makes them easier to peel.

Occasional breaks offered some time to botanize in the well-kept courtyard, which is used for art classes and growing food and native plants. One special native is the native strawberry bush (Euonymus americana), which is so loved by deer it can only grow large and full like this in protected yards in town.

Like the nonnative winged Euonymus, which the deer don't much like and so out-competes the natives in our preserves, the native has barely noticeable flowers. The "strawberries" come later, in the form of bright red, ornamental seeds that give the native shrub the name "hearts a' bustin'". At some point, when nature's checks and balances are restored and our forests come back into more ecological balance, the native Euonymus will thrive once again in our woodlands. Until then, backyards and school courtyards make a fine refuge.

There was considerable uncertainty as to how we'd get the chickens back into the box at the end of the day. When the last class departed, some chicken chasing ensued. One proved very hard to catch, as it would dart away and flap its wings at the very instant we tried to wrap our hands around it. Students watched from their classrooms, highly amused as three of us chased the chicken around the courtyard, clearly outmatched by this speedy descendant of dinosaurs. Good thing that I had planted this patch of raspberries years back as a Littlebrook parent volunteer. We managed to corral the chicken in the raspberry patch, where the foliage was dense enough that the chicken could not see my hands descending from above.

Have to say how good it felt to be back at Littlebrook, where principal Annie Kosek has cultivated over the years a wonderful staff and spirit of learning. Martha Friend, whose depth of caring extends beyond the school and into the community, teaches science, and Jenny Ludmer and all the other Science Day organizers had everything running smoothly. Thanks to Jenny's son, who has chickens at home, for providing critical assistance with the end of the day roundup.

Those Tiny Household Ants

An exterminator stopped by a friend's house while I was there, and identified the tiny ants that occasionally show up in the kitchen and elsewhere as "odorous house ants". He had a couple syringes with gel, applied some in an out of the way place along the ants' pathway, and quickly departed.

Two years ago, the ants were so numerous in our house that we thought they'd soon take over the whole world. Last year, there were few, requiring little or no action.

A couple previous posts describe the options. After trying borax-based products, we settled on a gel endearingly called Combat Source Kill Max, available at the local hardware store. Only tiny amounts are needed, placed along the path of the ants. They seem to gobble it all up, leaving no residual. Haven't needed to use it this year as yet. Maybe the ants have grown content with the great outdoors.