Saturday, November 28, 2020

The Second Forest of Institute Woods


In the Institute Woods, towards the end of the day, towards the end of autumn, it's not just the trees that cast long shadows. In the understory, a shadow forest grows, composed mostly of nonnative shrubs--winged euonymus, linden viburnum, asian photinia, shrub honeysuckle, multiflora rose and privet. Having evolved on a different continent in a different climate, they hold their leaves long after most of the native woodies have dropped theirs. Dominating the understory, these shrubs and vines constitute a second forest that serves up a second autumn, shedding their conformist green to show late-season reds and golds. 

There are second forests all around Princeton and beyond. The light green close to the ground in this photo is honeysuckle shrubs along Terhune Rd.
Here, viewed from the Streicker Bridge over Washington Road a week or two ago, are Norway Maples pushing up into the canopy of mature native oaks, beech, and blackgum, some of which are two centuries old. 


Bamboo at the Princeton Battlefield, bordering the Institute lands, offers another variation on the theme.

The different colors of the second forest provide a convenient code for easy long-distance identification. The pink here, down near the Friends Meeting House entrance to Institute Woods, means you're looking at winged euonymus. If it were growing in full sun, the color would be a vivid red, from which comes its other common name, burning bush. 
Here the pink of the winged euonymus mingles with the still green multiflora rose. 
Linden viburnum has its own distinctive fall color, 

as does Asian photinia, whose leaves tend to be broader towards the tips. It's usually more golden than this photo shows, and in Mountain Lakes and along Princeton Pike has turned whole woodlands golden this time of year. 
Mingling with the photinia here is the viny ever-green Japanese honeysuckle. 

Wineberry, with its fuzzy purple stem, is another Asian species with lingering green in late fall. 
Privet holds onto its green as well, here growing up around the tan stem of a shrub honeysuckle. 

Add global warming, which is bringing unusually warm and comfortable autumn days, and the feeling of gratitude for unseasonal warmth and color begins to  mix with a foreboding about the ecological consequences. Awareness creates an emotional undertow pulling against the uplifting effect of weather and color. The second forest flourishes in part because it is inedible to wildlife, which prefer and depend upon native species for food. The colors that greet our eyes this time of year signal a diminishing edibility for the forest's inhabitants. 



Four plaques tell the story of how the Institute Lands were saved from development in 1997, a half century after they were acquired. Though a couple key elements are left out--the Lenape Indians and Oswald Veblen--it is an extraordinary story, listing the major donors, 
the Taplins who led the way,
the coordination of governmental, institutional, and nonprofit entities that in NJ has been so effective in saving land. 

You can click on each photo to hopefully make it large enough to read.


Here, on this plaque, would have been a good place to mention the Lenape Indians as early occupants and stewards. A whole additional plaque could be dedicated to telling of Oswald Veblen's role as primary instigator of acquisition. As partially told on the IAS website, and more fully told by George Dyson in a talk at DR Greenway, Veblen convinced the early Institute leadership to acquire the land, then did the legwork necessary to bring all the parcels together. Over ten years, beginning in 1936, Veblen laid the foundation for open space in Princeton, with the acquisition not only of the Institute lands but also the 100 acres on the east side of Princeton that he and his wife Elizabeth later donated as Princeton's and Mercer County's first nature preserve, Herrontown Woods.

It's interesting to look at the chronology of open space initiatives in the Princeton area. The Institute lands were acquired between 1936 and 1945. In 1949, the Stonybrook Millstone Watershed Association was formed. Around 1959 Herrontown Woods was officially opened. In 1969, the Friends of Princeton Open Space came into being. In 1989, the DR Greenway was formed. Whether there's meaning in the 20 year increments of their foundings, all three nonprofits played a role in purchasing from the IAS the conservation easement that now protects the Institute lands from development.

Preservation tends to be celebrated more than management, so it's good to see there's a plaque celebrating maintenance, at least of the trails. The leadership and persistence needed to keep the woods accessible was first provided by Veblen, then later by mathematician Paul Dirac, then still later by what appears to be lasting funding in 2008 provided by Addie and Harold Broitman.  

Though the land is preserved, and the trails continue to be kept clear, and the richness of the Institute Woods has been researched and documented by Henry Horn and others, there is still a missing element for insuring the Institute Woods' longterm health. It's not clear that the woods hold the same biological richness seen in Veblen's time, or even Henry Horn's. With habitat restoration and deer management, we might lose the colors of the second forest, but gain a second preservation, this time saving the flora and fauna not from developers but from ecological imbalance and attrition of native species over time. 

The first preservation, in 1997, prevented intentional alteration of the woods by developers. But the woods is still being altered indirectly, unintentionally, through the invasion of introduced species and the banishing of predators that once kept deer numbers in check. The second preservation takes responsibility for the unintentional changes humanity has unleashed, and requires us to be active and informed participants in the forest's ecology. Clearing the invasive species that crowd the forest, and reducing the intense browsing pressure of deer, would begin to bring back the lovely vistas and sweeps of wildflowers that surely helped inspire the community investment in saving the land more than twenty years ago. 

Friday, November 06, 2020

In a Hidden Valley, Sudden Abundance, and a White Squirrel

Some of my favorite memories in nature are of sudden abundance. Day to day, walking through a woods or stepping into the backyard, we tend to see one or two of this or that bird or flower. The dispersed, low-key nature we typically see contrasts with accounts from long ago, when endless flocks of passenger pigeons darkened the sky, and herds of bison stretched to the horizon. As a kid, I read of distant streams or lakes teaming with fish. "Where lunkers lurk just below your boat" was one memorable headline. On a few occasions I convinced my father to drive me to them, trips that repeatedly ended in disappointment. 

Serendipity, however, has served up sudden abundance a few times in my life. One fall day early on in my small Wisconsin hometown I was walking home from school when I happened to look up and saw the whole sky filled with monarch butterflies heading south for the winter. There was the small inlet we canoed into in the Quetico, where we happened to look down and saw the shallow water was thick with a school of walleye, from which we quickly caught a delicious dinner. During our time in North Carolina, there was the time when hundreds of cedar waxwings enlivened our neighborhood for a couple days with their antics. And each year in the fall, I'd hope to be around when a large flock of migratory robins, with a few scarlet tanagers mixed in, would descend upon our yard, strip the flowering dogwoods of their ripened berries in an orgy of consumption, then be gone. Even the small park behind our house here in Princeton served one evening a few years ago as a stage for sudden abundance, when winged ants began emerging from the ground, attracting hundreds of dragonflies which in turn attracted a flock of swallows, spectacular fliers all.

This summer, serendipity served up sudden abundance in the most unlikely of places: a hidden valley in Princeton Junction. One afternoon I was standing outside a strip mall with a few minutes to kill, and decided to check out the woods behind the row of businesses. In retrospect, I was just following the flow of the pavement like any self-respecting raindrop would have done, but this going with the flow was taking me away from the human mainstream into another world.

There, beyond the edge of the asphalt, the land dropped down into a woodland like no other I have ever encountered. Perhaps only a botanist would have recognized the extraordinary nature of the nature that stretched before me. Clethra as far as the eye could see. Okay, let me explain. Clethra alnifolia, summersweet, sweet pepperbush, call it what you will, is a native shrub with a fragrant flower sometimes used in landscaping. 

Now, if you're into native plants, you may start to wonder where they typically grow in the wild. Many of the more popular ones--like Clethra, or Virginia sweetspire, bottlebrush buckeye, oak-leaved hydrangia, purple coneflower--have proven rare or non-existent in the wilds I've explored over the years. This could be due to the myriad ways in which we have transformed the landscape, from development to draining to fire exclusion. Or it could be that their home habitat is remote from places I've lived. In the case of Clethra, I had never seen it in the wild save for one sorry specimen holding on next to the towpath along the banks of Lake Carnegie. 

It was a surprise, then, to step behind a pizza joint just up from the Princeton Junction train station, and find myself gazing out on a sea of Clethra, growing like a weed. 

Ostrich fern is another plant I've rarely seen in the wild, and here it too was growing in abundance, giving the woodland a tropical look. 

Returning later with a pair of rubber boots, I waded out into the mud to explore this hidden valley, several times almost losing my boots in the thick muck. 

Here are a few other sudden abundances and rarities--plant, animal, and human--that I encountered:

On the hammocks of high ground surrounded by the mucky soils, Hydrangeas were in full bloom, reaching up to 17 feet tall.

Under a canopy of black gum, red maples and oaks, there were lots of Magnolias

and highbush blueberries.


Netted chain ferns, which bear a resemblance to the much more common sensitive fern, were tucked in among the massings of ostrich ferns.

A small, bent over tree with a curious compound leaf caught my attention. It wasn't a walnut or ash or anything else I could think of. I was excited at the thought that I had discovered a very rare tree, and stumped several botanists before sending a photo to Bob Wells of Morris Arboretum. He promptly identified it as poison sumac--something I hadn't encountered since field botany days in Michigan. The ID explained the skin rash I had been dealing with since handling it.

As with the poison sumac, there was just one Styrax, which showed the remains of its pendulant flowers, and one native azalea. All of these are rarely seen in the wild.
Only towards the other side of the valley did it become clear why this habitat was so different from what can be encountered in Princeton. Most of the stormwater runoff from the strip mall is somehow channeled to the far side of the valley, where it has eroded the stream and exposed the underlying gravel and sand. Simply by crossing Route 1, I had left the piedmont clay of Princeton and entered NJ's sandy inner coastal plain. Though erosion has changed one side of the valley, the other side is fortunately bypassed by the runoff, allowing the mucky soils and hammocks to persist in something close to their pre-development state.  


I had just counted my 30th wild hydrangea blooming in the valley when I saw a man with a white beard walking down into the woods. Scampering about 30 feet ahead of him was a white squirrel. I had already encountered so many unusual plants in this valley, and now I was seeing a white squirrel for the first time in my life. 
It's distinct appearance lent magnificence to its every move, as if a spotlight were upon it. This photo is the best I could manage with my cell phone as the man continued down the slope. The white squirrel can be seen in the lower right corner. 
He didn't seem to notice me, so I called out to ask him something about the squirrel. He turned and began telling me about a white squirrel he had befriended some years back. It had been a true albino, with pink eyes, and he had trained it to come to him for food. It had gotten to the point where it would come inside. He said that he'd start opening the door for the squirrel to go in his house, and the squirrel would push it further open and come in. He said the true albinos supposedly can't see as well, and that's one reason why it might have allowed itself to be tamed. One day it disappeared, and a friend told him it had been hit by a car. 

The white squirrel I had just seen was one of the albino's offspring. Actually, he explained, they are called silver squirrels, because they have a little gray on their backs, but are otherwise white. Squirrels are really smart, I interjected, expecting him to marvel at how remarkable squirrels are, but my thoughts on their intelligence made him think instead of how you can't keep them out of a house, and how squirrels had gotten into an old neighbor's attic and nearly destroyed her house. He was clearly not one to romanticize animals.


I asked him if this hidden valley is protected, and he said they have had to fight to keep the developers out of it. They lost about 60 feet of it when the strip mall developers wanted to build off the back. Lots of trees lost. He later said there's no organization, just the neighbors who border the property. He had a t-shirt on that said "REAL MEN DON'T NEED INSTRUCTIONS". I asked to take a photo of the shirt, as an excuse to photograph him. He said yes, and pointed out the hammer on the shirt, accidentally cut in two by a table saw. His name was John.

We walked down to the stream, where he said there had been a bridge that got washed out. The bridge turned out to be a long timber, 8x8, which he lifted back into place with some effort, but still impressive for his age. He said the neighborhood is called Berrien City

I told him how amazing this valley was for a botanist like me. He said when he'd first heard about the house they bought, and heard it was in Princeton Junction, he pictured something urban. But finding this valley behind it changed his mind. He asked if I'd seen the pond, and when I said no he offered to show me. 

As we maneuvered through the woods thick with sweet pepperbush, he began telling me about his early days, living on the outskirts of Langhorne, PA. He had wanted to be off the grid back then, bought a house that hadn't been lived in for 30 years, had a hole in the roof, one bedroom, a living room and a kitchen. They had a 2 year old son. Their water came from a spring up the hill. A number of them living there dug underground pipes to direct the water to their homes. He said he was at the bottom of the line, and had 600 feet of regular garden hose that the water flowed through to get to his cisterns--one of concrete and two of stainless steel. The cisterns were always full and overflowing, and to keep the water flowing through the hose in winter he had to keep the faucet open in the kitchen. If the hoses froze, he had to gather up all 600 feet and bring them in next to his woodstove to thaw out. He heated completely with wood until their son was seven. The house had 30 amp service, and there was some sort of radiant heater he could turn on to warm the outhouse seat before he headed out there in the winter. They heated water on a stove, and bathed in a tin tub in the kitchen. They ate squirrel and raccoon. The raccoon, he said, actually tasted good. A possum they tried, though, tasted like a McDonald dumpster. He still chops wood. His son, a policeman, still heats his house with wood, even though they have a regular furnace. His son uses a woodsplitter, though. 

The subject of raccoons got him talking about how he used to pay his mortgage with roadkill. Raccoon pelts fetched $50 back in 1980, and fox $75. He'd keep them in his freezer, skinned or sometimes not, until he had enough to make a delivery. It didn't take many to come up with 300 bucks. 

John told me more stories as we stood next to the stormwater pond, in this otherworldly valley hidden behind the loading docks and clustered storefronts of a strip mall that looked like any other in America. I wished I had turned on my phone's recorder to capture his voice and more fully document his story. Much of it involved his life in the fur trade in the 1980s, driving fur traders along a circuit from NY City out to North Carolina, north to Ohio and Pennsylvania, then back to New York, sometimes with $100,000 worth of furs in the back of the truck. It sounded like an updated version of trade in the 18th century. As a line of work, it probably met its demise in the 1990s, when animal cruelty concerns came to the fore. And I doubt a mortgage could be paid off in the 21st century with roadkill. 

Heading back to my pickup afterwards, as if to bend my mind once more before emerging from the woodland, I saw another white squirrel, or perhaps the same one, racing up a tree.

Thursday, October 22, 2020

The Work Behind a Natural-looking Meadow--Smoyer Park in Princeton

Sometimes, maybe most of the time, natural takes work. This goes for both nature and human nature. Most people will look at this wet meadow, with its stand of ironweed set off by goldenrod in the distance, and think it burst spontaneously from the ground, fully formed. But that's not the case. 




There are places where native diversity happens without intervention. I've known a few, where the original hydrology is intact, and introduced species have yet to invade, and fire is allowed to sweep through periodically and beneficially, as in ancient times, and the soil still holds within it the seeds to feed all the stages of succession, from field to shrubland to forest. 

But not here in the middle of Smoyer Park, which had been a farm before it became ball fields. Plowed, regraded, planted with exotic turf grasses, this land had long since lost its native seed bank. Soil has a memory, as do we, composed of all the seeds that have fallen there and have yet to sprout. That memory is erased when plowed or bulldozed, as so much of America has been. Into the void will fall the seeds of mostly nonnative, weedy species that will lead to discouraging results for anyone who tries a romantic "just let it all grow" approach. 

Bringing back natural, then, takes work. For an analogy, think of all the parenting needed to raise a child, all the emotions that need to be understood, the impulses that need to be steered in a healthy direction, all the parts of self that can get buried and forgotten along the way. There's plenty that can go wrong during that perilous journey to adulthood, and if it does, even more intervention is needed to regain that sense of comfort within one's own skin. 

Nature has been profoundly traumatized, and yet many people somehow expect it to spring back without ongoing assistance. As with parenting, it's hard to have success in the absence of love. Most of the world's love and attention is directed somewhere other than towards nature, which explains why our suburban landscapes seldom receive more than custodial care--weekly visits of mow, blow, and go by crews indifferent to the land and its promise. 

This photo shows what the wet meadow looked like just after it was planted with native grasses and wildflowers four years ago. Many would assume that nothing more was needed to create a healthy meadow, and would have walked away thinking "mission accomplished." But as with a baby, birth is really just the beginning. I looked upon the detention basin's bare expanse, seeds planted but yet to sprout, with an eye for all that could go right and all that could go wrong. Over time, it has taken only a couple hours of attention now and then to steer the planting in the right direction, but those few strategic hours, catching problems early, has made a big difference. In a sense, the planting resides within me. It is part of my internal calendar, rising into my thoughts often enough to prompt action. 

Here is an account of the many kinds of plants that can make things go right or wrong when a detention basin is converted from exotic turfgrass to native meadow. (Click on the "read more" to continue.)

Monday, October 19, 2020

Fall is Burstin' Out All Over

After the heavy hitters of late summer are past--the Hibiscus, coneflowers, bonesets, et al--it's easy to think the season of native wildflowers is over, but this fall has been a surprise in the beauty and variety that nature held in reserve for these sweet autumn days. 

One that's been a big hit at Herrontown Woods is Hearts-a-bustin', though I prefer to call it Hearts-a-burstin', because when I see it my heart does more burstin' than bustin'. 

This native euonymus (E. americanus) would be a common shrub in the forest if not for the deer, who love to eat it, stem and all. They keep it browsed down to a couple inches high, so we had to take some of those and grow them out in cages so that visitors could see the ornamental seed capsules on the shrubs, one of which has risen to eight feet thus far. It helps, too, for the ornamental seed production, if it's growing in a clearing where the trees aren't hogging all the direct sunlight, like our Princeton Botanical Art Garden.

A little earlier in the fall when the capsules were just starting to open, you could see why it is also called strawberry bush. 


A solitary white snakeroot is growing near a Hearts-a-burstin' planted behind Veblen House. It can easily be confused with boneset and late-flowering thoroughwort. When I first moved to Princeton almost 20 years ago, white snakeroot was common in some areas, even weedy, being one of the few native wildflowers that deer didn't eat, but it seems much less common now. 


A few fall flowers in Herrontown Woods manage to bloom despite deep shade. Wood asters adorn some of the trails, 

occasionally accompanied by a wreath goldenrod.

More subtle is beechdrops, which parasitizes beech tree roots rather than producing its own nourishment through photosynthesis.

Along a busy street in a frontyard raingarden fed by runoff from the roof, blue mistflower blooms profusely for an extended period while staying low. 
New England aster also brings color to the garden late in the season.

The white of late-flowering thoroughwort makes a good foil for New England aster's rich color.


Another cloud of white late in the season comes from what I call frost aster. Because it can become too numerous, I would in the past make plans to enjoy the bloom, then cut it down and remove it before the seeds were released. But once it's bloomed, it quickly fades into the background of landscape and thought, foiling the best of intentions to control. 


Turtlehead grows quietly and unobtrusively during the summer, bending around other plants to attain its tall, skinny, awkward state of maturity. The blooms make for a top-heavy look, but this year were solidly ornamental.


Indian grass is particularly pretty when growing in a distinctive clump, rather than crowded in a field. Like many prairie grasses, it responds beautifully to the wind.
Bottlebrush grass is more of an understory grass, and unlike most native grasses it gets an early start in the spring. 


This one's called woolgrass, for its wooly appearance, but is actually a sedge, with edgy triangular stems. Unlike most native sedges that get an early start in the spring and move quickly to flower, woolgrass takes its time, gaining more height and slowly developing its inflorescence, which is ornamental at all stages, particularly when backlit. Though typically found growing on wet ground, it has been thriving through our wetter summers when planted upland as well, as here in the botanical garden at Herrontown Woods.



There are many species of native sunflower. They can make a big and very welcome show in the fall after other tall yellow wildflowers like cutleaf coneflower and cupplant have faded. A powerline right of way in the Sourlands preserve is one of the few places where they really show their stuff around here.

In North Carolina, they had names like "giant," "showy," "woodland," and a rare one called "Schweinitzii." I knew giant sunflower (Helianthus giganteus) from only one derelict patch growing along a roadside outside of town, and decided to do it and myself a favor by taking a tiny bit of the patch and planting it in my garden and in a sunny opening in a nature preserve I managed in town. As often happens, what seemed like a species on the brink in the wild turned out to be prolific and expansive in the garden. 

The sunflower in the photo, though, is sunchoke, a sunflower that has long carried the name Jerusalem artichoke. Each year, I think I'll eat its tubers, which I don't, even though they have an appealing nutty flavor when eaten raw, and can work well in a stirfry. And each spring, I attempt to pull out every last sprout, tired of its aggressive underground spread. Then in the fall, longing for summer blooms to continue, I am thankful to find that my eradication efforts have once again failed to completely stem the tide. 

These are some of the flowers that ease the transition from summer's glory to a palette of browns and grays. Let their colors, and the rich spectrum of autumn leaves, penetrate deep into your soul, to carry you through the winter to come.

Friday, October 09, 2020

Autumn in a Vase

As autumn has evolved, so have the bouquets that appear on counters and tables in our house. 


I'm content that the flowers in the front and back gardens feed the pollinators and produce some seed and beauty, but my wife invites them inside in various congregations. Plants have always been easier to photograph than people, and especially now, given that they don't need to social distance. 

The yellow is autumn Helenium, and the long strands in the back are white vervain, which looks scraggly in the garden, with tiny white flowers barely noticeable, but in a vase takes on an artistic effect.

The frost asters in this bouquet (white) are weedy native that can get too numerous but has shown its glorious side this fall. The burgundy colored disks are a common stonecrop that's not native but has a very long ornamental trajectory, going from green to pink to burgundy to chocolate, and keeping its form through the winter.
This one adds blue mistflower, goldenrod, and one of the many kinds of sunflowers. The sunflowers don't last very long in a vase.
A week or two later, turtlehead got added in (white tubular flower).
The pink/purple is New England Aster. 

We have so many flowers in the garden that no matter how many end up in vases, there will still be enough to produce seed for new plantings elsewhere.