Princeton's Nowhere Land Might Have a Future

The municipality of Princeton's newsletter broke the news last week that the town has been awarded a $552,000 Climate Solutions grant to restore 45 acres of forest at Community Park North. Kudos to the town, and to FOPOS, which will help with the project. Now, what sort of forest, you might ask, is so degraded that it requires more than $10,000/acre to restore? I stopped by last week to have a look.

It's appropriate that the sculpture that now graces the entrance to the woods at the back of the Unitarian church parking lot appears to be in mourning. 

Many hikers who head down the trail won't notice anything amiss, but for me, Community Park North woods has the feel of a post-apocalyptic landscape. Walking its trails, you can imagine yourself to be one of the fortunate or unfortunate survivors after civilization has extinguished itself, leaving invasive species to overrun the wreckage. 

For a virtual tour, click on "READ MORE," below.

What Privet is This? Border Privet in Princeton

A botanist friend of mine, John L. Clark, asked one day if I knew which kind of privet we have here in central New Jersey. John's extremely knowledgeable about flora of farflung places like Equador, but he has some charming gaps in knowledge of local flora that I can sometimes help with. Though I knew there were different kinds of privet--European, Chinese, Japanese--I had long been content to just call any thick infestation of the shrub by the general name of privet, and think no further. All the species of privet are nonnative and invasive, so for management purposes, it's not necessary to know one kind from another. 

More important for management is to be able to distinguish the non-native privet from native shrubs with similar appearance, particularly the native blackhaw Viburnum. Both have opposite branching, but privet often has a terminal cluster of small black berries that linger through the winter. And many of the privet leaves linger through winter as well. 

The photo shows the difference in the shape of the buds. The longer bud on the top (curved here, but sometimes straight) is blackhaw Viburnum. The stubby, grayish buds on the twig below are privet. 

Sometimes privet's winter leaves can take on various shades of green, sometimes bordering on purple or brown. 

I was glad John persisted in his quest to find out which privet we have in central NJ. Having lived in the south, he at first assumed we have Chinese privet (Ligustrum sinense), but after posting a closeup of the flower on iNaturalist, he soon learned that we have Ligustrum obtusifolium, latin for border privet.

Posting another closeup, John pointed out various identifying characters of border privet: "Corolla tubular with small lobes (the tube longer than the lobes), Shoots pubescent (i.e., NOT glabrous)"

The Penn State post describes "a gradient of four different species: border (L. obtusifolium), common (L. vulgare), Japanese (L. japonicum), and Chinese (L. sinense)." But John has determined that we only have border privet here, probably because it is the most cold-hardy. When I lived in North Carolina, we had a mix of Japanese and Chinese, with the Japanese having much larger and glossier leaves. 

Thanks to Inge Regan and John Clark for these photos. Winter, by the way, is a great time to go after infestations of privet in the backyard or local woodlands. Come by Herrontown Woods on Sunday mornings after 10:30am and you'll likely see the Invasive Species of the Month Club clearing swaths of privet to make room for native species.

Rogers Refuge Featured in the Princeton Echo

For the past two years, Princeton Echo has started the new year with a feature article about a local nature preserve. Last year, it was Herrontown Woods, and this year, Rebekah Shroeder wrote an extended portrait of the birding mecca Rogers Refuge and the volunteers who have cared for it since the 1960s. 

The Charles H. Rogers Wildlife Refuge is a hidden gem, a covert part of Princeton's beauty and ecological richness, accessed down an often passed but seldom seen gravel road called West Drive. Climb the observation tower just in from the parking lot and you will see a most unlikely vista for Princeton--a grand marsh.

Since joining the Friends of Rogers Refuge (FORR) nearly 20 years ago, I've gotten to know the many volunteers featured in the Echo article. 

The article draws primarily from an interview with Winnie Spar, an avid birder, poet, and FORR stalwart. 

Charles Rogers and Tom Southerland were the environmental activists who first called for protection for the wetland back in 1968. Tom Poole was another early advocate. Winnie's husband Fred Spar led the group beginning in 2005. Laurie Larson has been a longtime member who created and maintains the website, rogersrefuge.org. Lee and Melinda Varian provided critical leadership after Fred Spar passed away, and most recently, David Padulo has taken the helm. 

Important support, particularly for fighting the invasive Phragmitis, has come from the Washington Crossing Audubon and Partners for Fish and Wildlife. Winding through land owned by the American Water Company, the Refuge's trails are kept open by volunteers. The town of Princeton helps out, particularly with maintenance of the pump that augments the water naturally flowing into the marsh from the Institute Woods. The town also funds deer culling that has allowed native habitat to rebound. For my part, I was commissioned back in 2006 to write an Ecological Assessment and Stewardship Plan for the refuge. That assessment includes a detailed plant inventory. Mark Manning and his son recently conducted an inventory of dragonflies and damselflies, and the extraordinary list of bird sightings continues to grow. The article also mentions Betty Horn's work to maintain the University's Rogers Bird Room, and an online exhibit called Capturing Feathers: A Digital Collection of Bird Imagery.

Congratulations to the Friends of Rogers Refuge on getting well-deserved recognition in the Princeton Echo. The article will reportedly also appear in U.S. 1. 

Past blog posts about the Refuge can be found by putting the word "rogers" in the search box of this blog. Some examples:

A virtual nature walk at Rogers Refuge

The Spar family cleaning out birdhouses

Wild Rice at Rogers Refuge

Dedication of bird observation towers in 2009

Spring peepers and wood frogs singing at Rogers Refuge

A birdwalk at Rogers Refuge

Tom Poole and early advocacy for limiting Princeton's deer numbers

Conspicuous Earth Hugging By Trees

An endearing feature of trees is their affection for the ground. People hug trees now and then, but trees spend their whole lives hugging the earth. Like humans, trees lust for the sky, but unlike humans they know that quest requires a good foundation, and find ways to hold on tight. Here are some of the more demonstrative embraces seen during a recent visit to Coconut Grove, Florida. All except the first were seen at Fairchild Tropical Botanical Garden.

Root flare is a sign of health in trees, but I'd never seen the likes of this. I'm calling it a kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra) after encountering this charming video that describes its buttressed base and the fluffy seeds that used to provide stuffing for life vests. 

The extravagant buttressing is reminiscent of the fins of a rocket that in this case can reach more than 200 feet tall, vaulting above the rainforest canopy. With seedpods packed with useful fiber, it's not surprising that the kapok is in the same plant family as cotton--the Malvaceae, also known as the mallow family. 

One of Princeton's native members of that family is the rose mallow hibiscus (Hibiscus moscheutos), fairly common along the shores of Lake Carnegie and in raingardens.

The ombu, a native to the Argentine pampas that goes by the latin name Phytolacca dioica, develops a conspicuously bloated base that with time can become convenient for sitting. If you haven't seen one, just imagine a 50 foot high pokeweed--our local Phytolacca americana with very similar leaves, flowers, and berries. 

I was impressed by this tree's buttressing, 

and even more impressed with this larger specimen.

With leaves like that, I was sure it was some sort of yucca, but no. The iNaturalist app called "Seek", my new botanical companion for the trip, called it Pandanus tectorius, a kind of screw pine. With those mangrove-like roots, it's not surprising that screw pines grow along coasts and are wind and salt resistant.

Native mangroves have similar adaptations. Though they have lost a lot of territory, as development has transformed the Florida coast, this one still finds some ground to hold onto.

Had to look at the plant marker for this tree with a bloated base. Surprise! It's the ponytail palm--the same species we have growing in our living room in Princeton. 

Another name for ponytail palm is elephant's foot. 

This tree's swollen base is the boulder that it is growing on.

Back in Princeton, at the Barden in Herrontown Woods, a white pine shows some flare for root flare.

Strangler Figs: Airborne Roots and Flying Buttresses

Coconut Grove, FL, where I was fortunate to spend a week with family for the holidays, is named after its palm trees, but the tree that will catch your eye more than any other is the strangler fig. 

How silly we are, these extraordinary trees seem to say, to think that trees should start life on the ground, have only one trunk, make their flowers seen and keep their roots tidily hidden. 

The strangler fig's logic is clever. How can a new tree survive in a tropical forest where existing trees cast deep shade and have a lock on soil nutrients? It starts its life as if on stilts, as an epiphyte high in the canopy, sprouting on the trunk of another tree. Oftentimes, the seeds, freshly digested by a bird, catch in the rough bark of a live oak, or a cabbage palm. Declaring itself improbably independent of nutrition from mother earth, it lives at first on air and rain, growing stems skyward and roots earthwards. When the roots reach the ground, the strangler fig's growth accelerates. The above ground portions turn into multiple trunks that envelope the host tree. That embrace can ultimately prove lethal, providing the strangler fig with a convenient supply of additional nutrients as the host tree rots away. 

 

More and more roots are sent downward, each one turning into yet another trunk when the roots reach the ground. Surely if one trunk is good, then many must be much better. The result brings to mind a cathedral replete with flying buttresses. 

The result of all this free-thinking, or if not thinking, then free-doing, is a tree you can walk through. 

This old beech tree in the Institute Woods in Princeton achieves a somewhat similar effect, though it's just one trunk that has rotted through. A closer equivalent in our forests is achieved in a more covert fashion. Trees like beech, sassafras, pawpaw, black locust, aspen, and the blackhaw Viburnum sprout new trunks as their roots spread underground, creating what appears to be a grove of trees that is in fact one individual.

Wikipedia lists 13 different species of strangler fig around the world. This one at Barnacle Historic State Park is the native Ficus aurea, whose fruits the sign says are edible. 

I'm guessing that many of the other strangler figs--those with myriad trunks like this impressive specimen at the University of Miami--are banyan trees from India.

On the left in this photo you can see some aerial roots growing towards the ground. 

Here's a closeup of a cluster of soil-seeking roots growing downward from a limb--another tree trunk in the making.

What little bamboo I saw in Coconut Grove paled in comparison to the expansionist aims of strangler figs. 

This fig appears ready to eat the pavement, 

while others drape themselves over walls, 

or probe the local infrastructure.

This strangler fig was so bold as to break into a tiger's cage.

Fortunately, there's no tiger living there now, just a couple of chickens. 

I forgot to mention the hidden flowers, which are borne inside the fruit and accessed only by a tiny wasp. Each species of fig has its own specialized species of fig wasp to fertilize it. For more reading, and some cool photos of just how tiny those wasps are, here's an interesting post. This Forest Service post describes the mutualistic relationship between the wasp and the tree, and says the U.S. has only two species of native fig. 

For anyone headed down Florida way, a good example of a banyan tree can be found at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas Minipark, named after the famed activist and author of The Everglades: River of Grass.  

Names I Remember, Names I Forget

One ongoing self-observation that I've had through a life of nature observation is that there are some plant names that resiliently spring to mind, and others that remain persistently unretrievable no matter how many times I learn and relearn them. For example, the latin names Gleditsia triacanthos and Robinia pseudoacacia look esoteric and intimidating, and yet for some reason I can summon them instantly. They refer to honey locust and black locust, respectfully, though I don't knowingly have any deeper interest in or respect or affection for these two trees than any others. Well, that's not completely true. I love black locust because it resists rot and burns clean. It can lie on the ground for years and still make great firewood. And a thornless version of honey locust makes a wonderful shade tree in public squares, its tiny leaflets melting back into the landscape in the fall. But I love other trees for their traits just as much. Gleditsia and Robinia, then, are two trees among many in my mind, and yet their names remain buoyantly floating above the others, at the top of the heap and the tip of the tongue. 

At the other extreme lies fennel, a delicious, fragrant vegetable that grows gloriously. A friend made a casserole with fennel and leeks wrapped with prosciutto, the cheese on top baked to a golden brown. It was to die for, and yet the word "fennel" still dropped down into the cerebral abyss, dredged back up just now only by once again googling "plant that tastes like licorice." Similarly, there's a kind of lightbulb whose name I can never remember. The others come dependably and quickly to mind: florescent, incandescent, LED, mercury vapor. But the other one ... I think it starts with an "a" but I could be wrong. That's right. I was wrong, again. Had to google. It starts with an "h," as in "halogen." 

What's the difference here? Gleditsia and Robinia make a merry, musical pair, both with impactful accents on the second syllable: gle-DIT-see-a and ro-BIN-ee-a. Fennel and halogen are less musical, with the accent landing heavily on the first syllable, like tunnel, or funnel, or allergen, or estrogen, or pathogen. But "merry" and "musical" also have the accent at the beginning, so maybe it's that the words "fennel" and "halogen" get less merry and musical after the first syllable, with consonants that are soft and easily swallowed up. I often think about this when comparing the names "Veblen" and "Einstein." Einstein has a memorably sonorous name that can be drawn out deliciously when spoken, like a double exclamation point, fitting for his matchless legacy. Veblen, on the other hand, whose quietly extraordinary career flew under most people's radar, then was long left for forgotten, has a name with soft consonants and indistinct vowels that are all too easy to mumble.

There's a belief that forgetting someone's name reflects a negative view of that person, but I find I can just as easily forget the name of someone I have just met and like. Next time that happens I'll pay attention to the sound of the name itself. It's fun to explore these things, and maybe the act of writing this will create an inner web of meaning to catch "fennel" and "halogen" before they once again drop into the abyss. 

The Invasive Species of the Month Club

Surely it's not an original concept, but it's a great idea nonetheless: an Invasive Species of the Month Club. Nature can be baffling in its complexity, intimidating, and for some, downright off-putting. If you love plants, then you welcome the diversity of species out there to be learned. Monocultures are boring. But if you have little curiosity about nature, then complexity becomes onerous, and simplified landscapes like a front lawn are experienced as reassuring. And then there are those who really like nature and want to help it, but for whom plant names go in one ear and out the other.

The Invasive Species of the Month Club, conceived for Herrontown Woods by FOHW board member Inge Regan, helps people get acquainted with invasive species one at a time. The nonnative plants spreading through local preserves are often the same ones popping up along fence rows in the backyard, so volunteers gain knowledge they can put to use at home. Every Sunday morning we gather to go after one invasive in particular. Some can be pulled out by hand; others require loppers.

In application, the concept becomes more flexible. We may not focus on one invasive for a full month, but at least each week there is a plant to be focused on. 

Burning bush, aka winged euonymus, is easy to identify any time of year by the "wings" on its stems, but even easier in the fall when it turns various shades of red or pink. It's pretty, but because deer don't like it, its proliferation is making the forest less edible for wildlife.

We spent one morning early in December pulling out jetbead, named after its clusters of black berries. In December, it can be the only shrub that still has leaves, so becomes super easy to identify then.

Privet will keep its leaves all winter, so will be a good candidate for focused effort through the winter. The leaves can vary in shade of green, confusing someone new to the shrub, but that's the idea of focusing on one species at a time. Multiple encounters with privet eventually lead to a confidence in identifying it in all its shades of green. 

Privet was the main focus of this past Sunday's Invasive Species of the Month Club. The weather was cold and damp, with rain threatening, but surprisingly it was one of our most satisfying sessions. The little boy in the lime green dinosaur coat was totally into it, and we managed to clear a whole section of the valley of a dense tangle of invasives. There's enough space in the tree canopy to power native wildflowers and shrubs there, once the invasive shrubs and vines have been subdued. That's the goal, but the process of group effort and gaining increasing confidence and familiarity out in nature have their own satisfactions.

The Blob That Swallowed Our Nature Walk

I'd been watching the weather for Sunday all week. It was almost comic how a big pile of predicted rain sat centered over the exact timeframe for the scheduled nature walk at Herrontown Woods--a mountain of rain rising conspicuously, incongruously, out of a prairie of sunny weather stretching into the distance on either side.

The consistency of the weather prediction, which showed the blob sitting in exactly the same Sunday time slot for five days straight, and which ultimately proved accurate, surely represents a triumph for meteorology.  

Astute readers will note a distinct resemblance between the blob of rain that swallowed our nature walk and the drawing of a boa constrictor that had swallowed an elephant in The Little Prince. 

Finally, we bailed, and rescheduled the walk for a week later.  

Nature Walk at Herrontown Woods, Sunday, Nov. 27, 1-3pm

A nature walk is planned for this Thanksgiving weekend, on Sunday, Nov. 27, from 1-3pm. If the weather looks iffy, check the events page of the HerrontownWoods.org website for an update. 

We'll meet at the Herrontown Woods parking lot at 600 Snowden Lane, across Snowden from the Smoyer Park entrance. Sturdy shoes are a good idea. Maps at this link.

The photo is of a pokeweed that came late to the fall color party.

Solarizing a Princeton High School Detention Basin

Earlier this fall, I was passing by Princeton High School on Walnut Street when I saw something I'd never seen before: 

a whole field covered with plastic. The field, next to the tennis courts and a parking lot, is actually a stormwater detention basin that the school wants to replant as native meadow. But before planting, they need to kill the existing turfgrass. 

I had contacted the schoolboard members on the Operations committee a number of times over the past year, promoting the meadow idea and encouraged them to contact a federal agency called Partners for Fish and Wildlife. Over the years, I had worked with Partners to convert, at no cost, a number of detention basins in town to native meadow--at Farmview Fields, Smoyer Park, Greenway Meadows, and even at the Princeton High School ecolab just down Walnut Street. 

Instead, the school hired at some expense an outside contractor to do the conversion. The plastic is probably a very plasticky attempt to avoid the use of herbicide. If you place clear plastic over grass, the heat from the sun gets trapped under the plastic. Like a greenhouse, or the earth's atmosphere, or the windows of a car parked in the summer sun, the clear plastic is transparent for light but opaque for heat. The sunlight travels through the plastic, hits the ground, turns into heat, and the plastic keeps the heat from escaping. Trapping solar heat to kill the grass is called solarization. I had accidentally done something similar when I laid a vinyl floormat on the grass next to the curb in the hopes someone else would find it useful. No one took it, and the grass under the mat was killed, leaving a brown spot for the rest of the summer.

This PHS environmental science teacher is one of several using this detention basin as well as the ecolab to teach about stormwater issues and habitats. 

Unfortunately, the plastic was installed late in the summer, as the sun's power was waning. When the plastic was removed this week, the results were less than impressive. A deep-rooted weed called plantain remains particularly abundant. 

It would be interesting to find out why herbicides were not used. The school may well have banned the use of herbicides when school is in session, but that doesn't preclude the use after hours or on weekends. Herbicides get a bad reputation for being heavily used to impose sterile lawns in suburbia, or on farms to eliminate every last weed, including milkweed. But they can also be used, in a targeted, minimalist, medicinal way, to kill invasive weeds that would otherwise be too difficult to control physically. We manage toxicity in our own bodies, taking only enough medicine to achieve a beneficial effect. Banning herbicides brings the comfort of absolutism, and makes people feel they're being green, all the while handicapping those who are actually doing the work to restore native diversity to the landscape. 

We'll see how the project goes. Not sure what happened to all of that plastic.

What's Eating Local Viburnums?

Each time I see a native arrowwood Viburnum growing in the woods, I take a closer look. There's a viburnum leaf beetle--a nonnative species introduced from Europe--that showed up in Princeton about a decade ago. On a visit to Pittsburgh years back, I saw native Viburnums totally skeletonized by the insect, and worried about the fate of our own Viburnums in NJ. 

I've posted about this insect pest in the past. Suffice it here to say that among the various species of Viburnum in NJ, the arrowwood Viburnum (V. dentatum) is the most vulnerable. The nightmare scenario would be for the leaf beetle to defoliate all arrowwood Viburnums, then move on to decimate the next most vulnerable species.

Preferring wet ground, blooming profusely even in the shade, the Viburnum dentatum is not as common in the woods as the blackhaw Viburnum, or the highly invasive Linden Viburnum. The last couple years, I didn't notice much insect damage. This year, observations are mixed. Some shrubs in Herrontown Woods were badly eaten, 

while an arrowwood across town in Rogers Refuge showed no damage at all. 

Hopefully, the total stripping of leaves that I witnessed in Pittsburgh will prove to have been an exception, and natural predators and diseases will keep the Viburnum leaf beetle in check. Worth keeping an eye on in coming years.

Nature at the Princeton Battlefield

(Thanks to those who commented. Scroll down for an update.)

As a lover of both nature and history, I experience the Princeton Battlefield differently than most. There's gratitude for its preservation, along with some grieving for the way the land is managed. Nature here is pushed to the fringes, as if to replicate a giant ballfield. But the battle took place on a working farm, not an athletic field. 

The Clark House has been restored, its 18th century charms highly valued. So why would the landscape not be similarly treated? In the winter of 1777, the soldiers would have been treading through corn stubble, or pasture, or an orchard. 

One answer would be that visitors and re-enactors benefit from a clean surface. The question then would be how much to mow and where, so that people could enjoy a lawn, but also have areas that evoke more a feeling of the 18th century. 

As I walk across the field, I feel a sense of space more than place. Perhaps if I tried I could feel grandeur, or solemnity. Graveyards are mowed, after all. A big sky and a big field help us to understand that something big happened here, when a nation was being born, its future stretching far off towards the horizon. Maybe the landscape works in some spiritual way to evoke freedom and possibility. But as I walk these hallowed grounds, I'm also feeling a sense of a long ways to go before reaching anything interesting. Okay. Perhaps that long trudge could generate some appreciation for the long overnight march of Washington's amateur army from Trenton to Princeton. 

One tree stands in the middle of the giant lawn, an offspring of the great Mercer Oak that had witnessed the battle and lived through two more centuries before falling to a windstorm in 2000. Trees growing at the time of a great battle are called witness trees. The soldiers who fought that pivotal battle are long gone, but centuries later a tree, especially the long-lived white oak, could still claim "I was there!"

The offspring was donated by Louise Morse, spouse of Marston Morse, a mathematician who Oswald Veblen helped bring to the nearby Institute for Advanced Study in the 1930s. It was Veblen's initiative to acquire the 600+ acres behind the Battlefield that later became the Institute Woods.

The sign tells the story of the white oak and General Mercer. What I've come to look at, though, is not the highly symbolic tree but a thin sliver of golden brown in the distance. 

Beyond the lawn, towards the back of the Battlefield, is a meadow that is mowed once a year. For some reason they mowed the edge of it this fall but have left the rest, perhaps as winter cover for wildlife.

Taking a closer look, I'm surprised to see that, among the blackberries and prairie grasses, goldenrods and asters, are myriad sassafras sprouts, most of them bright orange this time of year. The meadow is a giant clone of sassafras--one root system with ten thousand heads. Can't say I've ever seen that before. 

To the left of the field is a bedraggled woods, dominated by the skeletons of ash trees killed by the introduced Emerald ash borer. A heroic American tree species silently meets its demise.

Behind the Clark House, and also across Mercer Street to the left of the pillars, more signs of introduced invasive species abound. Rampant invasive porcelainberry is stifling the 1976 bicentennial plantings--flowering dogwoods and daffodils around the edge of the field. As is typical of the landscapes we daily tread, the Princeton Battlefield invests in mowing the grass, while leaving the unmowed areas untended and overrun. Each year the Sierra Club organizes a spirited volunteer day to battle against bamboo near the Clark House. In the past, I would lead a group to cut the aggressive porcelainberry vines off of the bicentennial flowering dogwoods, but it's hard to make lasting progress when unsupported by the state agency that views grounds maintenance of this state park as "mow and go." Now all I do is make annual visits to snuff out a small infestation of mile-a-minute I spotted some years back on the Battlefield grounds.

Surely the soldiers who fought here knew their plants better than most people do today, and would feel disoriented by today's massive lawn surrounded by alien weeds. If I were to envision a battlefield landscape that sought to provide a more historically authentic botanical and horticultural context, I'd imagine some portion of the massive lawn being given over to the sort of landscape the battle was actually fought upon--pasture, orchard, corn field, whatever research shows to have been likely at the time. Along the edges would be native forest rather than tangles of kudzu-like nonnative vines. 

According to its mission statement, the Princeton Battlefield Society seeks to "restore the lands and cultural landscape." Maybe once other admirable goals are achieved, someone in the group will get interested in showing people an authentic 1777 landscape, and get the state parks department to help in the effort.  

To acquire, protect, preserve, and restore

the lands and cultural landscape related

to the Battle of Princeton of 1777;

To enlarge and improve the

Princeton Battlefield State Park;

To educate the public about the Battle

of Princeton, the Ten Crucial Days,

and the American Revolution.

Update, Dec. 23, 2022 : It's not hard to find accounts of the chronic underfunding of maintenance for NJ's state park system. This cuts both ways for Princeton Battlefield State Park. It explains why invasive species run rampant along the fringes of the park, but doesn't explain the large investment in mowing. One could have a mowed area around the house and for the areas of the land used for re-enactments and other events, and for visitors to explore the park (we used to fly kites there). Surely that still leaves large areas that could be managed for meadow. 

Nearby the Institute for Advanced Study grounds provide an example of large areas requiring only an annual mowing. 

Ribbons of mowed grass through meadow at the Battlefield would not only reduce mowing but also invite visitors to explore the full extent of the park. Walking across a vast lawn gives little sense of progress, departure, or arrival, and thus doesn't encourage exploration the way a mowed path does. 

The current management, in which nature is either suppressed by mowing or neglected along the fringes, does not reflect the view of nature held by the battle's greatest hero. George Washington was, among many things, a farmer. He believed plants were so important to a nation's future that he "had a dream of a national botanic garden and was instrumental in establishing one on the National Mall in 1820." 

In our era, when most people suffer from plant blindness, it must seem incongruous that the United States Botanic Garden is located immediately adjacent to the U.S. Capitol building. Plant blindness, according to the botanists who coined the term, "results in a chronic inability to recognize the importance of plants in the biosphere and in human affairs."

With this in mind, some rethinking of how vegetation is managed at the Princeton Battlefield could add to the visitor's experience, and shift some funds from mindless mowing to a mindful restoration of a more historically authentic landscape.