Princeton University Students Study Local Nature

A recurring observation, which this blog has long sought to make less common, is that many people go through life knowing little about the natural world all around them. Kids can navigate the school years without gaining acquaintance with more than a handful of native plants. Princeton University students can tend to remain cloistered on campus, studying distant continents while leaving the local unexplored. 

A salve for this concern came this past fall when twenty Princeton University students gathered for a walk through Herrontown Woods. They had signed up for professor Andy Dobson's Ecology of Fields, Streams, and Rivers--a course that combined standard lecture with field trips to "local sites of ecological interest," including Herrontown Woods, Mountain Lakes, the Institute Woods, Terhune Orchards, and lands preserved more recently by the Ridgeview Conservancy.

What a delight to show them the all-too-rare forest opening in the Botanical Art Garden, where wildflowers team in the gaps between scattered trees. They witnessed the rebound of spicebush, as browsing pressure from deer has been brought more into balance, and the foundational, enduring open space legacy of the late great professor Oswald Veblen and his wife Elizabeth. 

In turn, the students taught us a few things two months later, when Andy invited us to witness their presentations of individual research projects. 

I hadn't known, for instance, that the Lenape valued the red mulberry, and that this tree species I had considered weedy is actually becoming rare, in part due to interbreeding with the introduced white mulberry. My increased respect may lead to identifying and propagating remaining local red mulberries, for planting in an open understory at Herrontown Woods.

Another student explained how the invasive barberry can serve as a tick haven. The nonnative shrub's dense, low growth provides a humid habitat for white-footed mice, which in turn harbor the ticks. 

We learned a new word, "solastalgia." Coined less than 20 years ago, the word captures a kind of loss we are becoming more and more familiar with. If nostalgia is a longing for a place or time left behind, solastalgia is the distress felt when the world we thought we knew does the leaving. The word captures the present era, as climate change steals the seasons, rapid development transforms once familiar landscapes, and even foundational systems like democracy become threatened.  

Another presentation told of the peach-clematis aphid, which lives two lives--one on peach-related trees, another on the non-native autumn clematis vine that blooms bright white in yards and in the wild. Andy pointed out that the resourceful aphid reproduces sexually on one, asexually on the other. This interaction between a nonnative insect and a nonnative plant is reminiscent of how the spotted lanternflies are drawn to the tree of heaven (Ailanthus)--the two having evolved together in Asia before being transported here. 

It was satisfying to see, as well, that Andy's course led one student to discover the fascinating world of fire ecology, that is, how plants of many sorts have adapted to and even become dependent upon the periodic presence of fire in the landscape. Her presentation brought back memories of my first happening upon the concept in my second year in college, exactly 50 years ago. I was on Ossabaw Island off the coast of Savannah, wondering why the pines were burying themselves in pine needles so thick that no new pines could grow. The answer, discovered pre-internet in books and articles, was that the pines dropped persistent needles as an evolved strategy to promote periodic fire that would leave the pines intact while exposing the mineral soil for seed germination and killing the pine's less fire-resistant competitors.

By teaching a course on local ecology, Professor Dobson is in part building on the great tradition of one of his predecessors in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Henry Horn, who frequently reached beyond the university's borders to lead walks in local preserves. Some engaging videos of Henry's walks are online, and Henry's wife, Elizabeth Horn, continues to teach a wildflower course at the Princeton Adult School. I looked back and found another great example of university students learning from local habitats: when history professor Vera Candiani had architectural historian Clifford Zink and me introduce her students to Mountain Lakes' flora and history.

Courses past and gratefully present demonstrate the potential for synergy between town, gown, and outdoors, and somehow brought to mind the imperative found long ago in the Grateful Dead's song "Truckin'": 

"Get out of the door and light out and look all around."

Most of what stuck with me from college happened outside the classroom. And though the distant world may beckon, there's a whole lot of truckin' and learnin' to be done just beyond one's doorstep.

Fountain Park--Ancestral Connection to an Eternal Spring

It is my sister-in-law Edna, not my siblings and I, who has taken particular satisfaction in researching our family's ancestry. She traced one lineage on my father's side back to Lord Hempleman of Hesse-Kassel. If my parents had known there was a Lord in our family's past, they might have called on me to show more regal bearing as a kid. Though it's flattering to learn of some royal ancestry, the most exciting find was another lineage, on my mother's side, extending seven generations back to an eternal spring located one hundred miles west of Princeton. 

In Schaefferstown, Pennsylvania, there is a fountain that flows nonstop, year-round, without aid of any pump. It's water rises from a spring perched on the hillside, then flows down the hill to a fountain where residents of the town still come to have a drink.

The fountain was part of an innovative underground system of wooden pipes that transported water from the spring down one side of a valley and up the other to provide drinking water in wooden troughs on the town square. 

According to some literature:

"The water company in Schaefferstown has the oldest gravitational conveyance system by underground pipes in the United States. The water system was constructed sometime between 1744 and 1750 by the founder of the town, Alexander Schaeffer."

It's also called "the oldest Chartered Waterworks still in operation in the United States."

This ancestral connection has all sorts of resonance in my life. Water holds an attraction for most people, but in my life it has been a recurring theme. I grew up near beautiful Lake Geneva, WI, got a masters degree in water quality, founded a watershed association, turned a soggy field in a public park into a wetland garden, dug a series of miniponds in my backyard, and favor wildflowers that thrive in wet soil. As a kid walking home from school when winter was finally giving way to spring, I loved to build dams out of wet snow to hold back the snowmelt along the curb. Clearly, all this time Alexander Schaeffer's genes have been whispering encouragement to his great-great-great-great-great grandson.

The eternal spring is in a park that also feels eternal, appropriately called Fountain Park, 

Halfway up the hillside is the spring house, which looks more like a mound of earth, with a wall on the bottom end, its own picket fence

and its own caretaker--one in a long line of caretakers dating back to the mid-1700s

Peer in through the door in the wall, 

and you'll find what looks like a small indoor swimming pool--a durably crafted stone chamber where the water collects before flowing down to the fountain. 

One enduring mystery, which I'm hoping a hydrogeologist who strays upon this post can explain, is why springs tend to emerge not at the bottom of a hill but halfway down. 

Climb up this hill and you quickly reach the top, where there hardly seems to be enough land to feed such a copious and consistent spring--not much more than a small farm field, with the land beyond lower and flowing off in different directions. 

German immigrant Alexander Schaeffer laid out the town in a way reminiscent of those he knew in Europe, and initially called it Heidelberg, after one of the most beautiful cities in Germany. 

Water from the spring still feeds troughs along Market Street, bringing back memories of ancient Roman water works seen in Italy.

The park is owned and maintained by residents of Market Street. Buy a house on Market Street, and you also become part owner and steward of the park. 

While in town, I met one of the owner/stewards, Ann Ginder, who gave me some copies of this pamphlet. At the time--my visit was in 2018--her husband, Andy, was president of the group of residents along the street who take care of Fountain Park. Carl "Cork" Meyer, who I didn't meet, is the one who does most of the physical work to maintain the park. 

On the town square, Alexander Schaeffer built what still stands as a tavern called Franklin House, and it was there that I met what proved to be a distant cousin of mine, Howard Kramer. Our ancestral connection to each other and the town's founder can be tracked back via gravestones variously populated with names like Meyer, Moyer, and Meier. Ann Ginder calls Howard the "unofficial mayor" of Schaefferstown.

Schaeffer's house and farm on the outskirts of town are being restored as a historic site, with summer festivals to celebrate the town's history. It's not just the unique drinking water system and a long line of advocates and stewards that has saved the town's historical features. As one website explains,

"Because the area was left isolated from rail lines, canals, and modern highways, the town did not grow appreciably in the 19th or 20th centuries. This greatly influenced the small-town look and feel that the area maintains today."

Thanks to my sister-in-law Edna for discovering our ancestral link to this special place, founded by my great-great-great-great-great grandfather. And thanks to those who care enough to cherish and sustain that history. Howard wrote to me that "years ago there was a steady line of people getting their drinking water here and at the fountain mid-way up Market St." Even now, with all the world's turbulence, radical change, and myriad threats to what we once thought of as forever, there is an improbable spring perched above a Pennsylvania valley where the water still flows.

Native Bamboos Once Common in the Southeastern U.S.

This post isn't about the tall bamboo you often see growing around town. That would be golden bamboo (Phyllostachys aurea), native to southeast China, cultivated in Japan for centuries, and first introduced to the United States in the 1880s. In our neighborhood, I sometimes see people of asian descent harvesting its young shoots in the spring. (If you're looking for a clever way to get rid of it, or want to eat it, or both, scroll through my various previous posts that actually ARE about the nonnative golden bamboo.) 

Nor is this post about the bamboo you are confronted with when you pull out of the Spring Street parking garage behind the Princeton Public Library. That one's probably the nonnative arrow bamboo (Pseudosasa japonica), which lacks the towering, thick stems. Instead, it grows into a dense mop of evergreen foliage, seldom rising much beyond ten feet high. It's rarely seen in Princeton, but was a common feature in neighborhoods where I used to live, further south in the piedmont, in Durham, NC. We'd find it thriving in shade, and in that Princeton back alley it does an excellent job of screening the homes beyond it from the sight of cars pulling out of the parking garage day and night. 

This post IS about what that patch of arrow bamboo reminded me of: native bamboos. Yes, there are native bamboos that once dominated vast stretches of the southeastern U.S., but which are now largely lost from the landscape.

The photo shows a patch of native bamboo, cane so-called (Arundinaria sp.), that I planted 20 years ago in a nature preserve we created in Durham, NC. Called "17 Acre Wood," the neighborhood preserve straddles Ellerbe Creek--good floodplain habitat for native cane. A scientist with the Natural Resource Conservation Service, Roger Hansard, had given me the plant. (He was also the one who showed me the last remnant of another little known, long-lost feature of the eastern U.S.--extensive native grasslands. There once was a great native meadow just south of Princeton, called Maidenhead Meadows.) 

Prior to western settlement, early European explorers in what is now North Carolina documented not the unbroken forest of lore, but a mosaic of grasslands, forest, and canebrakes. The canebrakes were dominated by native bamboos. 

There are three species of native bamboo. A Name That Plant article gives a quick overview of native (Arundinaria sp.) and nonnative bamboos in the U.S.. 

Differences in distribution and vegetative characteristics help to distinguish among Arundinaria species and from non-native species. Typically river cane is more widely distributed in the southeastern US, switch cane in coastal plains and lower elevations, and hill cane in higher elevations (Appalachian Mountain region).

The Tennessee Conservationist has an excellent writeup on the river cane that until the 1700s formed "the dominant ecosystem in the Cumberland River valley." Dense stands of river cane, growing from 5-40 feet tall, served as important resources for American Indians, excellent forage for bison and later cattle, and hiding places for escaped slaves. They postulate that some of these massive canebrakes were the result of cane reclaiming corn fields abandoned by "prehistoric Mississippian peoples" many centuries prior, as major droughts led to the breakup of an early civilization. In turn, the canebrakes proved easier than forests for newly arrived western settlers to turn into farm fields.

If you've never seen bamboo blooming, it's because it can grow for decades without blooming at all. Then a year finally comes when the whole patch will bloom at once, then die. I've seen a whole city block suddenly die in this way. 

The cluster of roots and leaves of native bamboo that I planted alongside Ellerbe Creek some 20 years ago in Durham has grown into a patch 30 wide. Maybe someone will come along and use it as a source for replanting the Cane Creeks of the world, named for what was once abundant and now is seldom seen.

That's what I was reminded of a few weeks ago, pulling out of the Spring Street parking garage next to the public library.

A Rose Blooms in Brooklyn

 Quite the surprise, arising the morning of January 1st,

to find a rose blooming in a Brooklyn backyard. My first thought on this first day was, "Why is this rose blooming? Doesn't it know it's winter?" And such a large, beautiful rose!

Then I looked up and was surprised again, by two tall towers--iron exclamation points--rising along the back fence between two backyards in this row of brownstones. "What were those towers?," I asked my hosts.

Turns out that long ago, these towers anchored an elaborate web of clotheslines that stretched back to the apartments. I'm guessing the lines were mounted on pulleys, so that residents could hang laundry all the way out to the towers, then "pulley" it on back when it was dry.

It looked something like this--not unlike a harbor full of miniature sailboats. 

Sailing and line drying clothes are both ways to collaborate with nature. Both require being tuned in, aware of the outdoors, alert to shifts in the wind and the weather. Lacking an outdoor clothesline, I can still collaborate by hanging my clothes on a rack, then return the next day to find that nature has effortlessly dried them. 

Machines have stolen us away from collaborations with nature, yet, embedded in concrete, these iron towers remain, soaring skyward like the masts of idled sailboats, still standing ready to launch us back to a more sustainable lifestyle. Patiently indifferent to a changed world, they teach the rose to bloom in January.

More about what it was like to hangdry clothes out the back window can be found in a post on Ephemeral New York. 

Handling Rainwater Runoff in My Yard--a Video

I was one of the hosts for a highly successful Green House Tour in Princeton this summer, organized by the Princeton Environmental Commission (PEC) and Sustainable Princeton. While other tours were of homes that demonstrate how to shift away from fossil fuel dependence, my tour was of my yard, and all the ways to utilize rainwater runoff to feed native plants in the landscape. The organizers made four excellent videos of the various tours, including one of my yard, below. Devan Sekaria did the filming, with editing mentorship by Seth Mellman.

 (A good companion piece to the video is a post from ten years ago about how to incrementally shift your lawn to garden, called "The Incredible Shrinking Lawn, Thanks to Cardboard.")

Default Landscapes That Lack the Touch of a Human Hand

Much of the land in central Jersey has been highly traumatized, first by agriculture, then by suburbanization and invasive species. During the agricultural era, plowing erased the land's memory of what it once had been, not altogether unlike the erasure of Native American culture through forced assimilation. On this traumatized land now live many people who have lost connection to the land around them. Land that long ago lost its memory--its seedbank of native species that once flourished upon it--has now lost the touch of a human hand. 

Tended only by machines, this landscape of turf and tiny cannonball shrubs is what can be called a cultural default landscape, with closely mowed and trimmed plants kept in an eternal infantile state. The values expressed here are neatness and simplicity. Nature, being neither neat nor simple, becomes the tacit enemy of the suburban landscape. Subdivisions like this remind me of the motels we would plop down on the Monopoly board.

Heightening the sense of disconnection, this development, with houses dropped on the land as if they were spaceships from another planet, also lacks any clear physical connection to other developments around it. West Windsor at some point becomes East Windsor, their names suggesting they are west or east of something, and yet Windsor itself--once called Centerville because it is located at the center of the state--has barely 300 residents. 

In Princeton, there is more sense of connection, with a downtown nearby, and a few trees have grown up, but otherwise the default anti-nature landscape of house plus sterile lawn tended by machines is the same.

Here is another cultural default landscape, and by that I mean a landscape whose relative sterility is enforced by engrained cultural expectations. This is perhaps the largest detention basin I have ever seen, meant to capture runoff next to a public school. My guess is that the school cannot use the area for sports, and no one will think to turn it into a meadow, so it is destined to remain a barren mowed lawn in perpetuity.

Surprisingly, this large field across the street from the mansions has been left to grow up in broomsedge--a native grass. Not a high quality grassland by any stretch, but the less frequent (probably annual) mowing at least allows the grasses to reach sexual maturity.

Over near the hospital in Plainsboro, a vacant field demonstrates another kind of default landscape, where engrained cultural imperatives of farm or turfgrass have ceded control to invasive species. Cultural abandonment allowed three classic weeds to move in: mugwort, Chinese bushclover, and late flowering thoroughwort. Those first two are nonnative, with the mugwort being crowned "most likely to succeed" in abandoned fields. 

It is astonishing to witness the hegemony that mugwort can achieve. Monocultural stands of mugwort stretch for miles along roadsides in the Plainsboro area. This can be called an invasive species default, in which aggressive nonnative species fill the void left by past agricultural trauma followed by neglect. 

Chinese bushclover appears to be newer on the scene in NJ. In the North Carolina piedmont, where I used to live, this highly aggressive species was planted by the Dept. of Transportation to reduce erosion along roadsides. Solving one problem, the DOT created another, as Chinese bushclover has since invaded native grasslands across the eastern U.S., and is now displacing other species along rights of way and on vacant lots in the Princeton area.

How does one counter the cultural and invasive species defaults in our area? One approach is to knock out the worst of the invasive species--the mugwort, Phragmitis, and Chinese bushclover--and then plant deer-resistant natives like late flowering thoroughwort and wild senna. These in turn will produce seeds that can start shifting the seed bank back from nonnative to native. It's all we've had time for thus far, in this field next to Herrontown Woods, preserved but otherwise forgotten. Maybe one day it can be a shining example of a native grassland, that, unlike so many others, has received the steady, ongoing, healing touch of a human hand.

Our Color-Coded Forest -- v2023

Happy Thanksgiving to readers of Princeton Nature Notes, now 17 years old--the blog, that is, and maybe even some of the readers. I will be leading a nature walk this Sunday, Nov. 26, from 1-3pm, open to all. Meet at the main parking lot for Herrontown Woods, off Snowden Lane. I had hoped to show off what I call the color-coded forest, but a storm of heavy wind and rain stripped most shrubs of their remaining leaves. It will still be good to have a hike, though, and you can see in this post what area woodlands looked like until just a few days ago.

November is when woodlands turn into one of those paintings where you match the color to the number. It's a time when you can gaze into the distance and identify every woody plant by its color. For instance, in this photo of a woodland overlooking the canal in Kingston, check out the yellow in the upper right. That's what's left of the Norway maple leaves, which turn color later than the native maples, and seem to know no other color than yellow in the fall. And the green in the understory? That is bush honeysuckle--what I call the "second forest." It's still green because it evolved on a different continent with a different climate, and so its timing is different from the native flora in spring and fall.

Seen this past week from the cliff in Herrontown Woods, the color coding was much more complex, with non-native Photinia, winged euonymus, and bush honeysuckle mixing with native species.  

Here's a glorious dogwood along the red trail. 

Up on the ridge, the maple-leaved Viburnums develop subtle shadings.

In our "cultural zone" between the Barden and Veblen House, young white oaks turned a rich burgundy earlier in the month. I tell people it's called a white oak because it turns red in the fall. Red oaks mostly turn orange. Naturalists have been doing Stop Making Sense tours long before David Byrne got around to it.

And then there's Photinia villosa, which is both beautiful and concerning, given how densely it has come to dominate in areas across town in Mountain Lakes and the Institute Woods. A few specimens turn bright orange, while

most turn bright yellow, even when growing side by side. You won't see a Norway maple going rogue with orange in the fall.

Another shrub, related to Photinia but just starting to show up in our woods, is a mystery. I discovered it across town fifteen years ago in Rogers Refuge, and even crack botanists have yet to put a name on it. 

Here you can see Photinia (yellow), American holly (evergreen), and in the foreground some sweetgum leaves (red). You can see how empowering the color coded forest is for distinguishing one species from another. 

Barberry is beautiful as well. If only wildlife could feast on beauty, we'd be all set.

Bush honeysuckle--here photographed mid-month with a background of pink winged euonymus--keeps its leaves longer than other nonnatives. Even after all that wind and rain, it could still be easily spotted, clinging to its leaves. 

A less common nonnative called jetbead (Rhodotypos scandens) has found its way into one area of Herrontown Woods near the little red barn. Like bush honeysuckle, it keeps its leaves late into the fall. Having blended in all summer, it suddenly becomes exposed this time of year, thanks to the color-coding.

Small patches of this unusual native grass, found thus far only in a couple spots along the ridge, are easily spotted now as well. 

You can see the long awn on the seed that gives this grass an attractive look, as if it has fancied itself up with long eyelashes. The coppery background leaf is beech, which will keep its leaves far into the winter, a reminder of November's color-coded artistry.

Past posts about the color-coded forest. 

Liz Cutler's Pressed Flower Art

This is a post to honor the work and artistry of one of Princeton's great environmental educators, Liz Cutler. I first knew Liz as founding director of the nonprofit OASIS (Organizing Action on Sustainability In Schools), which promoted sustainability at 23 area schools. As sustainability director at Princeton Day School, she organized school garden tours and climate summits focused on mobilizing and empowering the next generation. Once a year, PDS would send a hundred kids to Mountain Lakes for community workdays back when I was the resource manager there. Later, we served together on the Princeton Environmental Film Festival committee.

Since leaving PDS, Liz says she's been consulting with schools all over the country to help them become more environmentally sustainable. One particularly nice-sounding gig: she spent this past winter as Master Teacher-in-Residence at The Island School in The Bahamas helping their young faculty improve their teaching practice.

To her extraordinary environmental work has more recently been added extraordinary art, specifically pressed flower compositions. According to Liz, what "began as a meditation in 2020 has become a creative manifestation of my love of nature and of my life's work as an environmental educator." 

Less than two years after she started creating her many and varied compositions of pressed flowers, the Princeton Public Library hosted an exhibit of her work. 

She now has a website, LizCutlerPressedFlowers, where she makes prints of her original compositions available for purchase as lasting gifts. The website is an opportunity to check out all her lovely work, and includes a description of her process. Twenty percent of all proceeds go to benefit The Watershed Institute and the D&R Greenway Land Trust. 

The Pleasure and Aesthetics of Native Seed Collection

One of the more pleasurable and aesthetic outdoor experiences in the fall is gathering seeds. I claim no expertise, but adhere to one simple rule: let the stem below the seeds turn brown before harvesting. And harvest when the seeds are dry. Also, be messy. Let some of the seeds fall where they would have fallen if you hadn't come along to take some. Alright, that's three rules. But that last rule is especially enjoyable. How many times in your life have you been told to be messy? 

There are more official rules out there for seed collection, particularly of uncommon species, but nearly all the seeds I collect now are either from my backyard or the Botanical Art Garden, both of which I planted. It's gratifying to see these new populations of local genotypes thriving, and to expand their local presence further. 

The plants I harvest from tend to be generous towards a human tendency to procrastinate. Many species hold on to their seeds for months in the fall and into the winter. But the prettiest time to be picking them is sooner rather than later, as they become increasingly weathered and threadbare as winter progresses.

Harvest of wild senna, seen in the first photo at a lovely stage when the leaves contrast with the dark seed pods, can be postponed considerably, as the pods hold onto the seeds for months.

The bright, fluffy clusters of ironweed seeds are easy to identify on stems that can reach 8 feet.

Rose mallow hibiscus (Hibiscus moscheutos) holds its seeds in convenient cups. Best not to wait too long, because there's a slow attrition to spillage and insects as winter sets in.

As with other sedges, the seed clusters of morning star sedge (Carex grayi) will break apart as fall progresses. Some other local sedges with easily collectible seeds are squarrose sedge and fringed sedge.

The seeds of bottlebrush grass, attractively arranged along the stem, were already starting to fall off when I collected them in late October. Just grab the dried stem between thumb and finger and pull upward to strip the seeds. This is an attractive understory grass. 

The seeds of turtlehead (lower left in the photo) are still ripening, having shown their own form of procrastination, waiting until early fall to bloom.  

Collecting seed has extra meaning and purpose this fall, because many of them will be planted along a wooded slope in Herrontown Woods where a large clone of wisteria had pulled down some of the trees, creating openings where sun can reach the ground. Years of effort, particularly with the consistent, transformative work over the past year or two by volunteer Bill Jemas, has largely snuffed out the daunting wisteria clone that had taken over an acre or two, choking other growth as it steadily expanded along this broad hillside. It even somehow traversed the creek and was headed towards the Botanical Art Garden, adding another layer of urgency to knocking it out. Into the void created by our wisteria removal has come garlic mustard and stiltgrass, but this year we pulled those before they went to seed. 

With much of the slope now bare (the photo shows wisteria to the right, cleared areas to the left), it's time to introduce native plants. We could toss the seeds hither and yon, but I like to give them a better chance by being more deliberate. Deer are an issue, of course, given their appetite for native plants, and my plan is to plant seeds in small circles here and there, creating loci a couple feet wide. I like to scrape a thin layer of dirt away, scatter some seeds, then sprinkle some dirt on top and tamp it down. Then I'll place a 3 foot high plant cage around each circle. Those that grow inside the cage should be protected enough to mature and produce seed that can then scatter beyond the cage on its own in subsequent years. 

It's actually a good way to find out which species the deer leave alone, and which they munch on. We are, in a way, creating "deer feeders" by protecting a few plants inside the cages--plants that each year spread beyond the cages, where the deer can eat them. This approach has been successful at the Barden. Thanks to the town's investment in annual deer culling, many of the plants that sprout beyond the cage survive. 

Of course, all of this thus far is talk. Procrastination is a particularly powerful factor when it comes to getting plants or seeds in the ground. There's so much other work to be done! What's real and lovely, and has actually happened, is the seed collecting.