40 Princeton University Students Come to Herrontown Woods

It's always such a pleasure to give Princeton University students in Professor Andy Dobson's Ecology of Fields, Rivers, and Woodlands course a tour of Herrontown Woods. The students get to see the good things that can happen when a professor takes an interest in local nature beyond the boundaries of the University, as Oswald Veblen and his wife did some 90 years ago when they started acquiring this land that became Princeton's first nature preserve. Andy is carrying on that tradition, with a class that has grown to 40 students.

Perhaps the most engaging moment came when I demonstrated the exploding seedpods of the native jewelweed. 

At the Barden, we gathered around the combination of intention and serendipity of a miniature frog pond where a green frog continues its residency.

FOHW board member Inge Regan spoke of the parallels she sees between her profession as a physician and the work of botanists to heal a nature preserve. "Physicians of the earth," she calls us. 

There were many examples of healing: our successful battle against invasive wisteria that had previously smothered the landscape around the Veblen House, and the rebounding native vegetation since the town's initiative 25 years ago to reduce auto accidents and the intense browsing pressure on native plants by culling the deer herd. 

Along the "voulevarde" boardwalk we stopped by the pergola built out of wood milled from fallen trees in the preserve by our chainsaw virtuoso Victorino and his assistant Wilbur. I spoke of the rot-resistant wood from black locust, as well as white oak and red oak, used in construction.

Given the large number of students, they came in a schoolbus. This may be the first yellow schoolbus to ever visit Herrontown Woods, unless public school students were being bused there back in the 1960s/70s when Herrontown Woods was the center of environmental education in Mercer County. 

Subtleties and Histories of 70 Years of Trail Markers at Herrontown Woods

Thanks to volunteer MaryJoan Gaynor, some paint and some aluminum sheeting, we were able to update some of our trail markers recently at Herrontown Woods. 

There are many ways to mark a trail--with plastic, metal, or even paint right on the tree--but we use these homemade metal markers affixed with aluminum nails. Decades hence, a steel nail long buried in a fallen tree could break a chainsaw blade. Always good to think ahead!

Note that the nail is only hammered partway in, preferably just far enough into the bark to hold securely.

Why not hammer the nail all the way in? If the nail is deeply embedded, the tree's growth will ultimately swallow both the nail and the marker, as this tree is starting to do.

There are multiple generations of trail markers in Herrontown Woods. Back when Kurt Tazelaar, Sally and I--the founders of the Friends of Herrontown Woods--were reopening the trails back in 2013, these wooden markers helped us find the old trails. Someone told us that girlscouts had put these markers in decades prior. 

That was such an adventure, cutting through fallen trees, looking for clues to where the trails once led. Recreating a lost trail system had the feeling of the frontier, and yet we were living in Princeton.

Hope's Community Collage Unveiled

This year, the annual Veblen Birthday Bash was devoted to unveiling a Community Collage on the outside wall of Veblen House in Herrontown Woods. 

Conceived and developed by FOHW's board member and artist in residence, Hope VanCleaf (wearing a hat in the photo), this work of collective art brings together many individual hand-crafted tiles contributed by community members, combining forest photography, natural materials, and original artwork. As described in an article in the Town Topics, the collage "celebrates the wonders of nature and serves as a token of appreciation for the woods and the Veblen House renovation."

After a bit of ceremony and a speech or two, some of the artists posed with the Collage, including Herrontown Woods neighbor and volunteer, Lisa Boulanger, who contributed several tiles. 

People lingered in the ideal weather, clustered around handhewn tables in many different conversations, well beyond when the fireflies made their presence known. Mathilde Burlion and Andrew Thornton gave tours of May's Garden, and Sustainable Jazz with Phil Orr on piano and Steve Hiltner on reeds sent all-original music wafting across the grounds. A new term was coined, "treeverb", referring to the complex enrichment of tones caused by each tree reflecting back sounds at a different pace. 

Lead organizer of the 2026 Veblen Birthday Bash was FOHW board member Inge Regan. The Community Collage will be made waterproof and then exhibited on the Veblen House outside wall as part of an "Inside-Out Museum" featuring art and Herrontown history.