A New Sign for Herrontown Woods

Thanks to the municipality of Princeton for installing a new sign along Snowden Lane for Herrontown Woods. The sign was designed by a consultant with input from the town open space manager, Inga Reich.

Importantly, it includes an arrow to point visitors in the right direction, and a salamander to celebrate the various species of amphibians that call Herrontown Woods home. 

Thanks to Britt for these photos of salamanders she and her kids recently found in the preserve.

Here's a red salamander, 

and here's a northern two-lined salamander.

The new sign is greatly welcomed. One of the posts of the old sign had rotted, and the words had nearly faded from one side. 

The old sign included the word "Arboretum." That was not original to the Veblens, but was added later by the Mercer County, more aspirational than official. We have, however, started towards getting arboretum designation. Volunteer Alastair Binnie has been leading an initiative to create a "Tour of Trees" with maps and signage to identify many of the 55 species of trees found at Herrontown Woods thus far.

The old sign may prove useful if we create an arboretum area within the preserve.

Our Annual Birthday Celebration of the Veblens

Every year we throw a Veblen Birthday Bash in June to honor Oswald and Elizabeth Veblens' role in founding the open space movement in Princeton. They were born on the 24th and the 2nd of June, respectively.

This year's celebration was particularly successful, with lots of socializing, lawn games, live music, and displays documenting our accomplishments and plans for the future. 

Of particular note was a display put together by our new architect, Paul Buda, who showed off some of his past work and ideas for restoring the Veblen House and Cottage.

While pianist Phil Orr and I, known as the Sustainable Jazz Duo, performed our original latin and jazz music.

There were all sorts of productive conversations about where the Friends of Herrontown Woods has been and where it's going. Town council members David Cohen and Leighton Newlin came to learn more about our work and offer their ideas. 

Inge Regan, seated on the right, was the primary organizer of the event, with lots of help and encouragement from board members Angelique, Hope, and Pallavi. 

Clifford Zink, an architectural historian who has been our longtime advisor, came to join in the conversation.

Mathilde and Ninfa gave tours of May's Garden. Located just down from the Veblen House, where Elizabeth ("May") Veblen once propagated flowers, the expanded garden now serves as a setting for Mathilde's Grow Little Gardener classes.

Later in the evening, as the fireflies began to join us, it was very moving and healing to have a Native American, Carlos Eagle Feather, sing a song of gratitude, honoring and connecting the work we do to the love his ancestors had for the Herrontown Woods lands.

The west side of the Veblen House provided a backdrop for displays of the past year's accomplishments.

There was the Princeton Salamander Crossing Brigade's work to protect salamanders during their spring migration, 

a special approach to circus called Circus Quercus, led by Zoe Brooks in the stone circle next to Veblen House, 

our interns, Ninfa and Moss, funded by a grant from Green Matters,

a Herrontown Woods Community Collage project led by our board member and Artist in Residence, Hope Van Cleaf, 

May's Garden Club led by master gardener Mathilde Burlion, 

and scenes from our work this past year with Princeton High School students to manage two PHS detention basins for native flora. 

Earlier in the day, Robert Budny and his daughter Sophia had helped me display our work in front of one of the basins, as part of a Ciclovia event. 

All in all a full and joyous day for the living, honoring those who came before. Thanks to everyone for making it possible. 

What's Bloomin' in the Barden? -- July 2, 2025

The Botanical Art Garden at Herrontown Woods, nicknamed the Barden and packed with more than 150 species of native plants, has a steady stream of blooms through the summer. This is a rich, complex, dynamic landscape that contrasts with the more static "trees n' turf" landscapes we tend to see around town. Walk the paths of the Barden and see if you can find the latest flowers to unfold.

Bottlebrush buckeye (Aesculus parviflora) is a popular shrub for landscaping. Native to the southeast U.S., it creates abundant flowers in the shape of a bottlebrush, pollinated by many kinds of insects, including the beautiful syrinx moth.

Another attractive shrub of the southeastern U.S. is the oak-leaved hydrangia (Hydrangia quercifolia). Though its natural range is centered in Alabama, it graces many yards in Princeton with its large blooms and rich fall color.

Growing in the swale next to the parking lot is lizard's tail, named for the shape of its squiggly spires of flowers. It's latin name is pretty squiggly as well: Saururus cernuus. Like pickerelweed and arrowhead, it thrives in wet ground, and can be found growing along the shores of Lake Carnegie. It can spread once established.

Shrubby St. Johnswort, deer resistant and growing to four feet high, provides a month-long display of small yellow flowers. Its latin name, Hypericum prolificum, could refer to its many flowers or the many new plants it can produce from seed, which we pot up and make available for sale.

One of my favorite wildflowers is tall meadowrue (Thalictrum pubescens), which grows in an informal way with tall, topply stems. Its clouds of delicate, miniature flowers attract miniature pollinators. 

Pokeweed can get as big as a shrub, even though it dies back down to the roots each fall. It can provoke ambivalence, looking sometimes weedy, sometimes elegant. The course vegetation contrasts with the beautiful flowers and berries. In North Carolina, I once saw a man carrying an armful of the spring foliage home to cook in a special way. 

While pokeweed (Phytolacca americana) can imitate a shrub, its relative in Argentina, the ombu (Phytolacca dioica), forms an unorthodox tree with spongy wood.

The Barden is a special habitat seldom seen in Princeton. We intentionally manage it as an open woodland where shrubs get enough sunlight to form abundant berries for the birds. My love of elderberries extends back to childhood and the delicious pies and jellies we made from its berries, which will turn dark purple when ripe.

Pagoda Dogwood -- A Comeback Story

It was a great surprise, many years ago, when I first encountered a pagoda dogwood in Herrontown Woods. Though its leaves have the classically arc-shaped veins, this is not the highly ornamental flowering dogwood. Nor is it the silky dogwood often found in floodplains. Also called alternate-leaved dogwood (Cornus alternifolia), its discovery took me back to field botany days in the 1970s, when a charismatic University of Michigan botanist, Herb Wagner, introduced us to many of the less common flora. 

I'm guessing the discovery in Herrontown Woods was about ten years ago, and at that time I could find only two specimens of pagoda dogwood in the preserve. One was thriving, the other dying, possibly of an introduced anthracnose disease. Encountering no others, I assumed the species was barely hanging on and in danger of succumbing altogether. 

But the one remaining specimen continued to grow, now more than twenty feet tall, and fortuitously created many progeny when a lower branch touched the ground and took root. Some of these I carefully dug up and divided, then planted in various spots where I'd remember to care for them. 

Initially caged and watered, two of the new specimens took hold in the Barden, thriving in spots sunny enough to generate many blooms this spring. 

Then, within the past couple years, much to my surprise, I began encountering the distinctive reddish stems of young pagoda dogwoods scattered here and there in the preserve, along a stream or up on the ridge. I'd say they are expanding on their own, without any help from people, but it's also true that the town's deer-culling may have reduced the browsing pressure on native woody plants sufficiently for these younger specimens to grow large enough to be noticed. As they grow, their branching will take on the characteristic tiered, pagoda-like shape.

It's rare, in this tragic time, when treasured species like ash and beech are being laid low by introduced pathogens, to find what looks and feels like a resurgence. This post is written in mid-spring, when the foliage is fresh, the birds have returned, periodic rains soften the soil and feed the vernal pools, and a string of deliciously cool days ease the tending of nature's garden. So much in the world is broken. There is so much to grieve, and yet the woods can still fill one with good news.

Postscript: Another comeback story is the butternut tree, a native that had been laid low but is becoming more numerous in town due to some timely intervention years back, along with some ongoing care. Kind of a fun story: I was telling a resident at Princeton Community Village about the butternut tree the other day. She had never heard of it, but a light went off in her head. Charmingly, the roads at PCV are named after trees. with names like Juniper Row, Sassafras Row, Tupelo Row, and Red Oak Row. She had always wondered why there was also a Butternut Row, which she assumed was named after a squash. Now she knows it too is a tree, one that still grows in Princeton, like and unlike all the others. 

Herrontown Woods in the News -- Salamanders and Wet Meadows

There have been some excellent recent writeups in local news media about the Friends of Herrontown Woods' work in the community, in Town Topics, TapInto Princeton, and the PPS District News.

The first was by Carolyn Jones in TapInto Princeton, entitled "How To Save the Salamanders? In Princeton a Volunteer Brigade Helps Out," about FOHW's Princeton Salamander Crossing Brigade--a group put together by FOHW board member Inge Regan that includes community volunteers, high school students, teachers, professors--all taking a keen interest in helping amphibians migrate safely across Herrontown Road in the spring on their way to vernal pools, where they lay their eggs. 

Soon thereafter came a student writeup in the Princeton Public Schools District News about FOHW's collaboration with PHS Environmental Science students and teacher Jim Smirk to turn a detention basin at the highschool into a native wet meadow. 

Don Gilpin followed up on that with a front page article in the Town Topics about our work at the high school. Along with collecting data in the basin, the students are weeding out invasive species and planting natives. Our "Iwo Jima" photo shows the students lifting a tool shed into place that will also collect rainwater for watering plants. The shed was built from scavenged materials by FOHW volunteer Robert Chong. The rainbarrels were donated by Jenny Ludmer of Sustainable Princeton. 

The outdoor learning the students are getting, ranging from applied analytical skills to plant identification, including how to safely and effectively use garden tools, will serve them well in life. Combining the physical and the intellectual, whether helping amphibians at Herrontown Woods or tending to a complex plant community at the high school, reflects the active stewardship Oswald and Elizabeth Veblen valued and hoped to encourage when they donated Herrontown Woods nearly 70 years ago. 

Princeton Grad Students Help Out at Herrontown Woods

One of my favorite things to do at Herrontown Woods is to restore habitat with a group of grad students from SPIA. That's the Princeton School of Policy and International Affairs, formerly known as the Woodrow Wilson school. 

Mariah Lima is the organizer. She somehow discovered Herrontown Woods last year, and this time, for what she called "SPIA Forest Crew Part 2", she brought six friends: Nadia, Rebecca, Caroline, (Mariah), Derek, Veronica, and Matteo.  

It was one of those inspiring spring days, when the shadbush is in bloom, 

when the opulent leaves of skunk cabbage form green ribbons along the streams, 

and when newborn tadpoles nibble algae growing around masses of salamander eggs in a vernal pool.

We decided to work in an area of intense restoration, where years of work had finally slain a giant 3-acre wisteria monster, making room for native species to be planted. 

There were still some garlic mustards to be pulled, and considerable satisfaction to be had in digging out remnant sprouts of thorny Japanese angelica trees with the claw of a hammer, for lack of a better tool.

Rebecca and Nadia planted loci of native seed--ironweed, JoePyeWeed, and coneflower--covering the seed with a thin layer of soil and tamping it down.

Mariah, Derek, and Matteo made cages to protect newly planted elderberry shrubs from browsing deer.

A pileated woodpecker had preceded us, chowing down on insects hidden in a fallen log. Such a pleasure to participate in nature's dynamic cycling of life with a spirited crew at Herrontown Woods. 

Late Winter Blooms at Veblen House

Even before spring officially begins its sweep through the landscape, the Veblen House grounds come alive with blooms.  

Particularly prolific in expanse and blooms are the snowdrops that grace the grounds with white in mid-March, echoing the patches of lichen on the boulders. 

Down below the Veblen House, near the fishpond, are some other early wildflowers mixed in: crocuses, the yellow of winter aconite, and the blue flowers of Scilla, also called Siberian squill. All of these flowers are nonnative, but they do not spread into the surrounding woodlands.

Veblen House was once the meeting place for the Dogwood Garden Club, of which Elizabeth Veblen was a founding member. These flowers date back to those times, with another pulse of planting energy happening during the Bicentennial in 1976, a couple years after Elizabeth passed away. 

Showing up even earlier than these early spring flowers, and far more subtle, are the catkins hanging in profusion from native hazelnut shrubs we rescued and propagated. These grow near May's Garden, which long ago served as Elizabeth "May" Veblen's garden, and has been reborn in recent years as a teaching garden for kids.

It was quite a job to cut and clear some 25 dead ash trees from the woodlot near the house this past winter. If left standing they would have become hazardous. Thanks to Victorino for his skillful felling of the trees, and to Andrew and Ninfa for cleaning up the debris. This patch of lawn is often used for croquet. Other games like horseshoes and bags can be found elsewhere on the grounds. 

The flowers of mid-March serve as prelude to the bigger show to come, as thousands of daffodils burst forth in coming weeks. Many of these were planted by Elizabeth Veblen herself after she and her husband purchased the property nearly 85 years ago, in 1941. 

We are careful not to mow down the daffodils after they bloom, leaving their foliage to collect solar energy to drive next year's flowers.

Soft Open for Firmer Trails at Autumn Hill Reservation

If you haven't been to Autumn Hill Reservation in a while, this would be a good time to check it out. A three year revisioning of the trails to make them drier and more scenic is now essentially complete, and we're doing what could be called a "soft open" on the newest sections. 

Signs give hikers a gentle nudge away from the old trails and towards the new. 

This winter's revisions bypass wet areas and follow ridgelines and historic rockwalls that date back to when this land was farmed 100+ years ago. 

Our wonderful mapmaker from Maine, Alison Carver, is already converting my scrawl and tracking files into a new map. The new configuration, with a new "blue" trail, should give hikers more options for exploring the preserve.

Thanks goes to Andrew and Ninfa for their help in clearing myriad invasive shrubs that were growing along the trail corridor. One of the satisfactions of trail creation is the habitat restoration that happens at the same time. Spared from our loppers were the many native spicebush, wild grape, and tree saplings growing along the routes.

With safety in mind, after the routes are cleared, our chainsaw virtuoso Victorino comes in with his assistant Wilbur and clears hazard trees, usually ash trees that were killed in recent years by the introduced emerald ash borer. Here, Victorino is checking to make sure the dead tree he is about to cut down will be able to fall cleanly to the ground. Note the clever ladder he cut from a tree branch so that he can reach the trunk to cut it.

Note also the Asian bittersweet vine climbing up the tree in the foreground. We cut as many of those as we can as part of the restoration work.

Occasionally I ask Victorino to sharpen the blade of my little electric chainsaw so that I can handle the small stuff.

Victorino also cuts some potential table tops from fallen ash trees that have interesting grain--tables that will tell the story of this forest in their tree rings.

A lot of thanks goes to those who support the Friends of Herrontown Woods with donations that make the work of Andrew, Ninfa, Victorino and Wilbur possible.

In other news from Autumn Hill, as of Feb. 28, there were still three big diabase boulders being held up to the sky by the rootball of this fallen tree. (I happened to be standing ten feet from this fine dental display when the first one fell, a couple years ago.)

But by March 6, only two remained. This drama has been playing out since the tree fell 5-10 years ago, lifting the root-tangled boulders up out of the ground. Don't you sometimes wish the pace of news in the world was more Autumn Hillian?