Barden Egg Hunt Brings Delight

Not every Easter egg hunt features a bagpiper striding down the Barden path, leading a procession of children to a table of games and goodies. But then, not every egg hunt is led by Mathilde Burlion, who honed her bagpipe chops in the south of France, where music is part of the spring migration up the slopes of the Pyrenees to higher pastures, though probably sans bunny ears. 

Working at the Barden as part of our weekly Sunday morning stewardship session, pulling weeds and propagating native plants, I could still pick up on the joy of the event. Written on the children's faces was that look of anticipation and concentration as they headed down a pathway to begin the search, basket in hand. The Barden has never been so thoroughly scrutinized by young eyes as it was during the search for hidden eggs. 

Part of the event happened the day before, when kids and adults gathered to paint the eggs and hide them. Some of the plastic eggs held candy, but others held little treasures that, when gathered together Sunday at the table in the gazebo, were incorporated into art projects. 

One of the boys, having helped hide eggs the previous day, hid them so well that only he could find them. That allowed him to come late on Sunday and still find some eggs. Nice strategy. 

The many egg hunt activities slowly gave way to adults and families out for a Sunday walk on a lovely cool day. Helping out before and during the event was our part-time caretaker, Andrew Thornton, whose combination of work ethic and whimsy adds so much to the Barden experience. Thanks to everyone who helped make this such a delightful community event.

Wood Dragons, Lanterns, and Song--Celebrating the Chinese New Year

February 24 was a very special day at the Botanical Art Garden in Herrontown Woods.  Community celebrations of the Chinese New Year had begun two weeks prior, when in the morning sun, the air cool and crisp, dragons began to appear in the Barden, first on the gazebo, 

then on a small leaning tree. 
 

Another dragon strode down the wooden bridge fashioned years ago from fallen trees.

By mid-afternoon, people had gathered, too, some 200 in all, for a dragon parade, traditional Chinese songs and games, and a tea party--all part of a festive community gathering in nature.

As described in a wonderful article in the Town Topics, 

To the beat of red Chinese drums, children and adults carrying colorful dragons paraded through the winding paths of the Botanical Art Garden, known as “the Barden.” Children sang traditional new year songs, guests enjoyed tea and tangerines, and the Herrontown Woods visitors played traditional games like jianzi and ribbon dancing.

Some of the more adventurous participants joined FOHW president Steve Hiltner for a lantern walk up to Veblen House. 

The event was the brain child of Danni Zhao, who founded United Moms and recently completed a PhD in economics at Princeton University. She was inspired by the nature of Herrontown Woods, and also by the nature of this especially auspicious year of the wood dragon. Again, from the Town Topics article:

“The wood dragon, known for its cooperative, upbeat, and understanding nature, symbolizes a year of growth and stability, especially in relationships,” Zhao wrote in a press release. “It brings both the promise of fortune and new opportunities according to the Chinese zodiac. This made our event at Herrontown Woods particularly special, blending the wood dragon’s symbolism with the serene beauty of nature.”

Danni teamed with FOHW board member Inge Regan, and as they worked together over several weeks the event took shape.

Though this was probably the largest event we have hosted to date at the Botanical Art Garden, there was no sense of overcrowding, as kids and adults spread down the many paths that wind through the grounds, exploring the Barden's numerous nooks and crannies.  

After an afternoon of joyful processions 'round the gazebo and down the garden path, this dragon collapsed on a table for a well-deserved rest. 

One doesn't usually think of February as a time for outdoor events, but somehow the weather felt just right. Coats and dragons helped keep us warm.

Dinosaur Tracks Found in Excavated Rocks Near Herrontown Woods

In 2023, the development of a woodlot at the corner of Van Dyke and Snowden Lane was finally begun. As heavy equipment graded the site, excavations of underlying sedimentary rock yielded a giant pile of rocks that sat for months near the road. One day, Lisa Boulanger, a Herrontown Woods neighbor with an interest in dinosaurs and geology, took a closer look at the rocks, and found several fossils, including a dinosaur footprint.

Here is her description of what she found, sent to me in an email in June. The upper Triassic is a geologic periodic that ended 200 million years ago. She said that fossils were also found in a similar excavation for the Princeton University library years ago. 

"Attached are some photos of rocks from the Prentice Woods construction site on Snowden Lane, near Herrontown Woods. Excavation for basements exposed part of the Newark Supergroup, the Passaic formation, that is from the upper Triassic. (Interestingly the same Newark formation cuts right through the center of CT, where I grew up, so the rocks are very familiar-looking.)

I split one slab and got the positive and negative of what may be a partial print from some kind of vertebrate, but it's not well-preserved enough to tell what.

I knew they were hitting some layers that had been ancient shoreline, because I found shoreline ripples in the stone.

There are also many big slabs of fossilized mud with dessication cracks, another good sign of areas that were inundated and then dried.

I found one invertebrate track, a type called Cruziana.

And then finally I found one clear print, most likely a rear foot ("pes"; the front feet are "manus"), possibly from an Atreipes.

(Of note, both Cruziana and Atreipes are what the tracks are called - it's not the name of an animal.) I just went back to the site today, and the track has been damaged, so probably not worth trying to haul it out. This rock doesn't weather well once exposed, it tends to crumble. (Note footprint to the left of the sticks on the rock in the photo below.)"

The huge pile of rocks is now gone, but we are very grateful to Lisa for sharing this photographic record of the ancient history that lay just a few feet beneath the ground near Herrontown Woods. 

The Toil and Reward of Rerouting Trails

The cool winter weather has been ideal for working on improving and rerouting some trails at Herrontown Woods. 

Some of the motivation is to bypass chronically muddy areas, but the best reroutes highlight previously hidden features of the preserve--quarried rocks, giant trees, or inspiring vistas out across a valley. The first reroutes of this sort were done by Kurt and Sally Tazelaar, who helped found the Friends of Herrontown Woods in 2013. The trail adjustments we are making now carry on that tradition.

Scott Sillars, Andrew Thornton, and I have been the most focused on this effort. The aim is to have two new reroutes in place in time to be featured during our April 13 Earthday celebration.

The process I like to use for creating a new trail route is to be intentionally unspecific as to the actual route the path will ultimately take. That way, we are motivated to first clear a wide swath of forest of the all too numerous invasive nonnative shrubs. The mass dieoff of ash trees has created many openings in the canopy, channeling solar energy down to the shrub layer, where nonnative shrubs compete with the native species. Highly invasive winged euonymus, with its "wings" along the stem, is super easy to identify in the winter. A more seasoned eye can also identify the nonnative Linden viburnum, Photinia and privet shrubs that crowd in on the native spicebush, blueberries, and blackhaw Viburnum. 

And of course there are many multiflora rose bushes that, with their vicious thorns, have made so many forested areas impossible to explore. These, too, must be subdued and hopefully extinguished, with the greatest of care to avoid the thorns. The liberation of native species from weedy incursion, using a pair of loppers and a Buckthorn Blaster, can itself be deeply satisfying, regardless of what trail ultimately takes shape. We are making the forest navigable again, seeable again, welcoming again.

Another advantage of working in the winter is that we don't disturb the spring ephemeral wildflowers that will emerge come spring. Work on several trail reroutes is on hold until the spring ephemerals have come up, the better to avoid building the new trail over top of them.

The first reroute, just completed, avoids a muddy seepage area on the yellow trail, and instead takes hikers through an area where past quarrying of the diabase boulders has left the hillside dotted with vernal pools.

We had just opened the new route when our first hikers showed up. Emma Kohn had brought some of her friends from Equador to see Herrontown Woods. 

Fun to see the boy lingering to count tree rings where Victorino had cut an opening for the trail through fallen trees.

Other trail projects in the works are an extension of the blue trail through what we're calling The Valley of the Giants, and some reroutes to improve the experience for hikers entering from Princeton Community Village. 

Special Clay at Herrontown Woods

We've had people of many sorts and interests visit Herrontown Woods--botanists, geologists, historians, birders, ecologists, herbalists, herpetologists, architects, a dry stone waller--all drawn to a particular facet of this multi-dimensional place. This post, about a ceramicist's visit, began with a conversation at one of our monthly May's Cafes at the Barden. Maybe we were talking about Toshiko Takaezu, the celebrated ceramicist who is said to have gathered clay for her pottery at Herrontown Woods, but in any case someone told me that there is an artist at the Arts Council of Princeton who is sampling clay from various locations in our region. I contacted Adam Welch, executive director of the Arts Council and himself a potter, for more information.

That someone canvasing clay in NJ turned out to be Ryan Lilienthal, the Arts Council's current resident artist. He was enthusiastic about visiting Herrontown Woods, and as it happened, he visited Toshiko's studio the day before coming. 

He brought a friend along, and I showed them a few places where I had encountered particularly dense clay. Ryan began digging, and was soon demonstrating "the worm test," in which soil is rolled into the shape of a worm. If it holds together, that means the soil's clay content is high. 

I have grown to love and respect clay, for the very reasons many gardeners dislike it. The denseness of clay slows water's passage through it, allowing water to linger on the surface. That water, if the clay is sufficiently dense, will form vernal pools in spring where frogs and salamanders can gather to breed and lay eggs. Many native plant species also thrive in areas where clay keeps the ground wet. Sedges, rushes, and wildflowers like hibiscus, ironweed, and cutleaf coneflower all thrive where sunlight reaches the wet ground made possible by clay. 

Ryan proved to be a kindred spirit. A longtime painter, he has in recent years taken a passionate interest in clay, and reveled in the mud that Herrontown Woods holds in abundance.

That clay comes in many colors--usually brown, but sometimes grey, and sometimes with an orange cast that reflects a higher iron content. Understanding clay in its many forms, and the forces that led to its creation from the underlying rocks, is a lifelong study in and of itself.

Ryan collected samples from several locations, placing shovel fulls in large ziplock bags, to take home and test. 

One of the tests he conducts is to make a brick out of the collected clay. A week after his visit, he sent me a photo of one of the bricks made out of Herrontown Woods clay. 

Where might this exploration of local clay lead? A possible next step that Ryan talked about is pit firing pottery, that is, using the ground as a kiln to fire the clay. 

In so doing, Ryan would take us back, or forward, to an era when people interacted with nature by making stuff. A government website about New Jersey's geology provides a dramatic contrast between how clay was used in the past, and how it is mostly used now to, alas, cover mountains of trash:

Back in the day, hundreds of thousands of tons of clay dug in Central New Jersey was used to make bricks, pottery, roofing tile, and other useful products. Most of the clay that is currently mined in New Jersey is used to seal the tops of landfills. 

The purpose, by the way, of putting a thick layer of clay on top of a landfill is to prevent rainwater from seeping into the pile of trash, where it might then flow down through the garbage and into the underlying aquifer, picking up toxins along the way. Instead, rain hits the impervious clay and runs off the landfill, keeping the contents dry and the groundwater supposedly unpolluted. Nice to think of the clay in Herrontown Woods' soil as cradling the rain in vernal pools for slow infiltration, rather than shedding it.

The "cultural zone" of Herrontown Woods--the area between the Veblen Cottage, Veblen House, and the main parking lot--was historically used to make stuff. The land was cleared to grow food. Boulders were quarried for trap rock. Trees were harvested for firewood or used for building. Though I'm glad they stopped hauling away rocks from the ridge (we like our boulder-studded forest!), there's something honest about local harvest. Now, we manage the land for native diversity, which is important, but it's also very satisfying to find utility in the landscape. We cut boards from fallen trees to make a boardwalk, and have started to grow some food near Veblen House. We collaborate with nature at the Botanical Art Garden. What a fine thing if clay, cursed by so many gardeners, becomes yet another source of art, utility, and wonder at Herrontown Woods. 

To get more of a sense of how clay was mined and used historically in Princeton, read Clifford Zink's history of Jugtown, in which he describes the use of local clay to make bricks and pottery in the Jugtown neighborhood of Princeton. 

Tales of Winter Toil to Improve Trails at Autumn Hill Reservation

People tend to think of winter as a dormant time for the outdoors. The woods around Princeton seem static, with the color palette reduced to infinite shades of gray and brown. For a preserve manager, however, it's this dormancy that makes now the best of times to be working on trails and habitat. Invasive shrubs in full summer growth somehow feel much more intimidating. At Autumn Hill Reservation, which is tended to by the Friends of Herrontown Woods, winter is the best time to carve through dense stands of invasives to shift some trails to dryer ground and more interesting routes.

Most people know about Autumn Hill's most charismatic feature: this abandoned automobile. 

Fewer have noticed this plaque at a homestead site nearby, where pachysandra and bottlebrush buckeye speak to past habitation. But in some other areas of Autumn Hill's 70 acres, trails pass through less than engaging seas of invasive shrubs.

 

We've tried to add to the interest by looking for other landmarks to feature along trails. Last winter, one reroute incorporated a tree whose rootball had lifted four hefty boulders up when it fell. A bit uncanny: I was actually standing ten feet away, looking at it when one of the boulders fell back to the ground. The root ball is still holding onto the other three. 

It's heartening to see that the humble signage has not strayed from where we put it to help with navigating the new routes.

Winter rains highlight a few spots where we still need to either reroute trails or install a boardwalk. We grieved when this tree fell--probably the last wild butternut in Autumn Hill Reservation, pointed out to us by arborist Bob Wells when it was still alive. The wood is said to be good for carving, if we can get some of it out of the woods. FOHW has been planting butternuts elsewhere to see if we can bring back this largely lost species.

A recent success stories in Autumn Hill is the reroute of a chronically wet trail onto higher ground along a previously hidden old rock wall. It looks relatively tame now, but reclaiming this high ground for a trail required a major battle with dense and often thorny invasive shrubs. Multiflora rose, border privet, Linden viburnum, autumn olive, asian photinia, winged euonymus--this is the usual cast of characters in backyards and preserves town-wide that displaces native species more edible for wildlife. Cutting invasives to create a better trail counts as a win-win. While liberating spicebush, blueberries, and flowering dogwoods from competition, we get to expose interesting rock wall features and improve the hiking experience. I guess that's a win-win-win, which makes the work more rewarding. Simply by using the trail, hikers helped to maintain it. One year later, remembering the toil of creation, it's a pleasure to walk this trail and see how dry it is, despite recent heavy rains.

This winter, we're cutting through dense invasive shrubs to shift wet portions of the yellow trail to higher ground. Just to show what we're dealing with, here are three different species of invasive vine growing up a native tree: Asian bittersweet, Japanese honeysuckle, and multiflora rose. The latter is a thorny shrub that sometimes grows up trees as if it were a vine. Winter is a great time to cut these vines at the base. A "buckthorn blaster" is used to prevent regrowth.

Japanese stiltgrass makes these mops of light brown where it sprawled during late summer. Even this super invasive annual grass seems less intimidating in the winter, when it survives only as billions of seeds in the ground. 

One of the more positive stories in Princeton's nature preserves is the rebound of the native spicebush since the town began culling the deer herd in 2000. When I came to Princeton 20 years ago, spicebush were rare in the woods, and they looked like this, with a buzzcut of intensely browsed stems at the base of one mature trunk. With fewer deer to eat them, they have become numerous again, with many trunks reaching maturity. But this one, growing next to a trail frequented by the deer, shows what all spicebush used to look like. 

Despite the cold and color deprivation of winter, work in Autumn Hill Reservation lifts our spirits. It was ten years ago when Friends of Herrontown Woods made Autumn Hill's trails passable again. Each year, with incremental interventions, we can highlight more of the preserve's long hidden beauty and make it easier and more fun to hike there.

Princeton Outdoor Action Comes to Herrontown Woods

On a bright afternoon, made brighter by recycled light bouncing off the snow, a lively group of students from Princeton University came to Herrontown Woods for a hike. 

They are part of a university organization called Outdoor Action, which organizes trips near and far between semesters. According to trip coordinator Demyan Hryciw, the students also make visits to help out with stewardship. 

There are countless stories to be told of local nature, some upbeat, some not so much. Encountering many dead ash trees cut down for safety's sake, the students learned about the Emerald Ash Borer. Many seemed not to have heard that our most common tree in Princeton is being lost to the ravages of an introduced insect. 

More positive was a visit to May's Garden. Named after Elizabeth "May" Veblen, it was rediscovered near Veblen House after removal of invasive shrubs and vines. Volunteers had gotten so far as to stretch fencing around the remaining cedar posts. The garden remained largely dormant for a couple years, until a dedicated gardener came forward to restore the garden and begin teaching kids about growing food. Herrontown Woods is a patient place that waits for people of passion to bring its many facets back to life.

It's a delight to see university students exploring beyond the university's borders in Princeton, and to introduce them to a nature preserve that one university professor with a vision created for the community long ago. 

Thanks to Demyan for the photos.

Related post: Princeton University Students Study Local Nature

Seeking Safe Bike and Pedestrian Access to Herrontown Woods Along Snowden Lane

How can bicyclists and pedestrians get to Herrontown Woods and Smoyer Park from nearby neighborhoods? Snowden Lane has long been a narrow road with steep ditches on either side,

creating a hazard even for cars. In recent years, houses have popped up along this stretch, transforming a charming country road into a suburban street. It's time to add sidewalks so that Herrontown Woods and Smoyer Park are no longer isolated from the neighborhoods they are supposed to serve. 

Yet we're told that any bikeway would be too expensive, given the presence of wetlands, specifically where Snowden crosses a tributary of Harry's Brook. 

Here is a status report, and a potential low-cost solution. 

First, some good news: There's now a bikeway along the edge of Windy Top. But to make this stretch of bikeway useful, additions need to be made at either end.

At the north end, at the top of the hill, the Windy Top bikeway deadends, 250 feet short of the entrances to Herrontown Woods and Smoyer Park. Can the town fill in this gap?

Meanwhile, at the downhill, southern end of the Windy Top portion of bikeway, the Prentice development is going in, and has already laid the gravel bed for a bikeway that will extend down to Van Dyke Road. This is great news. If the town can complete that pesky 250 feet mentioned above, we will soon have a bikeway accessible to anyone approaching from Van Dyke.

But how to extend the bikeway down Snowden Lane along what is called "the gauntlet" that separates the parks from the Littlebrook neighborhood? 

Can the town use the Windy Top approach (in the photo) and extend the bikeway along the edge of that section of road as well?

With a paved bikeway on the right (west) side, that could extend the bikeway most of the way to Overbrook Drive.

But before the bikeway can get safely to the sidewalk that starts at Overbrook Drive, it first must get across a stream, and a paved bikeway might not be allowed in the floodplain of a stream.

One approach might be to make this portion, going down to the stream and up the other side, more of an unpaved pathway. Permission would be needed from the homeowners on either side of the stream.

And for getting over the stream, there's a lovely old stone bridge that few have noticed, but which is worth preserving.

This old bridge is right next to the newer one used by cars on Snowden Lane. Extend the pathway up the other side and you can connect with an existing bikeway that heads to Littlebrook Elementary school and downtown Princeton. 

A dialogue with town staff would be needed in order to see if this approach could possibly be used.