Last week while listing the many pleasures of my life, I included “watching the seasons change in our woods”. “Our woods” is a block of land directly across the street from our house. One hundred years ago it was part of a farm; since then it has attempted to follow the laws of natural succession and revert back to the forest it was before the settlers arrived. It runs east and west for about half a mile and averages about one thousand feet wide, north to south, all told, about twenty-five to thirty acres.
For the past fifty-five years I have wandered through these woods, often with a canine companion, in the role of a steward rather than as its owner. Years ago we enjoyed watched a BBC series, “Monarch of the Glen”. In it my favorite character was the ghillie, “Golly Mackensie”. The faithful employee of the “lord of the manor”, he was responsible as caretaker of the manor’s woods and streams. Like “Golly the ghillie”, I feel responsible to report regularly on the state of our woods.
The biggest activity this summer has been the local nature conservancy’s “stream headwaters initiative”. Near the north edge of the woods a tiny stream runs from east to west before disappearing into a storm sewer. Fifty years ago it ran all year around, supplied by a wetlands fed by three springs. In the 1980s the wetlands was displaced by construction of a soccer field; the stream is now intermittent, frequently drying up before it reaches the sewer.
The conservancy’s initiative is to eliminate nasty plants like honeysuckle and bittersweet and replace them with “native plants”. After clearing out all the undesirable plants, they have installed twelve deer exclosures (fences six feet high enclosing a space of perhaps ten feet by fifteen feet) and planted asclepias incarnata, chrysgonum, rudbeckia, eupatorium coel, etc. It’s difficult to complain about asclepias – it is also known as swamp milkwood and is an important tool in our effort to keep monarch butterflies prospering. And I certainly won’t quarrel about rudbeckia; it will be a pleasure to see a patch of black-eyed-susans in our woods. I hope the conservancy will do a better job of identifying these plants by their common names. It is not obvious that chrysogonum nor eupatorium are plants native to southwestern Pennsylvania.
Actually, the whole topic of invasive plants versus acceptable “native” plants is confusing to me. One wonders who decides what is acceptable and what must be removed. Are we really better off not enjoying honeysuckle and bittersweet? Perhaps we could grow them in a cage surrounded by a moat. The saddest victim of this initiative is the destruction of a lovely blackberry/raspberry patch close to the tulip tree we planted in memory of my wife
I am happy to report that our tree is prospering. It now has a diameter of nearly six inches at its base; its bole is at least three inches in diameter. I am also happy to report the survival of the maple tree the Kennedy family planted in memory of their daughter Nancy. Several years ago, careless erstwhile Paul Bunyans, intent on ridding the woods of ash trees before the emerald ash borer got them, dropped one right on top of it, breaking it off near the ground. Fortunately, a sucker showed up the next year and has now grown about fifteen feet tall. The conservancy is currently protecting it with a cage.
There is news regarding “the Freedom Tree”. Planted in the late 1970s, it honors Lieutenant Robert Pietsch, a naval airman then missing in action in Cambodia, via a plaque installed at its base. Both tree and plaque suffered neglect and, in 2008, the tree finally died. As a girl scout project, a thoughtful young lady had the plaque moved to a more accessible location and planted a new tree. It failed to survive, but now an apparently healthy Umbrella Magnolia has been planted in its place and is properly caged. We lovers of freedom are pulling for it to prosper.
Close to the Freedom Tree is the original Deer Exclosure in our woods. About ten years ago a young man constructed it as an Eagle Scout Project. It is a fenced area of perhaps one thousand square feet, intended to be a demonstration of what the woods would look like if deer weren’t permitted to eat the saplings. To an untrained botanist it appears to have been effective. It certainly would be a good project for someone to inventory the saplings inside the enclosure and compare them with those from a comparable nearby area.
This morning I set out to inspect the southern edge of the woods, an area that, with one exception, has been spared the well-meaning efforts of the conservancy. That exception is a fairly large area where a thicket was removed and a sign installed announcing the fact that the conservancy had replaced it with “native plants”. The area today is covered with chest-high thistle (thistle was not included on the conservancy’s list of native plants) and is at least as impassable as its predecessor. My inspection was interrupted when I encountered a downed birch tree blocking the trail at the perfect level. I am not sufficiently agile any more to crawl over it, nor am I flexible enough to crawl under. Better I retrace my steps and find another trail.
The efforts of the conservancy are indeed well-meaning, and a lot of volunteers spend many hours in what they consider a good cause. I wish they would spend some of it trying to preserve a number of existing assets – the patch of trillium at the northwest end of the woods, numerous patches of Mayapples (podotophyllum peltatum), and the “fairy circles”. And I endorse lots of nameplates on trees and plants to help us amateur ghillies learn our trade.