The Friends of Herrontown Woods is hosting a festival this weekend, on Sunday, Sept 21, from 3-5pm. The Chivalrous Crickets are returning, featuring the beautiful voices of sisters Fiona and Genevieve.
In addition to singing Celtic and other folk styles, they will also be leading some dancing. There will also be crafts, art, games, May's Cafe, and a raffle of an Einstein begonia. Tickets available at the link.Princeton Nature Notes
News from the preserves, parks and backyards of Princeton, NJ. The website aims to acquaint Princetonians with our shared natural heritage and the benefits of restoring native diversity and beauty to the many preserved lands in and around Princeton.
Saturday, September 20, 2025
Tuesday, September 16, 2025
Late-Summer Joys Large and Small at the Barden
The Barden is the nickname for Princeton's Botanical ARt garDEN: 160+ native plant species informally gathered along whimsical pathways next to the main parking lot at Herrontown Woods, 600 Snowden Ave. By combining the signage with a cellphone app like Seek, you can use the Barden for one-stop learning of local flora.
One of my annual joys at the Barden is getting to show kids and adults the exploding seeds of jewelweed, which has lately been producing beautiful tubular orange flowers that segue into pods with spring-loaded seeds. Find a swollen pod, pluck it gently from the plant, put it in the palm of a kid's hand and let them touch it lightly with a finger of the other hand. Kabloosh! The seeds go flying. It is really hard not to feel surprise and delight, no matter how many times you've witnessed this. An unexpected opportunity to share this experience came this past Sunday morning. We showed up to host our monthly pop up May's Cafe at 9am only to find the parking lot already full. Turned out that Cub Scout Pack 98 had driven down from Kendall Park for a two mile hike in the woods.When late summer meets early autumn, black gum leads the way with its brilliant red leaves.
This staghorn sumac looks a bit like a painted vulture drying its outstretched wings.
Woolgrass is not a grass, so let's call it woolsedge, Scirpus cyperinus. Admire its elegant seedhead, and feel its triangular stem that, like papyrus, prompts us to proclaim "sedges have edges."
Very thoughtful of Autumn Helenium to wait until now to bloom.
It's been a great year for ironweed, the relatively cool weather having extended its bloom.
I think of evening primrose as blooming through the summer, but didn't notice it until now, for some reason.
Our native euonymus, Strawberry bush, is developing its fruit, which will burst open later, revealing bright orange berries.
Late-flowering thoroughwort can look elegant or weedy. This year, perhaps due to the cooler weather, it has looked elegant, attracting many pollinators and exuding a wonderful honey-like fragrance.
Pokeweed, too, combines elements of elegance and weediness. The pendulant berries and bright red stems are attractive, but the leaves are a decadent jumble.
The name, rattlesnake root, Nabalus altissimus, doesn't capture the beauty of the pendulant flowers, each opening in turn, attracting a crowd of green/gold bees.
Friday, August 22, 2025
Stop Stiltgrass From Taking Over Your Yard
August is the month to try to keep the uber-invasive Japanese stiltgrass from taking over your yard. People familiar with the plant may shake their heads at such a goal, but there are still many yards that are free of its plague-like qualities, whether through luck or a combination of early intervention, vigilance, and persistence.
Have you seen it? There's usually a white line running down the middle of each leaf. It looks harmless, even graceful, but stiltgrass (Microstegium vimineum for long) spreads so aggressively that it can blanket whole forests, or line roadsides for miles. Once you learn to identify it, you may start seeing it everywhere.Michigan had until recently been spared, but here's my Ann Arbor friend Sam's backyard last year. Another friend, Victorino, who grew up in Guatamala, called it "communista." I had to laugh, if grimly, because replacing diversity and individuality with monocultural conformity and oppression is what stiltgrass does all too well. It's a warm-season annual grass, meaning that it sprouts from seed late in the spring and matures through the summer. By late August it can grow up and over everything else, then sets zillions of seeds in September.Virginia whitegrass (Leersia virginica) is a native with narrower, longer leaves. It flowers earlier and lacks the white stripe down the leaf. As with most native plants, this species "plays well with others," growing here and there without dominating.
Various other native Dichantheliums make life interesting. These native grasses tend to be perennials, and so better rooted and more resistant when you accidentally pull at one.
Various smartweeds can also look somewhat like stiltgrass. Smartweeds can be rambunctious, whether native or nonnative.
Monday, August 11, 2025
A Video Tour of the Veblen Circle of Native Wildflowers
Here's a video tour of the circle of wildflowers we planted in honor of Oswald and Elizabeth Veblen, whose generosity and love of nature led to Princeton's first nature preserve, Herrontown Woods.
Most woods are largely silent, flower-wise, in late summer, but in the woodland opening of the Barden, where scattered trees allow sunlight to reach the ground, sun-loving native wildflowers of summer can prosper. The video was shot during a pop-up May's Cafe hosted by the Friends of Herrontown Woods.
The Barden is home to more than 150 species of native trees, shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers
Friday, August 01, 2025
The PHS Ecolab Wetland Begins its Third Life
They say that cats have nine lives. How many lives can a wetland have? The Princeton High School Ecolab Wetland is now beginning its third. Lush and verdant in June, it was stripped bare of vegetation for the second time in its 17 year history at the beginning of July. The first time this radical change happened, in the fall of 2022, took me and environmental teaching staff completely by surprise. This time, the lines of communication were open, and the reasoning fully understood.
On June 12th, the wetland--a brick-lined detention basin squeezed between the science and performing arts wings of the school on Walnut Street--looked like this. The elderberries were abloomin' along the edges of lush sweeps of sedges, rushes, and wildflowers that thrive in full sun and ground magically kept moist by sump pump water.There were also cattails, lots of cattails--narrowleaf and broadleaf. Cattails, with their vertical hotdog-shaped stalks raised high, are the iconic wetland plant. But when I see cattails in a wetland that I'm taking care of, my reaction is "oh, oh." You may see cattails being overwhelmed by the tall invasive reed Phragmitis in the ditches along freeways, but in a sunny wetland like the high school Ecolab, cattails themselves can play the bully, spreading aggressively with the thick rhizomes they send out in all directions.
Thus, when I stopped by the Ecolab less than a month later, on July 7, and saw all that lush, beautiful native vegetation stripped bare, I grieved the loss, but I also saw a potential silver lining.The reason for the transformation was the need to replace two of the basin's walls. The blocks originally used to make the wall had become corroded by salt used to de-ice the adjacent walkways in winter. Replacing the blocks required complete demolition and rebuilding. The large tubes in the photo conveyed the frequent discharges of sump pump water away from the work area.
Friday, July 18, 2025
Summer Roadside Weeds in the Midwest
Many roadside weeds common in the midwest have yet to make it in any numbers to eastern locales like Princeton, NJ. Unless differences in climate or soil are limiting these nonnative weeds' rampancy in the east, a trip to the midwest can feel like prelude for what eastern roadsides could look like decades from now. Even if they can't compete with tough customers in NJ like the nonnative mugwort and Japanese knotweed, their behavior along midwestern roadsides shows what those first few popping up in Princeton could turn into over time.
Here's a display of roadside weeds collected on the hood of my rental car at a rest stop. This was in Ohio, though the same roadside weeds are found in Wisconsin, Michigan, and likely other midwestern states as well. The row of blue flowers on the left are chicory. The delicate white disk of Queen Anne's lace--the wild version of the carrots we eat--is in the upper right. Yellow sweet clover--there's also a white version--is in the lower right, and the pink flower in the middle is spotted knapweed.The vast majority of drivers are oblivious to these roadside dramas, where a pretty flower can become too much of a good thing. For me, a drive through Ohio provides useful guidance for deciding what to weed out of a meadow in Princeton.
Related post: Stiltgrass Reaches Michigan -- While midwestern weeds are moving east, eastern uber-invasives like lesser celandine and stiltgrass are just starting to pop up in Michigan.
Thursday, July 03, 2025
Fuel Tank Raingarden, Lost to Weeds, Receives Reboot
Just for comparison and to show what's possible, here is a thriving raingarden in Hopewell, in front of the Peasant Grill. It remains a low-maintenance, attractive planting year after year, surely because someone with knowledge acts quickly to pull weeds before they can get established. This is the informed, timely intervention we expect for ourselves in good medical care.
2020 Princeton Fuel Tank Raingarden Wannabe
2021 Princeton Finally Plants its Fuel Tank Raingarden
2022 Weeding Princeton's Fuel Tank Raingarden
2023 Fuel Tank Raingarden Threatened by Lack of Early Intervention
2024 Fuel Tank Raingarden Losing Out to Weeds
A Great Video about Pollinators on Mountain Mint
Some wildflowers are much better at attracting pollinators than others. The two champions in my book are clustered mountain mint and boneset. Back in 2008, I started documenting the many kinds of insects and other creatures drawn to the boneset growing in my backyard. Little did I know that an entomologist friend I hadn't seen since Ann Arbor college days, David Cappaert, had been inspired to do the same, 200 miles away, with the mountain mint growing in a Hartford, CT schoolyard.
Dave had the advantage of 1) being an excellent photographer and 2) actually knowing the creatures' names. He created a remarkable video entitled "Mountain mint, one day in August," in which he documents 52 species he found on one stand of mountain mint. For its first 8 minutes, the video is a parade of colorful creatures with colorful names like bee wolf, wedge shaped beetle, stinkbug, ambush bug, jumping spider, freeloader fly, and orb weaver.
Then, at 8:20 in the video, Dave begins describing the many interrelationships between the pollinators and their predators and parasites--a wonderfully complex food web, all "fueled by the nectar of the mountain mint." Check it out, and if you don't have any mountain mint growing in your yard, come to the Botanical Art Garden at Herrontown Woods, where in early July it's just starting to bloom.
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Learning and Stewardship on Princeton High School Grounds
Last year, the Princeton Public Schools hired the Friends of Herrontown Woods (FOHW) to oversee stewardship of native plants in two PHS basins, and to work with teachers and students. A student writeup in the Princeton Public Schools District News describes FOHW's collaboration with PHS Environmental Science students and teacher Jim Smirk to turn the basin into a native wet meadow.