My Labor Where My Mouth Is

Early morning, vernal pool, High Rock Park.

With a skin of ice.

The vernal pools are formed in depressions matted with a forest's worth of leaves.

Over the last few years I've made some fuss about parks in these pages and have suggested that one of the best ways for folks to experience nature, to satisfy the need to connect with it, is not only to have a visual experience, or even to sport in our fields, but to actually work with it. I had been wondering how one can get into our parks to practice, participate, work with the stuff of parks. The rule around here is that you cannot really touch, prune, collect, harvest, pull any growing thing in any of our city parks. That's a lot a nada.

But my inclination, a gardener's inclination, is to do those very things. My thinking had completely changed the way I see the direction of future parks, to the point where I had actually proposed to The National Park Service a park in the form of a farm. Of course, as far as I could tell, they had no idea what I was talking about, and acted as if I never sent them that 8 page proposal.

So I needed a more conventional way of working with nature in our parks, but at the same time, I had rejected the idea of working for Parks or any of the various alliances that service them. Enter the New York New Jersey Trail Conference. What's that? From their website:

"The Trail Conference is a nonprofit organization with a membership of 10,000 individuals and 100 clubs that have a combined membership of over 100,000 active, outdoor-loving people."

What do they do? In short, they create, map, and maintain hiking trails in New York and New Jersey. I own their maps, which are the best, printed indelibly on Tyvek. As it happens, they are organizing more actively in New York City these days. Just think about all the trails in all the parks we have between the five boroughs. The NYNJTC has trail building expertise, they have standards for blazing (trail marking), they can organize labor to get things done in ways Parks cannot always seem to manage. I like a small organization.

 Volunteers discuss what was learned on the trail.

Through their work, NYNJTC frames the way we perceive nature and landscape and that is something of which I am deeply invested -through my painting, photography, and even this blog. So it only made sense that I would finally take the dive, commit some of my free time to urban trail projects. Of course, I want something in return, and that is to learn as much as I can about building sound trails, boardwalks over wetlands, bridges over ponds, or stone steps. And maybe I wish for some influence too -the trail should go this way, towards these plants or that vista, how about building a trail in this or that park, or planting these plants in that location.

I love beech trees as they hold onto their ghostly leaves throughout winter.

I also get to visit parks I would be less inclined to for a variety reasons and get to know them intimately. For the coming three months I will be working on trail rerouting and restoration, boardwalk building, and stone step construction in Van Cortlandt Park, which I have never visited. Last weekend I attended a trail maintenance workshop at High Rock Park, also previously unvisited, and part of the Staten Island Greenbelt. Make some time for this park. It's wonderfully hilled with vernal pools in a mixed red maple-sweetgum, coastal oak-beech, and oak-tulip tree forest. In winter, early spring and late fall you can see the ocean as never before from its trails. Isn't that something?

A larger vernal pool, filled enough to be draining over the roadway on which I stood.

Old Field Revert

The scent in the air changes dramatically as you near the field reverting to forest. Probably all the decay -decay never smelled so good.

I've seen lots of this in different regions of the North East, but I do not think it looks like a weed. My guess on this one is Lysimachia, a native one. On the farm, its growing in the old field reverting to forest, trail-side.  See the whorled leaves and little flower buds shooting out from the petiole.

Too bad I'll miss blueberry season.

Cow Wheat, Melampyrum lineare, a native of eastern N.A.  I found a patch of it growing beside the trail in the field reverting to forest.

Mountain Laurel, Kalmia latifolia, is now in bloom in the woods, underneath the oak and tulip trees. Mildly scented, you can pick it up as you walk through the laurel forest.

Blue-Green Mystery Solved

Thanks be to the Internet. Well, the notion I was harboring all along...that this coloration was fungal, is true. Chlorociboria aeruginascens or C. aeruginosa.  Bless those who study fungus and organic chemistry. My phthalocyanine (blue-green pigment) was not so wrong-in fact led me in the right direction. Napthalocyanine is a derivative of the former and somehow the pigment of these fungi are connected to napthaquinone. Both naptha and now I am thoroughly out of my league. Apparently Green Stain oak is a commodity and is used for green colored wood projects. Check out the links to see:

Fungal Link A

Fungal Link B

Green Mystery

These are terrible photos taken in the dark of the woods. Can you see the blue-green coloring to the rotting wood? Its been the biggest mystery of my travels through the woods. I've spotted this on every trail, in little piles, a broken branch. At first I thought the trail-blaze paint might have made the color, but I was dubious of this. Then I thought, some kind of treated wood? Because surely it looks like a copper pigment and copper being a main ingredient in CCA treated wood. But why would there be so much treated wood and why would it be whole branches and twigs? So no to that one.  It looks closest to Copper Phthalocyanine Blue/Green that I use for paint. 

Is it some kind of chemical reaction or algal growth? Anyone know?

In The Forest

Its taken me some time to get my first woods hike here at Weir Farm onto the blog. No doubt, in part due to the trouble identifying woodland plants -which is new to me and less chronicled on the web. But the hiking has been sweet as can be. So many damp forests I've hiked in spring or summer are swamped with mosquitoes, black flies, and deer flies. Nothing can send me packing faster than a swarm of any of these boogers. But to my great pleasure, they've all been on vacation.

The White Trail is a short loop into the mesic forest of southwestern Connecticut. I've also had some difficulty identifying the types of forest on the preserve. This is in part because the trails here traverse what appears a patchwork of forest communities. I'm seeing at least three: Beech-Maple Forest and Chestnut Oak Forest in the uplands with Red Maple-Hardwood Swamp in the low. While any number of species inhabit all these communities, the named species are dominant and they affect the type of understory plants, and possibly some fauna, in addition to the overall look and feel of the woods. Now on to the woods....

The trail...

On the east branch of the White trail, look up and down, and you'll see this tree. From a distance, I thought this was a Tulip Tree, making me think this was an Oak-Tulip Tree community.

Getting closer, looking at the leaves led me to mountain maple, Acer spicatum. But the samara are reddish on the mountain maple, where these are green. A friend of mine calls this a "goosefoot maple." I'm going to call it Acer pennsylvanicum or Acer striatum.

We called the maple fruit "polynoses" when we were kids; I suppose still do and I'm not the only one.

Many of these Liliaceae in the woods -but which one? Hairy Solomon's, Smooth Solomon's, or Rose Twisted-stalk? I'll have to go back and take a closer look.

Another Lily, the Canada Mayflower. Sometimes 6 inches tall, but often quite diminutive.

The pink azalea, Rhododendron periclymenoides, growing well in the understory of maple and beech.

No scent that I could make out.

My new favorite tree. I knew what to call it as soon as I saw it and although I've never seen it before, I surely heard or seen the name -Shagbark Hickory or Carya ovata.

INTERMISSION

The White trail connects with the east-west running Yellow trail. After crossing the drainage, you begin a gradual incline, meeting again at the White trail and turning to the north.

As you climb, the drier, rocky soil gives way to a Chestnut Oak forest community. The understory has large tracts of Mountain Laurel. The mountain laurel and oak forest make up most of the western branch of the White trail loop.

I prefer the B&W photo over the color -looks like some kind of Burtonesque army of stick-people on the march.

Since the laurel forest is part of the understory, the shrubs are less leafy and many had little to no flower buds. Those that will flower are setting buds now, and I hope to see the bloom.

Anyone could miss this, but what a nice memorial. "The Anna White Woods, In Loving Memory"

It gently reminded me of the garden of Ian Hamilton Finlay.


Plant and mineral rubbin' bums!

Round things on oaks. Those woodpecker holes are fresh in a live tree.

I found this plant shooting through the floor of oak leaves. What is it?

The Blue trail is a north-south running trail that connects to the Yellow. It runs along the edge of a rocky ridge, winding among the oaks and mountain laurel. It is on this trail that I found the Lady's Slipper.

Seeing the Forest for the Fuel

On November 20th I read in the Science Times this article "Through Genetics, Tapping a Tree’s Potential as a Source of Energy" by Andrew Pollack. This article describes a cocktail of university departments, the Energy Department, and lumber companies working together to find ways of reducing lignin in trees through genetic engineering. Lignin, the chemical trees produce to keep them rigid and upright, gets in the way of producing ethanol from wood pulp. It also slows the process of making paper from wood pulp.

Its another attempt for an agricultural business to get into the oh, so lucrative fuel business. I do not know the science on this, but my suspicion is that trees won't make the most efficient ethanol once you have to farm it. But the biggest problem here is the genetic engineering of trees to contain less lignin. Unlike farm crops, which are generally annual and often do not survive without the farmers' helping hand, trees will survive and pollinate other wild trees with their genetically altered pollen. In not so many years, this trait could spread to much of the new wild offspring in the forest. Seems like a bad idea-especially if we are risking our forests for car fuel. It appears to me that we are in a period of boondoggling in the absence of any true leadership on our car fuel problems. In this period we are going to see a lot of companies looking to get rich off the boondoggle. Lets tell our congressmen and women we don't want to power our cars with trees. The Energy Department should get out of the forest.

Andrew Hancock for The New York Times

Young poplars in a laboratory at Purdue University.

Here's another article about the use of trees for fuel. It seems to have some strange statements,like this one: "Forests can provide renewable biofuels that can replace fossil fuels like coal and oil,” Kimbell said. “This will reduce the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere while diminishing our dependence on foreign fuel sources." I'm not sure how burning wood or anything made from wood reduces CO2, but thats a sound bite for you.