Then and Now

Nature abhors a vacuum. Clear land and do nothing with it and soon things will grow. If they are plants you don't want, they are considered "invasives" and "weeds." If they are plants you do want, they are considered "natives."

The same is true if you have an area prone to flooding. It fills with water after heavy rains. If there are no trees around to shade the area, the area dries out and things start to grow.

Ice pond, 2017 (Margo D. Beller)

A perfect example of this is along the linear park near me known as Patriots Path.

In 2018, the county parks people were cutting down trees infested by emerald ash borers. As I discovered, a lot of ash trees were growing along Patriots Path and those trees were soon cut and strewn around like trash. (Eventually they were removed.)

When the spring rains were heavy, the nearby Whippany River would overflow its banks and spread through the woods, across the path and into this area that acted like a bowl. Even after the waters receded and the path was walkable again there would be water for weeks afterwards.

Pond once the trees started coming down, 2018.
(Margo D. Beller)

One spring I walked the path after it had dried and came upon nearly two dozen mallards (plus pairs of wood ducks and Canada geese) that were in the water that remained on either side. At my approach the water fowl slowly moved off toward the Whippany River.

This area I'm mentioning had been shaded by trees, many of which, as I learned, were ash trees. When the trees came down the area was more exposed to the sun. And then a very interesting thing happened.

The water was replaced by plants.

There were weeds, yes, including wild grape vines, Virginia creeper, the inevitable poison ivy and others I can't identify. But there were also things growing that I can identify - joe-pye weed, cardinal flowers and cattails. Joe-pye and cardinal bloom in the fall. They are very popular with pollenators including bees and hummingbirds, the latter of which have already begun migrating south for the winter. Unlike the invasive phragmites, cattails also provide pollen and are important to some species of birds. 

The former pond, 2025 (Margo D. Beller)

According to The Nature Conservancy: Yellow-headed and red-winged blackbirds, and marsh wrens perch and build their nests on them. Waterfowl, such as Mallards and Canada Geese, nest among them. Frogs and salamanders lay their eggs in the water on and between them. Fish hide or nest among them. Many birds use the seed fluff to line their nests. Muskrats use rhizomes for food and the foliage to build their houses. This then provides resting and nesting sites for water birds. Deer, raccoons, cottontails and turkeys use them as cover. Insects eat and live on them. 

In addition, I learned, all of the cattail is edible. 

Cattails (Margo D. Beller)

These are different from phragmites, which, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, form highly dense stands that quickly outcompete native plants, degrade large areas of highly productive wetlands, drastically reduce habitat diversity and function, impair human use of beaches and recreational areas, and negatively impacts dependent wildlife and a multi-billion-dollar regional fishery.

Thanks to the plants, any rainwater has been sucked up far faster than before. I have seen no ice ponds in years. 

Cardinal flower (Margo D. Beller)

For all I know, the county park commission had people put these native plants in the ground. Or the plants could've come from someone's nearby garden. Or the seeds, floating around in the air we breathe, fell in the right place at the right time.

However they got to this place they have made this walking path a much more colorful place.

An Inconvenient Tree

The apple tree needed to be pruned. That much I knew. Its branches had grown long and tall and at least one high branch would drop its fruit behind the deer netting on the other side of the walkway. (I hope she forgives me.)

Overgrown apple tree, 2022 (Margo D. Beller)

The pear tree also needed pruning, to at least slow down the squirrels climbing to the roof of the screened porch. I did some pruning but there was one area I could not reach unless I stood on the very top of the ladder, and I was not going to do that even with my trusty spotter standing below. 

Pruned apple tree, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

The arborvitae to the side of the front door had also gotten too big. At one time I kept it pruned back but what with illness and age I stopped and so it grew as high as my second-floor office window. House sparrows would fight each other noisily in it outside my open window. Every so often I scared a cardinal or other bird out of it when checking the mailbox after dark. In winter it would bow low under the weight of the snow.

Overgrown arborvitae, 2022
(Margo D. Beller)

All these trees needing work was expected. The dead ash tree was not.

Shortened arborvitae, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

I didn't even know it was an ash until the tree guy came to give me an estimate. He took one look and said it was a dead ash. The tree trunk was light brown and it was full of small holes I hadn't noticed before. When the leaves had come down a few months ago I thought the branches at the top didn't look healthy. I should've known something was up when a redbellied woodpecker started whacking at the tree trunk during the summer, no doubt smelling all the treats inside.

Overgrown pear tree, 2022
(Margo D. Beller)

The ash stood near the property line with one of my neighbors, who had some of her trees cut down in November. She had left me a note, telling me the tree "near the pines" was "full of bugs." She offered to pay for cutting it down. Eventually I figured out the "pines" meant the yew hedge and the tree she meant was the one I had called the "weed tree" for decades.

Pruned pear tree, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

Why did the tree suddenly die? It was a victim of the emerald ash borer, native to Russia, Asia, Japan and South Korea. The first one came to the U.S. in a shipment from Asia in 2002. It was first sighted in Michigan. Now, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, it has been reported in 36 states including New Jersey, where I live.

Ash borer infestation was the reason my county's park people chopped down a lot of infested ash trees growing on either side of one of my favorite hiking trails in the winter of 2018, leaving the fallen trees until the next spring. It was a horrific sight seeing all those dead or dying trees. And now my yard was similarly affected.

I've never liked this tree and I'd often thought about having it cut down. In the early years of my living here it would send up daughter trees from a root under the yew hedge, which meant I had to crawl under the hedge to cut them down. Its roots then switched direction and started coming to the surface next to and then through my ornamental grass garden, forcing me to walk carefully to avoid tripping when I did yard work. The roots even broke a sprinkler pipe next to one of the plants. (Luckily there was no leak and the pipe was fixed the next spring before the sprinkler was turned on.) Unlike the nearby cherry tree, the ash did not provide fruit but strings of seeds that fell in clusters. 

Open sky where the ash used to be, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

I did not take my neighbor up on her kind offer. Instead, I called my own tree guy because, as I said, I had other trees that needed trimming anyway and I wanted to be sure any tree removal wouldn't affect the nearby plants. According to the guy who gave me the estimate, I have no other ash trees (or at least no trees that looked sick). 

It took a tad over a month from the time I signed the contract before the work could be done, today. Four trucks arrived at 7:30 a.m. and it was all over less than 90 minutes later. 

Looking out the back door, the first thing I noticed was the sky, a big hole where the tree used to be. I have written before about the "hole in the sky" created when a neighbor across the street took down a lot of trees. Whenever trees are cut the noise of saws and stump grinding bothers me, particularly if the tree being taken down appeared to me to be perfectly healthy but in the "wrong" place. An inconvenient tree. I'd shut the windows and try to block out the noise somehow, which was particularly aggravating when I was trying to work. I thought of the disruption to the birds and hoped no nests were destroyed in the process.

Today, on the New Year's Day (observed) holiday, when I was not working, the noise still agitated me, even though this was MY tree work being done and there are no birds nesting at this time of year to disrupt (tho' I'm sure they avoided the feeders while the work was going on). Here I was, doing the same thing I'd look down on my neighbors for doing. I know it was a dead tree but maybe they looked at the ash and thought it healthy and sniffed, "Another inconvenient tree."

Lesson learned.

Stump, 2023
(Margo D. Beller)

Now, the cut apple and pear look neater. The last time the apple was trimmed it produced a bumper crop the next spring. The pear tree only sets flowers on old wood, so I'm hoping this cuts back on fruit. (It was to get a pear that a heavy bear once tried to climb that tree, only to break two-thirds of its lower branches.) Even the arborvitae doesn't look as bad as I feared.

As for the ash, I left the stump. Pulling it would've upended the nearby lilacs, cherry tree and plants in the ornamental grass garden. Eventually the roots will die and decompose. I tried to count the tree rings but got as far as 40 before stopping. The ash tree could've been planted when the house was built in 1964 or it might've been one of the lucky trees that survived when the meadow was cleared to build the houses on my suburban street.

Well, thanks to an invasive little insect from the other side of the world, its luck ran out. 

When the Cure Is Worse Than the Disease

Same overflow pond a year apart. In the top picture, from 2018, the pond is
not frozen but some of the trees near it were cut down. (Margo D. Beller)

I am lucky that not far from my home there are a number of parks of varying size. One of them is a linear park that was once a short-line railroad that failed. At one point there were plans to extend a major road through these woods but that failed, too. The resulting park is called Patriots Path because it was first formed in Morris County (the path has since been greatly expanded into several counties), once known as the "Birthplace of the Revolution" because of its proximity to Jockey Hollow, where Washington's troops encamped for two winters years before the better-known encampment at Valley Forge in Pennsylvania.

The path is under the jurisdiction of the county, so it is county workers who do the maintenance. Thus, I am going to blame the county for the seemingly haphazard destruction of trees along parts of this path because of a small menace called the emerald ash borer.

The borer is an insect that, like the Asian long-horned beetle, is invasive and likely came over in wood pallets or other wood products shipped here from abroad. The borer's destruction of ash trees has been well known for months but it was only in the last few weeks signs have gone up along the trail warning of work to be done in the coming days to keep any damage from spreading through the entire forest.

Warning signs (Margo D. Beller)

When that work was finally done and the men, saws and heavy machinery I'd seen were gone, I brought MH to one part of the path for a short walk along the flat, paved trail. What I saw was horrific.

2017 - overflow-created pond, frozen tight.
(Margo D. Beller)

Trees were cut down and the stumps left in the ground. The cut trees were tossed aside or dragged away from the path and left in piles. Why would the county cut down trees it feared would be invested with borers and then leave them there? Did someone think the winter cold would finish off the insects? Maybe it will, but the ugliness of leaving them on the ground to become months of eating pleasure for a plethora of bacteria and insects makes me very angry.

I can understand taking down trees to save a forest. What I can't understand is leaving the area ugly so it is devalued and thus more easily ignored by people who don't care or want to understand why forests are as important to have as ballfields, dog parks or a shopping mall.

A year before, when the wind chill was in the single digits, MH and I had walked this same part of the path and we marveled at how the overflow from earlier rains and the nearby Whippany River had created huge frozen ponds. This year has been particularly rainy so the ponds that formed were deep but definitely not frozen.

Either way, it seems no one cares about these woods, all they care about is killing trees that maybe - maybe - were invested with borers. These county people are no better than my neighbors who take down a 50-year-old, inconvenient tree because they fear it maybe - maybe - will fall on their house.

Two different views of the destruction, Dec. 31, 2018
(Margo D. Beller)

There is such a thing as forest management. I've seen it at work. You take down trees to open up the understory to other types of trees. Thoreau wrote about it when he noticed that in a forest of white pines, any open ground was soon filled with oak seedlings.

Patriots Path, like many other parks, is a bit of woods in a suburban environment. When not chopped down for a housing development it is affected by the pollution from cars, lawn chemicals and even fireplace wood smoke. Too many times I have seen woods along state roads covered with choking vines, usually poison ivy but also mile-a-minute and Virginia creeper. At some point the vines will shut out all light to the trees and they will die. The state sends out mowers to cut the roadside grass but no one notices, much less cares for, the trees. The system seems to be based on benign neglect.

To those areas that proclaim, "See? We have woods here that are protected!" I say, well, I guess that's better than wiping them out and putting in a road or ballfields. But if you don't take care of the land and remove the sick or fallen trees or the vines and other invasives, people are going to ignore the woods as just so much wallpaper. Too many times I have seen people using these natural resources as backdrops to walk the dog, make a phone call or talk to their friends. Maybe it relaxes them but to me they are not walking in the woods to get away from the pressures of modern life or even to look for birds and wildlife. It's just a prettier background than walking Fido on your neighbor's lawn.

Dec. 31, 2018 (Margo D. Beller)

Winter is an ugly enough season in New Jersey when the leaves are down and everything is gray. Today with MH, walking on Patriots Path the only birds I heard were the woodpeckers high in the remaining trees. Many of the shrubs that lined the path were either ripped up by the county tree cutters or flattened by their machinery, so the white-throated sparrows that hid in these shrubs are gone.

I am hoping for a heavy snow to cover this mess, and that someone does something to remove the dead trees in spring and make this park meaningful to those who walk the path when the tree leaves sprout and the wildflowers are in bloom.