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Protectors of Pine Oak Woods · Current
Issues · Kreischer Hill Rare Plant Community |
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Southern Latourette Cleanup December 18, 2010 I had feared that Saturday’s monthly restoration, our 174th, was
likely to be a bust since several of our regular volunteers had other
commitments, and I had unknowingly scheduled the restoration for the same day
as the annual Christmas Bird Count on Staten Island (next year I know better
to contact the Staten Island Museum and verify the date). No
matter; Judy came to ferry our tools from High Rock, and Elaine, myself and Catherine still responded to cut and unwrap
vines from small shrubs and trees along the bike path at southern
LaTourette. We chose to work on one of the serpentinite barrens that border the path where
Japanese Honeysuckle was encroaching on the perimeter of the barren
area. As is often the case, the vines were thickest along the edge
of the path and thinned out somewhat as we worked our way up the hill; but
where they were thick they were very, very thick, and we spent a quarter hour
cutting and unwrapping vines from just one shrub. We followed an
old path that has now become a deer trail - a fact easily verified by a long
series of mounds of deer scat trailing up the hill - cutting and unwrapping
as we went. It was brisk work at first, but the day was sunny and
we were working on a hillside facing the sun. By noon my coat was
unzipped and hanging open, and I began to wonder if I should have worn more
layers that I could remove. We didn’t get terribly far in a two
hour session, but did remove vines from a fair number of shrubs, many of
which were already deeply incised by encircling honeysuckle. There
is much left there to do... Our
restorations usually occur in disturbed areas of the woods, areas that have
recently - and by recently I mean in the last 50 to 100 years - been graded,
excavated, plowed over or trees bulldozed down, etc. It is these
areas that are most affected by invasive plants, and whose recovery is most
affected by invasive vines. The bike path, or
“multi-purpose trail” is not a new pathway, of course. For the
most part it follows the route of the Old Mill Road that ran from the
intersection of Richmond and Richmond Hill Road to Forest Avenue. Through
the 1800's that roadway was used to service the several water
mills at LaTourette, and at that time it was still the main route between Richmondtown and the west side of Staten
Island. A few photos taken by photographers Simonson and Sperr about 1910 of one of the mills in the marsh
exist in the NYPL photo collection, and can be viewed online in the NYPL
Digital Gallery. The mill is a large,
three story shingle-sided structure, and the hillside is a cleared and open
field. In the background is the expanse of the marsh, and in the
foreground remnants of a barbed-wire fence end at what appears to be a peach
tree. Other albums of photos have views of the old St. Andrews
Church from the Old Mill Road. On some, taken from the viewpoint
of a cleared field uphill and opposite the church, the road appears clean and well tended; other photos taken from further down the Old
Mill Road show it bordered by shrubs on the slope side, but wide enough for
two wagons to pass, and in another, labeled as taken near Alaska Place, it
has narrowed to just one track. When
I first made acquaintance with the Old Mill Road just about ten years ago the
road had not been used for decades and was impassible by vehicle and difficult
to traverse even on foot. When it rained, one had to
circumnavigate long stretches of deep, water-filled ruts, but in the late
spring those ruts were alive with frogs and insects! In summer the
journey from St. Andrews to the fork where the road split to turn north and
south was one of alternating deep cool shade and sunlit barrens. The
road was lined with aspen, grey birch and black locust, some of which had
toppled making it necessary to crawl under or over them. Open
intervals were spotted with tangles of briar; multi-flora rose sprang up on
the edge, and here and there Oriental Bittersweet and the occasional shaggy
vine of grape scrambled up the trees to reach the sun. To
the left (left because in those days I always started walking from the St.
Andrews’ end) lurked the marsh, invisible from the road once summer had
leafed out. To the right a steep slope rose to the golf course
driving range which had produced (and still does) a graveyard of golfballs. There the highest green occupies
the site of one of the larger British fortifications on Staten Island from
the Revolutionary War, and just below the Hessian Spring flows down to drain
into the marsh. When the spring reached the road the water was diverted,
producing those amphibian-friendly, water-logged ruts and supporting a lush
growth of herbs that couldn’t sustain periods of dryness. From
below the thickets of Multi-flora Rose prevented one from following the
spring uphill, and higher, where the spring crossed the Blue Trail, bushy
clumps of Stinging Nettle sustained by the constant water supply made hikers
wearing shorts and short sleeves pay a price for daring to intrude. On
the Old Mill Road a little further along a berm of rock on the hillside marks
where another road (which was rather confusingly called the Mill Road) sloped
back up the hill toward the golf course. From the western edge of
the driving range one can follow the remnants of that road for some small
distance down the hill, but the grade is intermittently washed out and
interrupted by challenging tangles of briars. The Mill Road
crossed the Old Mill Road and continued down to the marsh where building
foundations are still found along the shore, although perhaps those are not
remnants of the old mills themselves, but merely outbuildings. No
sense of the former Old Mill Road now remains, other than the line of its old
route under the bike path, and I do regret its absence. No one
much used it then, and it had become a kind of private route into the woods
from where one could bushwack up the
hills, sometimes surprising a box turtle or sunning snake, or venture down
toward the marsh - if one was willing to cut through rose, briar and brambles
or just suffer their thorns. If one knew what to look for, one
could discern some the terraces of roads leading off toward the mill
sites. Although construction of the “multi-purpose path” has
eradicated almost all the old route, as a jogging and bike path it has become
again a popular route that undoubtedly serves a greater number of people. Still, I do regret the lose of the
solitude and peace offered by that old road... In
order to build the new path, contractors, overseen by the Department of
Parks, graded and re-aligned the old roadway, and then installed a
multi-layer structure of coarse gravel laid over with landscape cloth, finer
gravel and a top layer of finely crushed stone for a running surface. Where
the slopes were steep a top layer of asphalt was laid down to combat
erosion. A border about four or five feet wide on each side, in
places much more, was cleared to facilitate movement of construction
equipment and destined in part to become a berm for the path. The
old road, historically an area repeatedly disturbed, has been disturbed once
again, and now as before a series of pioneering plants is growing and
jostling there for space. There’s
nothing blooming along the road on today’s Restoration - not surprising
considering the season and repeated freezes we’ve had this month. But
at other times, Spring through Fall, we find a variety of flowers
blooming along the bike trail: cresses, milkweeds and lettuce, chicory,
beggar-ticks and thistles, golden-rods, mulleins and various clovers... Unsurprisingly
many of these are alien species that thrive on disturbed soil. If
the neighborhood hadn’t been roughed up, many of these would have had trouble
getting a foothold, either being crowded out or shaded over by the already
established vegetation. But those former inhabitants have been
evicted again, and fast moving newcomers can now get an edge. One of these is
Common Mullein (Verbascum thapus) which has been especially prominent these
past two years. Even at this time of year they attract our
attention, standing like tall, brown, branched candlesticks. Mulleins
grow as biennials, only from seed, and the “candlesticks” are the brown seed
stalks of their second year’s growth. Nearby, lying close pressed
to the ground, we find the plush, soft rosettes of this year’s new
growth. We often point out how soft its leaves are when we
encounter them on summer walks, and I have read that the pioneers would use those
soft leaves to cushion their shoes. I often recounted that one of
my friends used to call common mullein “indian toilet-paper,”
but those natives couldn’t have known the comfort of this hypothetical
Charmin until after European settlement since the plants arrived here only
with those foot-sore pioneers. This “potty business” seemed to be
an entertaining story, but recently I read John Eastman’s Field and
Roadside where he recounts that colonists supposedly used it as a
natural cosmetic, a “Quaker rouge,” rubbing it on
the face where it caused contact dermatitis and raised a red blush. Well,
contact dermatitis might make one think twice about using it on the other
end! I tried rubbing some leaves on the inside of my wrist to see
if that would cause a reaction, but there was no result. However,
it’s very possible that the leaves are not potent in winter. Catherine
wondered why a woman would even bother with this “make-up” since pinching the
cheeks to break a few capillaries would produce the same result, and I had to
agree with her skepticism. It’s a good idea to take
these accounts of pioneer “”herbalism”” with a grain of salt. Nevertheless,
I’ll try the experiment again next summer with fresher specimens. A
long stretch of the hillside we passed on the way to our restoration site had
been blackened by a recent brush fire. To my untutored eye, that
fire appeared to have started somewhere along the bike path, possibly by
someone’s careless cigarette. There have been more than one fire
in that area recently; an earlier blaze blackened several acres of phragmites close to the model airplane field, and
when I visited the bike path the week before the date of our restoration,
firemen were there again responding to a report of yet another blaze. They
had come in by way of St. Andrews, and finding no fire had to turn their
pumper around at the t-junctionof the
path. Large rocks have been placed at that junction to prevent
vehicles from encroaching on the woods, and there just wasn’t enough
clearance for the large pumper to make the turn. Firemen, you are
probably aware, are uncommonly proud of the appearance of their equipment,
and it was several stressful minutes while they back and filed to get that
truck turned around without a scratch, but manage it they did. That
junction by the way, is where Forest
Avenue, before it was straightened and widened, intersected the Old Mill
Road. The
hillside fire was close to the church end of the path. It appears
to have burned away from the path and broadened its front as it made its way
uphill through the leaf debris, while lack of fuel on the wide bike path
prevented it from burning down toward the marsh. On the higher
hillside all the ground was ashy grey,and the air was redolent of the smell of burned
leaves and wood. Fires such as this were common in years past,
sometimes the result of lightning, but more often the result of discarded
smokes or the activities of teens. (Long before that - before the
colonial period - it is
believed that native inhabitants along the east coast regularly burned their
woods in order to keep the understory open for easy hunting, but among
historians the extent of this practice is a matter of debate.) Generally
these brush fires don’t cause too much damage unless the weather has been
extremely dry. Such fires are more rare now;
there are fewer smokers and more watchers in the woods, and the response of
the Fire Department has become more prompt. The paradoxical result
is that brush fires, when they do occur, are sometimes more severe. When
there are fewer fires, twig and leaf litter builds up, and with more
available fuel the fires burn longer and hotter. Some
trees and shrubs are adapted to survive quick, low fuel burns, and others
not. For trees, what matters most is the thickness of their bark,
but many of the trees in our forests have relatively thin bark and are easily
damaged or killed if the fires are intense. Chestnut and oaks have
relatively thick bark, and survive best, and that perhaps is one reason that
this duo used to dominate our forests, or at least did until the Chestnut
blight laid waste to the American Chestnut at the turn of the 20th century. We
are told that Chestnuts historically comprised almost 25% of the trees in the
Eastern United States, and perhaps 40% locally. Its bark, not that of Oak, was the major source of tannin
for the leather tanning industry and its wood a staple lumber supply. Now
it is Oak, Hickory and Beech that dominate, the first two having thick, fire
resistant bark. Beech, however, has tight, thin-skinned bark as do
many other trees such as Aspens, Poplars, Birches and Maples, and these are
easily killed or damaged by fire. Most of these however, are
capable of re-sprouting from their roots, and a fire must be very hot on the
ground to damage the roots below. Small saplings, however, are
another matter entirely; they haven’t had time enough to grow a thick layer
of bark, whether they are offspring of a thick-barked tree or not, so a
relatively cool fire may wipe them out and their companion understory shrubs
as well. A
look at the hillside at LaTourette reveals that the fire was not intense; it
occurred late in the year, so the herbs had already died back and mostly the
leaf litter was consumed. Around some trees there were signs of a
hotter burn where litter had accumulated. On closer inspection we
could see that many trees were charred higher on their uphill side than their
downhill sides. This burn pattern is characteristic of hillside
fires because leaf litter tumbling downhill tends to pile on the uphill side
of the trees and there accumulates as a thicker layer of fuel. It
was almost incongruous that while leaves remaining on the trees were russet
and brown, and all around the soil was black and grey, Japanese Honeysuckle
leaves on vines twisted around the saplings were still green. These
vine draped trees seemed to be more charred than the others, and I wondered
if the vines had captured even more leaf litter around those tree
bases. Fires that are not too intense tend to renew the soil, and
here, where the burned leaves have given up their sequestered nutrients, it’s
likely that there will be an intense flush of plant growth in the
spring. There have not been heavy rains soon after these fires
occurred, so nutrients released from the burned leaves have soaked into the
soil rather than wash down the hill into the marsh. It will be
interesting to see how the hillside regenerates itself. Among the
new growth there will no doubt be more invasive vines that we will have to
unwrap from the new saplings. Following
the restoration we chose to walk to the trail entrance by the model airplane
and ball field to nose through the burned phragmites there. That
area is close to the Brookfield Landfill and buried trash occasionally rises
to the surface, so without the cloak of reeds it’s often not a very
attractive site. Where we entered the phragmites adjacent
to the ball diamond it was amusing that, as at last year’s fire site at the
ball fields at Great Kills, there was a panorama of balls that had been lost
in the reeds and were now revealed tattered and burned. Standing
in just one place, we quickly counted 27 visible balls, and no doubt many
others went un-noticed. We followed a trail toward the edge of the
marsh that was marked by old, red-painted arrows and new red plastic tape, on
the way passing a pile of 5 gallon cans of fire service foaming agent,
detritus of some earlier attempt at fire suppression. Toward
the edge of the marsh a shallow ridge bore Ailanthus and several other trees
that we did not recognize. Those unknown trees repeated in isolated patches as we made
our way across the marsh, but when we came upon one bearing pagoda-shaped
spires of prominent, brown seedpods we realized that one of these unknowns
was the Princess Tree, (Paulownia tomentosa),
variously called Royal Paulownia or the Empress tree, a spectacular
spring-blooming tree beloved by landscapers. Although it is a
lovely sight in bloom, dotted with spires of bluish blossoms that from a
distance resemble those of Horse Chestnut, it is considered an invasive
species because it can quickly claim a disturbed area and out-compete native
species that might grow in its place. In botanical gardens it is
often isolated by planting it in the midst of lawns that
are mowed; there the tree can grow as a specimen while the mowing prevents
its further spread. I recall that when a section of the Arlington
rail yards was cleared several years ago, it was soon covered with hundreds
of Paulownia seedlings, tall bright green shafts with pairs of huge
heart-shaped, leaves branching from an upright stem. There was
indeed a sight: a large green field studded with incongruous green-leaved
spears, some of them already 4 and 5 feet tall. There was no
near-by tree from which they could have been seeded, so the seeds must have
been imported with fill dirt for the yard. Subsequently gravel was
spread there and new tracks laid, and that took
care of any further growth of Paulownia at that place. I had not
known that there was Paulownia in the marsh at LaTourette other than two
larger trees, one close to St. Andrews church at the very edge of the bike
path and one adjacent to the bleachers at the flying field. We
occasionally spoke of removing these, but as Elaine said, we could see no
nearby saplings and they didn’t seem to be reproducing well, so we decided to
leave them be. Having now found several more, I think we’ll ask
Parks if they should be removed. Paulownia is another that
survives fire well, being able to re-sprout from buds on its roots, so these
trees will no doubt continue to thrive along the edges of the marsh, even if
the tiny seeds from their pagodas of brown egg-shaped pods might find it
difficult to germinate among the Phragmites. The
other trees there remained a bit of a mystery; some of them had an orange
cast to their bark and orangish roots
suggesting that they might be OsageOrange, and Sarah-David wondered if perhaps they might instead
be Mulberry which also grows there. We are pretty poor winter
naturalists indeed, since we desperately need leaves to help identify our
finds, and since Catherine had
taken her copy of William Harlow’s Trees with her when she
left to go back to HistoricRichmondtown we
were rendered helpless. Eventually we came upon some trees studded
with clumps of viciously sharp, two to three-inch long needles, both on its
trunk and branches and where its roots were exposed. Osage Orange indeed
has “spines”, but a later field guide check indicated that those thorns are
only about a half-inch long. Honey-locust, however, can have
viciously long, branched thorns, and also grows in that area; indeed, we had
already passed piles of their large, twisted, varnished brown seed pods along
the bike path. We don’t always recognize honey-locust by its
thorns because the honey-locust we most often see as street trees are
cultivars that have had the sharpness bred out of them. These wild
specimens, however, can have weapons aplenty - or not! In one of
these isolated clumps were two trees having much the same coloration and bark
pattern, but one had abundant thorns, and the other virtually none. The
tree with no thorns was another withorangish roots,
and having eaten mulberries from trees in that area in the summer, I wondered
if Sarah-David might have been right on the mark. Later in the
week I searched the web to verify the color of Mulberry roots, with no
success. I guess we’ll just have to check it out when we go back
next year in the growing season. We
followed the red-marked “trail,” occasionally stepping around broken bottles
and debris that had made its way to the surface, until we came to where an
abandoned, burned car lay close to where the bank sloped up toward the bike
path. On the way I searched for the pear-shaped puffballs I had
seen the week before, but without success. There had been a long
string of these in one of the groves of trees, outlining some buried wood in
the soil. I had cut one of them open, and found that they were
still pure white inside, and theoretically edible, although I would hesitate
to eat any mushrooms that had grown up in that place. Some
mushrooms are known to have an ability to concentrate pollutants such as
heavy metals that might occur in the substrate they grow upon. I
don’t recall that puffballs have that ability, but why would one take a
chance? By the way, cutting and carefully checking the interior of
collected puffballs is vital if you forage for food, not only to make sure
they are not over-ripe, but to make sure that they indeed are puffballs and
not some other fungus. The early growth of many capped mushrooms,
in what is called the “egg stage,” can resemble a puffball, and some of these
mushrooms are inedible or poisonous. When you section those you
will see the form of an embryo mushroom inside. Puffballs,
however, will have a smooth and even consistency inside, and be completely
undifferentiated. We bushwacked up the hill to the bike path, flushing
out a string of four deer that fled away toward the west. Just
before we came to the place where the Blue Trail loop returns to the bike
path, we came upon several small trees growing between substantial stakes,
several of which still bore rusted wire loops with which they had once been
tied. The trees were planted in the middle of what used to be an
old road and were, I believe, trees that Parks had planted in the Greenbelt
many years ago with funding from a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund
grant. It was to continue the care for those saplings that Dick Buegler began Protectors’ forest restoration
sessions many years ago. You can still find those trees scattered
around the hills of LaTourette. Sometimes all that remains is just
a dead stick between two stakes, but often they are healthy young
trees. Oaks, and especially American Holly, seem to have been
especially successful on the hillsides there. Occasionally we find
some of these with wire loops still attached, and we cut them away since the
trees have become established and no longer need a support which might now
strangle them. Most often, though, the wire has rusted away, and
it’s been several years since we’ve seen any still tethered. On
our return along the bike path we turned uphill at the burned section to see
how far the fire had traveled, flushing two more deer, bucks this time. We
followed the burn almost all the way up to the golf greens, where it had
stopped where it encountered the blue trail. In only one small
place had the fire crossed the trail at the top of the hill, and I don’t know
whether the fire was so mild that the narrow trail served as a natural
firebreak, or whether our firemen chose that line to stop the blaze. On
our way up we observed a curiosity: tree after tree on the lower part of the
hill had a pile of hickory nut shells close to the trunk, which we would not
have noticed had the fire not burned the ground cover away. In
themselves the scatterings of nut shells weren’t unusual, but none of these
trees the shells were under were hickory! Did the squirrels, I
wonder, transport these nuts in order to feed under a more favored
tree? That was just another head-scratcher that nature threw at
us... DfR 12-27-2010 |
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