[12 Sept. 2020] I go for many walks and enjoy walking in natural settings. Something nice but a bit odd happened on a recent walk. I got this urge to go to Wachusett Meadows, the Audubon sanctuary in Princeton. It was very cloudy and looked like it might rain, but I went anyway. I climbed up the high meadow maybe thinking I'd go up to the top of Brown Hill, but then I got the urge to walk around the southern part of the sanctuary. As soon as I started on this, I got the sensation that Emilie was walking with me for a couple of minutes. The sun came out soon after. I walked to all the spots we liked to visit.

On the way back, I came to a small pond we always stopped at, and there I saw them: closed gentian.

This flower blooms in later summer and autumn. I had forgotten all about it, but Emilie and I used to go to the sanctuary almost every September to see them once we discovered them one year — they always grow near the pond and nowhere else. The flowers are actually closed, apparently to make it harder for insects to get to the nectar. Bumblebees can pry open the tops of the flowers to get inside.

I finished my walk at the barns, and the sheep were out there, too. This Audubon usually keeps sheep and moves them around the various meadows. Emilie had always loved seeing the sheep; I said hello to them for her. It was a very emotional walk but very comforting too in its way. I'm so glad I got to see the gentian.

[20 Sept. 2020] Update: I've just received and planted closed gentian seeds I bought from Prairie Moon Nursery. Prairie Moon got its start as a prairie restoration project using native plants, later going into business selling the seeds they were producing. As you can guess, this is not your typical commercial nursery or garden center, and they have seeds, bare-root plants, and potted plants for many plants and wildflowers that you won't find almost anywhere else. They not just for Midwestern prairies, either. Their collection covers full sun, partial sun, and shade for all types of soil moistures from dry to wet, for USDA Zones 2 (parts of Alaska and Canada) through 11 (parts of Mexico).

Their seeds come with "Germination Codes" that tell you exactly how to prepare them to best stimulate germination. Check the code before buying seeds, to see what what you need to do. For my gentians, the seeds need to be activated by cold temperatures, Code C(60). So, sowing them now right in the ground is great, as the winter here will wake them up for growth in the spring. At other times of the year, I would have had to make a seed mixture and keep it in the refrigerator ideally for 60 days before planting them. Code A, on the other had, will germinate in a warm location without pre-treatment, so these should be planted in the spring once the weather is warm. I got some Code A seeds that I'll use next year and with luck fill in some shady dry patches under my trees.

[20 Sept. 2020] I was walking the west loop trail of the Calamint Hill Conservation Area in Princeton this weekend and came up this strange site. Yes, that's a metal ladder attached to a tree. At first I thought the squirrels here were getting particularly lazy, but if so then why didn't they install an elevator instead? My next guess is that it is some kind of temporary observation platform, although there doesn't seem to be anything special to see in the area. Perhaps someone sits on the platform to count the local wildlife like deer? Let's hope not bears, as they can climb, too. Maybe there's something up the tree the ladder gives access to? I did not attempt to climb the ladder; that's an accident in the making if the ladder unstable or poor attached to the tree.

The mystery deepened when I spotted a metal box attached to a tree about a dozen feet from the ladder. My immediate thought was that the box was a geocaching treasure box. (Geocaching is an outdoor activity when you use clues and GPS to find things like treasure boxes or log journals or pictures, or so on. I've seen the occasional geocache site on the rail trails around here, so I know some people geocache in central Massachusetts.) However, it seemed more likely the box had something to do with the ladder. So, I went and examined the box. It was sealed shut with some type of LED light blinking through a window, with a set of what looked like translucent plastic cylinders at the top of the window. I'm guessing it is some sort of scientific sensor, maybe a motion-activated camera to take pictures of wildlife. If so, then they've probably got a couple of me staring into it at close range.

Whatever the ladder and box are, they haven't been visited much. The ferns between the path and both the ladder and box were undisturbed, so no one has walked there recently (except me now).

[3 Oct. 2020] I was walking around town in Holden and saw a huge extent of Japanese knotweed at the corner of Main Street and Malden Street. You may know this plant as "Japanese bamboo" because its leaves and stems look like bamboo, but it's not a true bamboo. It looks great (and has small white flowers in season that attract many pollinators), which led to it being imported to North America as a specimen plant in the 19th Century. Alas, it's a very aggressive, spreading plant that most gardeners now don't want in their yards.

There was a patch of it growing alongside our house in Millers Falls when we moved there in 1960. For years, it just grew in the same place in the same clump with no problem. One year, my parents decided to get rid of it. We had no idea how tough it was. I no longer clearly remember why we wanted to get rid of it. I think the knotweed was attracting too many unwanted insects. Millers Falls back then was badly overrun with Japanese beetles every year, and they loved to live on the knotweed. When the plant was in flower, I recall seeing yellow jackets, other wasps, and ants all going for the nectar, in addition to tons of benign honeybees and bumblebees. Yellow jackets were a problem, since they liked to try to nest in our house.

So, the first year we chopped it down to ground level... and again two or three more times when it resprouted. It gave up as autumn got cold. The next couple of years it came up again and again during warm weather, and we chopped it down again and again. At some point, we dug up the roots. Well, as much as the roots as we could get. I remember looking down into a pit four or five feet deep where we had dug them out. It still came back the next year.

One year, its roots grew around to the front of the house and the knotweed came up under the front porch. Yet another year, it grew through the foundation of the house into the cellar! The foundation wasn't poured concrete like you see almost everywhere these days. Instead, the house was old and had, as I recall, fieldstones mortared together. It also had been built with square nails rather than the round "wire nails" that became standard in the 20th Century. The nails suggest the house might have been built in the 1880s or 1890s.

I think we finally got rid of the knotweed by digging a hole and pouring salt water on it. Yes, I've read that knotweed is very resistant to salt water, but perhaps after years of being cut down and dug up, the roots just didn't have enough food left to go on. (The leaves make sugar for the plant, which the roots store up for bad times, so if you keep cutting the plant down its food supply has to diminish.) Maybe we used an herbicide, but this seems less likely since children played in the yard almost everyday from early spring to late fall.

Happy ending? Well... not quite. When we chopped down the stems and leaves, we dumped them in the empty wooded lot across the street. Apparently the cuttings took root and established themselves on the sunny margins of the lot. Forty years later in the 2000s I was driving by the area on my way to Shelburne Falls or maybe southern Vermont. I swung though the village and the wooded lot was still undeveloped and fully edged with masses of Japanese knotweed. Tough plant; be careful if you decide to make friends with it. It doesn't play nice.

A Walk at Stillwater Farm

[3 Oct. 2020] Stillwater Farm in Sterling MA is now conservation land, but it was a working farm from about 1790 to the early 1970s. Its property originally extended in a narrow but long lot from the Stillwater River to farm fields and then up an increasingly steep hill. This was a fairly common farming arrangement in parts of pre-industrial New England*. You might expect a farm would want to concentrate on the most farmable land, but the river-field-hill arrangement provided many benefits in an era without motorized farm equipment, electricity, or railroads. The river could be used as a source of water, and the flood plain could be used as a wet meadow for growing hay. (It's unclear from the present site if Stillwater Farm had a wet meadow, since there're now roads, a bridge, and a containment pond where the wet meadow would have been.) Above the wet meadow were the farmhouse, farm buildings, and farm fields where the main crops were grown.

*The Willard Farm site at Fruitlands Museum in Harvard MA is another example of this farming layout. The site has an excellent explanation of the farm and layout and is well worth a visit. The museums and rest of Fruitlands are also worth seeing. Fruitlands was an 1834 "Transcendentalist experiment in subsistence farming and Emersonian self-reliance". As you might guess from the quote it was an idealistic but unrealistic community that didn't last long (only a few months). In present times, Fruitlands Museuem now features an art museum, a Native American museum, a Shaker musuem, and a 19th Century farmhouse.

Going uphill, Stillwater Farm had an apple orchard in the west, now long gone. If you've seen New England apple orchards, you might have noticed that some, if not many, are on the lower slopes of hills. This is not just because much of New England is hilly. Instead, it was a natural way to protect the trees. Massachusetts is now on average 2 degrees F warmer than it was a century ago (see this chart) and could have quite chilly weather and frosts in October during the apple harvest. Frosts could damage the harvest, but planting apples trees on slopes with well-drained soils meant that the frost would melt sooner in the day and drain away.

Much of the rest of the hill was pasture for the farm animals. It's unclear if Stillwater Farm itself pastured many sheep, but it seems likley. Very many New England farms had sheep, as their wool was an important source of income. (Many New England farms failed or were abandoned when wool prices collapsed in the late 1800s. In recent decades, sheep have made a minor comeback in New England, due to the development of a sheep-milk dairy industry.) Even with long-abandoned farms, you can usually easily tell the difference between crop fields and pastures. The fields have no stones in them, while pastures often have plenty of stones or ledge. Unlike plows, sheep weren't bothered by stones.

One last part of the hill was the woodlot, the area left for trees, possibly for lumbering and especially for firewood. Traditional New England farms ran on firewood, not only for heating and cooking but also for any heat processing of agricultural products. Even today you can find a few New England "sugar houses" that still use firewood to boil down maple sap into syrup and sugar. Trees took a beating in New England. Pre-colonial New England was mostly wooded, up to 80% of the land. The colonist farmers cleared the trees to plant their crops. They used wood to fence in their livestock and their land. They used wood to build their houses, barns, furniture, parts or all of tools, toys, and so on. They burnt a lot of wood for heating and cooking. At the height of traditional New England farming, only about 20% of the land remained wooded. (Now, about 70% is wooded, despite, for example, Massachusetts' population more than doubling since 1900 with extensive suburban sprawl caused by automobiles and paved roads.)

This river-field-hill layout meant that the farm was diversified: hay from wet meadows, crops from the fields, livestock in the pastures, apples from the orchards, firewood from the forest. This made the farm grealy self-sufficient, often with a surplus of agricultural product to sell. Profits could be use to buy necessities that the farm did not produce (iron tools, for example) as well as the occasional luxury. In bad years, this diversity meant that maybe some part of the farm remained productive even if another part was not. (In 1816, the "year without a summer" caused by cooling from a volcanic eruption, almost everyone suffered.)

New England is famous for its old stone walls. You can often see them in fields and in the woods. You may have been told that the early colonists builts the walls to remove the many rocks from their fields. Not so! The stone walls were built later, replacing the wooden fences the farmers had previous used. Many were built in the late 1700s and early 1800s. And, the stone walls were usually not built through the woods. Instead, they were erected in cleared land, to mark boundaries, enclose fields and pastures, and to pen livestock. As farms were abandoned, trees naturally regrew on the land, so that now you can often find stone walls in middle of the woods.

And farms were abandoned left and right. Most (not all) farming in New England fell on hard times in the latter decades of the 19th Century. By then, more-productive farms were spreading throughout the Midwest. The rise of railroads meant that cheaper farm staples could be brought to New England. Wool prices declined, making raising sheep unprofitable. Most New England farmers couldn't sell their farms, since few people wanted to buy an unprofitable farm. So, many simply abandoned their farms, either moving out west to start again or moving into the mill towns to work in the factories.

Another way to cope with the poor farming situation was to cut back and linger on. At Stillwater Farm, a lot of pasture land was left to grow trees (likely because the farm's livestock was reduced in numbers). At some point, the apple orchard ceased to be maintained. Finally, the farm was converted to a dairy farm. In the early 1970s, even the dairy farm was no longer viable, and the farm was finally abandoned. In 1990, the state of Massachusetts acquired the land for conservational and educational purposes.

[10 Oct. 2020] As often occurs around here, the maples are showing good color in this second week of October. The picture shows a view across Dawson Pond in Holden. The colors are a little less vibrant than usual, with fewer reds and more oranges and yellows. This is likely due to the drought. Maples naturally have yellow and orange leaves, but during the growing season the leaves are green because of their huge amounts of chlorophyll, which the leaves use to harvest energy from sunlight to make the sugars that feed the entire tree. As autumn begins, the chlorophyll breaks downs, and the green color goes away.

Under usual conditions, this process happens when the nights are getting cold, and the stress of cold triggers another process in the leaves: leaf sugars are turned into anthocyanin, which is red. If a lot of anthocyanin gets made, the leaves will appear brilliant red. (Many other plants also make anthocyanin; the skins of red, ripe apples are red from anthocyanin.) If only a little anthocyanin is made, the natural yellows and oranges of the leaves are seen instead. Burgundy-colored leaves can occur when red anthocyanin and green chlorophyll are both present in some quantity. (Dead leaves turn brown as all the leaf pigments break down.)

Why do some maples make all this anthocyanin? Since anthocyanin is made from sugar, wouldn't it be better for the maple just to pull all that sugar into the roots for next spring's food supply? After all, willow leaves just go yellow without flooding themselves with anthocyanin, so anthocyanin obviously isn't vital for all trees. Alas, nobody knows for sure why maples are crazy about having anthocyanin in their autumn leaves. This has been an active area of scientific research for decades. There's several theories about maples and anthocyanin but so far no convincing proof. Some theories posit anthocyanin gives a positive benefit to maples (such as more strongly attaching the leaf to the twig so that the leaf falls off later and more of the remaining leaf sugars can be sent to the roots, or the red helps protect the final productive stages of the leaves in some way maybe like sunblock, or the brilliant red deters some kind of insect pest to go attack less-colorful maples). Other theories posit that the red used to have a benefit but doesn't any more (such as once deterring some insect pest which is now extinct). Yet other theories posit there isn't and wasn't any benefit (such as anthocyanin just being a unneeded byproduct of some other necessary process in maple leaves). I personally find it intriguing that red maple leaves tend to stay on the tree longer than yellow or orange ones, but I'm still waiting for strong evidence that this actually confers some advantage.

In years with abnormal conditions, maples make less, sometimes much less, anthocyanin. Drought can cause this, and around here we have been in stage D2 "severe drought" for months. It seems likely to me that the maples weren't making enough sugar for all their needs and the roots were getting the lion's share to enable the trees to survive to the next growing season. Little then is left in the leaves to make anthocyanin, resulting in duller autumn colors.

[10 Oct. 2020] I was hiking the trails in the southwestern side of Wachusett Reservoir and saw these brilliant purple asters with yellow centers. Although there are several species of asters that look like this, I think these are New England asters.

Wachusett Reservoir is a large reservoir mostly surrounded by conservation land, so it has many hiking trails. When the reservoir was first filled in 1908, it became the world's largest reservoir for public water supply, eventually covering almost 7 square miles containing 65 billion gallons of water. It was later dwarfed by the Quabbin Reservoir, which began filling in 1939 and came to cover almost 39 square miles with 412 billion gallons of water. Four entire small towns in Massachusetts were taken over by the state and dismantled to make way for the Quabbin. In contrast, the Wachusett only flooded parts of four towns, although hundreds of homes, factories, business, and other structures were demolished. However, this makes Wachusett's negative impact on the local population seem much less than the Quabbin's. Actually, 2,000 people (see page 37 in "The Search for Water") were displaced for the Wachuesett Reservoir, only a few hundred less than the 2,700 displaced for the Quabbin.

[17 Oct. 2020] I finally spotted some yellow hawkweed wildflowers out by the Wachusett Reservoir. The flower might look like a dandelion on a quick glance, but it is actually an entirely different kind of plant. There are many species of yellow hawkweed, so it can be difficult to identify exactly which one it is. This year, all the hawkweeds I saw there looked stunted (probably because of the drought), so I didn't even try to pin down the species.

In a normal year, I can find yellow hawkweed growing all over town and sometimes in my yard, but I've seen none at all in Holden this year. The only reason for their absence must be the drought.

There's also orange hawkweed, which is a vivid orange color and is sometimes evocatively called devil's paintbrush. Around here the orange variety is rarer than the yellow. Some but not all years I can find it in Holden, usually growing along Phillips Road in the center of Holden for some reason. I've never had any come up in my yard.

Emilie and I first saw devil's paintbrush on a summer camping trip to Baxter State Park in Maine. We went to climb Doubletop Mountain, a mountain with two separate peaks, and saw a large field chock full of devil's paintbrush.