Arboretum Diary

4-3

Final day of Trail Steward training, we took a ride over to the other side of Lake Wingra, to the south shore, where most people might know it as the bike path that skirts along the popular Monroe Street. This is an add-on to the Arboretum and one that loses its connection to the central hub of the Nature Center to the northeast.  It had been a standard thicket of woods, much in the way of basswoods, black walnut, a silver maple here or there, a cherry here and there, but that, over the last 15 years has been eyed-up as a closer connection to the restorations of oak savannah in the Grady Tract and Curtis

Prairie.  This spring much of the buckthorn and honey suckle had finally been torn out and readied to do battle against over and over again (we have learned that often to properly eradicate an invasive, it often takes at least three, sometimes four earnest attempts at cutting and sometimes treating with an herbicide). This conscious effort, although clearly seen as an ongoing battle in which all too often the invasive wins out, is worth the while in monitoring the process of not only how to eliminate but also

Belted Kingfisher as seen at Ho Nee Um Pond

to understand just what it takes to recreate the native landscape in a time and at a place that is no longer perfectly conducive.  Millions of gallons of stormwater flow downhill into the Arboretum watershed each year bringing in any number of species not native to the landscape.  Honeysuckle, Buckthorn, a devastating species of Asian thorn (wraps around a pine tree for example, all the way up to the top foliage and does not allow for tree growth), certain grasses and even flowers all make-up a modern landscape that is charged by polluted run-off, highway wash, and storm water.  Certain remnants throughout the Arboretum still show off the strength of unhindered land – the compact and healthy web of roots, to ground cover, to stem and leaf, all lend a hand in warding off invasive, but these are minority plots.  The modern viewer, not educated by the near total attack of invasive in so much of an urban woodland, might come to think that the spring flowering of the honeysuckle leaf, for example, is the norm and that it belongs, but in truth the honeysuckle simple takes away resources from the oak canopy and can even come to shade out the growth of the oak grubs (young pods of oak growth).  In these conditions, you either let invasive completely eradicate the native species, or you fight back, and that is what the Arboretum mission is called upon to do: to restore, monitor, learn, and educate.  This patch along Monroe Street, now that it has receive the proper resources, will be quite

Buffle Headed Ducks seen at Ho Nee Um Pond

an amazing swatch to watch, for it is the most common area that passing traffic sees – what had been an area impossible to see through, has now been cleared of much underbrush, the ponds are visible, and the oaks against stand in prominent positions, giving the casual viewer a brief picture of what a savannah once was and should temporarily be.  Aesthetics, though, are just part of the matter; the results to the soil, the newfound space for native flowers and plants, and the prospect for the acorn to germinate just became that much better.  If the invasive come back, they can now be burned out, leaving the oaks to breath.  This used to the be naturally occurring cycle, either by wild fire, or by the hands of the native americans who also knew that the prairie health needed fire to reproduce properly.   It's all a stark lesson: to replace the woods with concrete will always have adverse effects on nature. How people respond becomes the interesting part of the equation.  Back in the 30's the largest known human-made calamity ever known, the Dust Bowl, was one of the primary motivations for the Arboretum as a place to step outside of the so called progresso the time and reconsider how to maintain the land for its own sake.  The wings savannah is a great modern extension of the old idea -- you don't have to give up on the possibility of keeping it right, even as pass, daily, the new woods and think that the tangle and the thicket and the garbage are the norm.