Arboretum Journal

"This time it was a rootlet of bluestem that sucked him up and lodged him in a leaf that rode the green billows of the prairie June, sharing the common task of hoarding sunlight." – Aldo Leopold, from "Marshland Elegy"















March 5, '17

The Arboretum is one of the great planned natural experiments in the world.  Considered of a handful of the great natural restoration projects, researchers from around the world take from it the lead at a time when restoration will be of the highest priority as habitats decreases and species dwindle due to encroachment and other environmental concerns.  As a piece of land within a city, its beginning were much more humble, a real hodgepodge of farmland and increasing, but accidental, urban use.  It took the kinds of efforts rarely seen for any issue in the modern times of distraction to pull together these various pockets of oak canopy, marshland, savannah, creeks and lake. To this day, it would be hard to make the case that the Arboretum is some kind of unified ecological presentation; but instead it is a researchers lab, and its very contrast of the hypothetical historical contents of the land, pre-European settlement, against what it had become through decades of neglect or farming, and now research, all show various patterns of growth and diminishment, depending upon its stage. The upper Arboretum, consisting of the nature center itself, the famous Longenecker Garden, Gallistel Woods, Teal Pond and Curtis Prairie, among others, seem fairly well-heeled. Transitions from native marsh, to savannah to oak canopy tend to move less in pockets that in a naturally occurring succession as elevation rises, then falls back down to Lake Wingra. To the south of the belt line, the Grady tract, an experiment in

Oak restoration and prairie manufacturing, seems a bit less responsive to the experiments with abundant invasive species including buckthorn and the garlic mustard and dame rockets, just to name a few.  Prescribed burns are clearly utilized here in order to eliminate the more shallow reaching roots of invasive, while allowing the more sturdy native taproots of other plants to survive. Burning can eliminate layers of leaves on the ground, opening soil to the prospect of better seeding success. Keeping buchgrasses, especially invasive, under control is critical to habitats survival for its own sake and for the sake of surrounding wildlife.  Taken in its entirety, the Arboretum is a lab that is unlike uses of landscaping, which call for a stability and visual performance; instead, the plantings and micro habitats here are bound to be ever-changing, and in that change, what we call phenology, or the observation of naturally occurring events within species, is the rule.  Today it is just before spring bloom. In a month, the transitions will begin to fill in. What will grow under the burns? To what restored portion of the marshland ponds will the waterfowl return?

The Southseas

"I'll get the cast net and go for sardines. Will you sit in the sun in the doorway?' 'Yes. I have yesterday's paper and I will read the baseball.' The boy did not know whether yesterday's paper was a fiction too. But the old man brought it out from under the bed." – Old Man and the Sea


The 33rd visit to the island had taken on a new light for the grandfather.  There was always mystery here, that much was true.  How could he forget the year of the midnight swimming through the tough fibers of the mangroves just in from Sunset Beach.  There were the dolphins the year with Lily as they swam alongside the kayaks.  Seashells so boundless on Caya Costa that the white sands there took on the look of a treasure sight of its own. As he sat outside in the breezeway this night gently tugging from a very short but sweet cigar, looking out onto the pink sunset that lay onto of the blue of the water as icing might on a cake, he was not sure he could keep himself bound together after the sighting of the sunken ship at the strait. Lily herself was quite an adventurer. If he told her, she too would not want to leave the sight.  There would be much talk, the two anchoring there directly in the middle of such a high traffic spot, day by day, diving, popping back up for air, perhaps bringing up items.  He took one more sweet tug from the cigar; he would only roll it off of his tongue and slightly to the back of the throat; he knew better than cigars at all; yes he did; but this marked a special occasion; he saw the island as something quite different now; the imagination took its turn backwards, to previous times, long ago, when the wooden ships would have been met here by nothing more than the kind of silence only an island can offer or, if closer to Fort Myers, just beyond, the native Indians. What could be done? He was now part of that time, having pulled his very hand over the wood of the structure. What lay underneath the sand and shells that had formed over its decks? It gave him a weaving snake up and down his spine. He was too old for fortune and fame.  This was history.  "Grandpa, are you going back out?" Lily asked from inside, having finished her last show on TV. "Going back out? what do you mean," he asked.  He placed the newspaper down onto the terrace floor. "We are going to walk the beach at sunset.  Don't you remember the dolphins?"
"Oh, yes." he said, "the dolphins." Near sunset the local troop of dolphins did their fishing by chasing the flying fish into the shallows at the beach then rounding them up.  "Yes, the dolphins. We should go."

The Southseas

"They walked up the road together to the old man's shack and went in through its open door. The old man leaned the mast with its wrapped sail against the wall and the boy put the box and other gear beside it. The mast was nearly as long as the one room of the shack." –Old Man and the Sea

"What did you find down there," the granddaughter said, bobbing in her small kayak now to a new ripple of waves made by boats slipping past the southern end of the Caya.  

"I don't know for sure," he said, too enthusiastic in his stomach to reveal what he thought he might have found.  To all treasure hunters, he now felt, it must be entirely something else to actually find what you are looking for.  How to proceed, who to tell?

"Yes, we should lift our soft anchors, shouldn't we?" he said, lifting his mask.  "One more time down, so I can get a clearer view. Here, hold this." He handed her a wide white shell that he had pulled from the dust of the bottom.  She took it from him and held it upward to the sun which was now at mid afternoon and hot enough to seemingly dry the droplets of seawater on contact.  As she lifted it, the old man remembered all the people just beyond at the pool and the waterpark, at the Land's End rooms and the Seabreeze room, the men playing golf at the short course and all the people laying at the Sunset Beach.  Here there were, in the middle of all of this, on top of Spanish treasure ship.  The water picked him upward then down again as the ship traffic moved by at low wake.  He took a deep breath and quickly arrowed down to the shallow bottom where he cupped his hand around the wooden posts and scooped away. He followed the line of the side of the vessel and it carried him fifty feet at least, too far to hold the breath and he had edged along the bottom to a deeper point. The ship was tilted as the ocean floor hear had created a naturally deepening channel. He used his feet to spring up from the wooden planking and quickly lifted up over the surface. The grandmother would not believe this story and he wondered how he would tell it.

Scenes from Bayfield

"Spring has come again the snow has finally stopped
the crescent moon and leafless trees look
thinner than before"  – Han Shan












A nuthatch was fooled by an afternoon sun
the bay is now a dark bowl of uneasy ice
she leaps to a sagging tamarack limb
and won't return until sky and water are blue

Scenes from Bayfield

"Snow obstructs my brushwood door with me inside alone" –Han Shan













The day before two men stood golfing in the park
the next a pollen of snowfall has turned to shadows
On Stockton Island lying in the Great Lake beyond
bears sleep in pine dens under a warming white sun

Scenes from Bayfield

"Snow covers earth and sky everything is new"
       – Han-Shan













Rabbit tracks are your companion on Pike's Creek trail
A crow caws somewhere off in the distance
each sound caught by the tumbling surface of a snowflake
the pines stand creekside undisturbed by the wind

Scenes from Bayfield

"Flat lake cold penetrates water-lily clothes
the mountain by the lake is neither right nor  
                                                        wrong
dusty tracks all end the world is far away
white clouds and gulls have no hidden plans"
        – Han Shan










The great city docks jut out into the ice unshaken
Madeline ferry alone sits rocking gently in its slip
The peaking cap of a cathedral sits snug up on the hill
above as the ice plates bob in accidental unison