All posts by Elsa Johnson

The Peripatetic Gardener Visits Hocking Hills

BEAUTY, GENERAL INTEREST

Hello dear Gardenopolis readers –

Our prolonged, unplanned vacation is over. Our Gardenopolis party (3rd one, celebrating two years of Gardenopolis Cleveland) was a success, with 50 people attending, enjoying good food in beautiful surroundings, and the rain politely held off until closing hour.  And now – drumroll here, please – co-editor Catherine is now the delighted new grandparent of a lovely little girl, Mira; co-editor Tom’s visiting grandchildren have returned to Chicago; and co-editor Anne has settled into a new living arrangement. Time for all of us to get back to work. I had hoped to have my interview with Cleveland Museum of Natural History’s Jim Bissell done by now, but I’m still working on transcribing it, so, not this time; instead I will share my mini-vacation visit to Ohio’s spectacular Hocking Hills.

I can’t believe I waited so long to visit this place (actually a series of places). I remember once as a teen going to a state forest down there to attend a forestry conservation camp. Alas, I was 15 and more impressed with the boys than with the scenery. LOL, as we say today. Then when I was studying landscape architecture at OSU, and the Hocking Hills were close, I was too busy. So the Hocking Hills have been on my bucket list for kind of a long time.

An explanation of the topography; It is all hills and valleys, ups and downs, with no seeming rhythm or natural order and no straight line roads. If you’re not used to the windy roads you might not want to drive after dark with the rising and falling multiple ssss curves, especially with some hot rod local in a semi’s-cab riding your car’s back end. Just off Rt.466 is the winner of the most-lethal-looking-driveway-entrance-to-a-school award, ever. Period. Why? Why? Why put an entrance to a school there?

Anyway, among those roads and tucked into those gnarly hills are wondrous places, cliffs and caves, and waterfalls, and grottos.  Some of these spaces fight the camera — the cliffs, for example, and the caves. Without a human or human structure in the picture to give a sense of scale, they are just jumbles of rocks and trees, lacking depth perception.

     

We started, as I suspect most people do, with Old Man’s Cave, which, along with Cedar Falls, and the Ash Cave are probably the most popular and most visited of the natural attractions in the Hocking Hills (there are unnatural attractions, but we won’t go into them here). All this chaotic multitude of big and little hills drain water into twisty-rocky-cliffy little streams that drain into twisty-rocky-cliffy bigger streams, and eventually become twisty rivers — which drain, finally, into the twisty Ohio River). One of these little streams carved Old Man’s Cave, which is a huge recess cave, created by the wearing away of a softer layer of rock from between harder layers of rock – here sandstone. There is an upper falls, a trail downstream to lower falls into Old Man’s Cave, and then the trail follows the stream that meanders between the walls of a gorge for roughly a mile. You eventually get to Cedar Falls, misnamed. The first colonists mistook the trees, which are hemlocks, for Cedars. Then from Cedar Falls you can pick up another trail to the Ash Cave, the area’s largest recess cave, or across a fun small suspension bridge to Whispering Cave, almost as large, I’m told, as Ash Cave.

What was interesting, to me, was observing that the infrastructure of stairs and bridges and trails that encourages and supports intense public use of this place/space — most of it created by the CCC in the depression years of the early 30’s (and they did a spectacular job), though it is showing signs of wear and much use over some 80 plus years, has largely endured.

Old Structures

New Structures

One enjoys a mix of ‘artifacts’ – Mother Nature’s, on one hand, and man’s, on the other — and both are beautiful. The CCC artifacts sometimes incorporate the former and often feel organic, and stand in contrast to the more contemporary man made structures. On the negative side, this place shows the effects of so much love, of so much use. The paths, and beyond the paths, are worn, the soil is bare. There is little vegetation along the main pathways, other than the trees, and these often have their roots fully exposed. This is the inevitable erosion and compaction of the access path too much traveled, and that tempting short-cut too often taken. Everywhere there are the signs of our human insatiable curiosity (what’s up that ledge? What’s in that cave? Gotta see!). Interesting, too, to me, that not until four years ago was there a precipitation event that damaged this otherwise so durable man-made infrastructure.

We also went to a place called Rock House, a collapsed recess cave — impossible to photograph with one’s android phone) a little more off the beaten track. Much the same story of wear and tear there.

Contrast these with Conkle’s Hollow, within a similar gorge, but somewhat – considerably? — less visited, and considerably less worn down, located in a state nature preserve rather than a state park or state forest. Does this explain the difference? I can’t answer that question. We hiked both the loop rim trail (two miles, not counting the ups and downs) and the inside-the-gorge trail. The rim trail takes you close along the edge of 200 foot high cliffs, and even if you do not get vertigo and thus are brave enough to go right to the edges and look down, all you can see are the tops of the trees below. The footing is uneven, challenging. The east rim, which gets the western sun, seems drier. There is mountain laurel and briar edging the path among the hemlock trees. The west rim, which gets the eastern sun, seems wetter, shadier. It is more open and ferny. 

The gorge itself is a religious experience! The path in and out is flat concrete that is handicapped accessible, and — thanks be to God, the ODNR, and the well placed fence — people largely stay on it. It helps that there are frequent signs asking one to stay on the trail to help preserve the vegetative ecosystem — ferns, ferns, ferns and more ferns, densely carpeting the steep slopes under the tall straight trees, clinging to the rock walls, growing on large stones, with lots of stinging nettle (don’t touch!) and little bit of a native broadleaved carex for contrast.

The air is moist, cool. There is a natural hush here, similar to what one felt during the recent eclipse. Perfect.    

                                 

Dear Fellow Ents

GENERAL INTEREST, PRESERVATION

by Elsa Johnson

It’s not just our trees that are dying but trees everywhere, headlines an article in The Guardian (issue of 19 September 2016, written by Oliver Milman in Oahu and Alan Yuhas in San Francisco).

In Hawaii, on the big island, in 2010, the iconic ohi’a trees – a rainforest evergreen — started dying at an astonishing rate. After almost six years nearly 50,000 acres of native forest on the big island are infected, and there is the potential for major deforestation to a whole family of metrosideros trees and shrubs of the Pacific. It is caused by a beetle carrying a pathogen (dark creeping shades of Moana!).

In other areas of the tropics, disease threatens banana plantations, coffee growers are dealing with fungal attacks that reduce yield and kill the plants that produce the coffee bean, and citrus greening is a threat to citrus growers worldwide.

In California an invasive pathogen called Sudden Oak Death – distantly related to the cause of the 19th century Irish potato famine – is infecting hundreds of different plants, including redwoods and ferns (but …but…it’s called oak death): 66 million trees have been killed in the Sierra Nevada alone. SOD is caused by phytophthora ramorum. Despite its name the pathogen slowly saps the life from oaks over two to five years. It is spread mostly through water, like rain splashing off an infected leaf, or wind driven rain that can carry the pathogen for miles. Whole mountainsides have died.

In the Midwest, from Texas to Minnesota and east into Ohio, trees are dying. Ashes succumb to ash borer, oaks succumb to oak wilt (as we know to our regret through the loss of old growth red oaks in Forest Hill Park), caused by the fungus Ceratocystic fagacearum, and to opportunistic insects like the Two-lined Chestnut Beetle.  And now something is affecting our native beeches. Meanwhile In the Pacific northwest, bark beetles and pine beetles are killing trees. Five years of drought starved trees of water and weakened their defenses. The beetles that used to be held in check by wet winters now have more time to roam beyond their normal territories, expanding from British Columbia to the Yukon border. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the iconic English and European beech forests are also threatened by climate change, especially drought. For us here, weather – mild winters possibly? – may not kill off the two lined chestnut borers the way a bitterly cold winter would, hastening their spread.   

What seem like small changes to us – the shift of a degree or two, the lengthening of fall and the earlier spring onset of spring by a just few weeks (which feels beneficial to us – who doesn’t appreciate a milder winter around here?) — can have profound negative cascading affects to ecosystems which depend for communal health on everything living in a balanced equilibrium of competing and cooperating interconnected organisms, both above and below ground.  Events like a long and too-wet spring, followed by a longish period of drought, such as we had here in northeast Ohio last year, which affected the prairie states even more severely, stress trees, leaving them vulnerable. They live lives many times longer than ours, but are slow to adapt.

Alas.

These changes to climate – that seem so unremarkable to us, or even good as we enjoy that mild winter day – naturally affect all components of an ecosystem, and there are parameters beyond which any ecosystem becomes destabilized and the natural equilibrium of the healthy ecosystem is sent awry. I believe we laypeople inadequately appreciate this. Probably new equilibriums will be established over an extended time, but we, personally, probably will not live to see it. Recent reports suggest as much as 80% of species may be on a path to extinction…. and we? We are who understand – we who care? Galadriels, sadly looking at the world we love, knowing that much in it that is wonderful will pass away.   

This is what tree death looks like.

 

 

Be Here Now

POETRY

by Elsa Johnson

What else              would one write               on a fairest day?

Yesterday      overhead                         the clouds flew by like

fluffed white dragons                strung out       horizontally —

battalions                no   –    legions !               lined up against

perfect blue                  Today’s heavens have changed three

times this last hour     —     wisps first         tattered         as if

breath ripped apart in some great battle         —             then

infinite           pale         and        totally        cloudless        sky

Now?         Dragon spawn                         Today is all sea rush

a constant in-rushing         wall          :        Sound    —     wave

upon wave       —         wearing away                 relentless and

without emotion                  Thus     what else can I say    but

Great Spirit               Dragon Breath             oh   cloud and air

let me be present        Here         :          Let me be           now

Chimney Swifts

PRESERVATION

by Elsa Johnson

Back in the day before people caged off their chimneys there were probably fewer mosquitos.

What??? You say… what possible connection????

The answer? Chimney swifts/chimney ‘swallows’.

Chaetura pelagica, voracious eaters of all flying insects, like mosquitos. These birds, native to the Americas, spend the winter (as I would like to do) in South America (northwestern countries), but breed in North America during our summers. Their range is from the Rockies eastward to the Atlantic and northward into lower parts of Canada. Like all swifts, they are incapable of perching, but instead cling vertically to surfaces. And this is where chimneys come in.

A swift spirals down to its roost opening from above. Originally these birds roosted and nested in trees. While they are diurnal foragers, able to stay afloat in the sky for hours, the time I am most aware of them is in the liminal hours of dawn and dusk. They are easily recognized, with their strange short, neck-less bodies, long slender wings, swift erratic flight and chittering call, but they are also easily mistaken for swallows (hence the name confusion). Able to drink and bath on the wing, they are one of the swiftest of birds.

They have extremely acute vision and interestingly, can focus with one eye or both eyes, and, like our native whippoorwill, which they somewhat resemble, they have a huge mouth gape — the better to eat you, little flying insect – but they are sociable rather than solitary, and many birds – sometimes hundreds – will share a roost.  In that roost there is only one breeding pair, mated for life.

Although originally cavity-in-tree dwellers, since the arrival of European colonists – and chimneys – these birds now almost exclusively use chimneys (and air shafts, isolated corners in lightly used buildings, and the walls of cisterns and wells). Here’s the catch, however: today many of us cage our chimneys, thus preventing chimney swifts/swallows from using them.

In 2010 the International Union for the Conservation of Nature changed this bird’s status from Least Concern to Near Threatened. Its population has declined precipitously across the majority of its range. The causes of its population decline are unclear. There may be contributing factors besides loss of roosts.  In the U.S, the chimney swift is protected and neither birds nor nests can be removed from chimneys.

How can you help? You can build a chimney ‘swallow’ tower.

This tall slender structure offers an alternative to chimneys. It is usually placed to allow easy maneuverability to descending birds, in an open field, or in a yard, in an open area…. but could also be placed, it seems to me, on a flat roof or deck. They can be big or small. As with chimneys, some maintenance is required. You can find plans on line; look for chimney swift houses. 

To Be Called   :   Testimony

BEAUTY, POETRY

by Elsa Johnson

I will speak now in other voices       :        whippoorwill        legend        saver of lost souls

haunting the wood’s edge in springtime                                calling the dusk moths home            

I will speak now in the voice of chipmunk              quicksilver             placer of sunflowers

seed-side-down                    offerings made                           for one more day’s safe grace

I will speak in the hawk’s voice         :        sharp-shinned huntress                          shrieker 

gifter of quick death         she of the ice-cold heart           the silent swift-moving shadow                         

and in the vulture’s voice          :          gleaner                  wing-rider                  wind-soarer                                                               whose presence is                                   the priesthood                                              of death

I will speak now in other voices       :       hummingbird chitter               high in the tops of

linear locust trees          :          small       writhen       ring-necked snakes                alarmed                               

loosened from sheltering stone          :         Yellow-jackets          that sting         and chase        

to sting again            and night-time horses           —          bolting         —              lightening

flares           —              thunder-claps                            and   I will speak for the un-wild deer                 

quiet-eyed                at the yard’s edge                             browsing the bushes without fear                                                             

I would speak for what does not speak     :     the  cruel devouring mantis      the delicate

damselfly she sometimes hunts           —          for bumblebees         butterflies          drunk 

in the milkweed         the goldenrod            —           all that multitude of            tiny insects        

buzzing flowers         :           in red crocosmia         sprawling                        purple pungent

oregano                           yellow-eyed blue buddleia                          crystal-crusted daylilies             

star-burst filaments of    cimicifuga                                                            and bee-glad phlox                                                   

I   too    will stand to speak for the wood drake            and for the still water on which he             

rests in beauty       For the great heron            the night heron              the ‘fisher’ flashing    

low     over the water          —       for the geese        drifting      among the reeds       the lily

pads        and for the strong-jawed turtle         waiting                                       lurking below   

                  

I will learn and speak the language of lichen                                         of grey-green filigree

coating stone                hiding time                      —                 the language of the aging oaks

riddled by borer        riven with wilt                 —                    I will learn the codes of worms

of microscopic mycorrhizal fungi           leaf mulch             and leaf mold              decay    —    

the language of           the mysterious complexity of dirt             duff           ruffled rhubarb        

and all that driven             erotic              unfurling of spring                                     new risen                               

out of the driven        luminous         dying         of fall                            I will speak for them

and  this voice too    :    ocean   :     least knowable           greatest of all              her words

of hush and sibilance      of susurration      that mystic speech          that echoes        down

our own chambered seas       words        of the wet world         that tell us                we live     

not          as we think         on our own terms            but helplessly           :          Hear that            

internal roar             Feel the great wave’s pull                the irresistible draw of its wash                     

its tremble        tumble        its untranslatable speech made up of        songs            of all

the large and lesser creatures of Sea             I will speak for them        :          sharp tooth

and finned tail      tentacle and gill          I will speak for what cannot speak      —      even

for that vastest whale         wrecked        broken       on the broad beach            by plastic

I will speak in other voices                                                                                 to bear witness

  

                       

Elsa Visits Sidwell Friends School

PERMACULTURE

by Elsa Johnson

While in DC for the march for climate action I also visited the Sidwell Friends School, where my husband’s cousin, David Mog (an ex-Cleveland-ite), taught math for many years. Though now retired, he is still welcomed back at Sidwell Friends, and so I got a tour of the school complex. David had told me about the waste water recycling project that Sidwell Friend’s installed several years ago and which I’d expressed an interest in seeing up close and personal (well – not too).

It is a complex system in which the water from toilets flows first into a sort of settling tank where the solids settle out. Then the liquids flow into a series of three hillside, heavily planted leach beds. As it passes through the plants of each leach bed it gets progressively cleaner. Supposedly after flowing through the third leach bed, it is safe and clean and can be recirculated.  At Sidwell Friends it is reused again and again. By being circulated back to the toilets it proceeds thus in a continuous cycle. Impressive! There is really nothing to see – and definitely nothing to smell – except plants.

 

As part of the educational aspect a cylinder was installed at the top of the terraced slope that charts the flow of the water. This shows how the system works. Of course there is a good bit of unseen infrastructure of pipes, etc., in a basement which I did not visit. 

In the same location, at the bottom of the slope is a rainwater catchment pond that captures rainwater off of the roofs of several of the more recently constructed buildings surrounding the site.  The runoff rain water flows through a variety of runnels and tunnels, mostly aesthetic, and then flows into a catchment pond, which has fish. The day we were there I believe there was a problem with the filter and so the system was getting tweaked a bit by the firm that manages it.  There was a young (by my standards) man working in the water and David had a good talk with him while I wandered around taking pictures. 

The Sidwell Friends complex was also interesting for using its sloped site efficiently — putting playing fields, in one case, on top of a garage, and in another on top of the gymnasium.  

After the visit to Sidwell Friends Elsa and David drove past the Kushener/Trump home which is in the same neighborhood as the new Obama digs (a few short blocks from each other), which we also tried to drive past, but the access road was (is) blocked as Obama is still heavily guarded by security, for his own safety. We did a little DC tour and talked about what may be Elsa’s next DC sojourn in September, the Interfaith March. We shall see.     

Gardenopolis Cleveland Goes to Washington D.C.

POLITICAL, PRESERVATION

by Elsa Johnson and Catherine Feldman

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Dear Gardenopolis readers,

We’ve missed a couple postings, and we apologize. We (the editorial board) confess to being political creatures for whom climate change is a very real and very present (as in right now!) issue, and the direction this president has chosen in response to this issue – i.e., to deny it, and wipe out the EPA – has had us (some of us more than others) spinning off in various activist directions ever since the inauguration. Most recently two of us (Catherine and Elsa) traveled to DC for the Climate Action March (where it was a hot! hot 91 degrees! – a record high for the month, and the month itself a record high for DC).

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We joined the group, Elders for Climate Action for the march itself (200,000 people strong) and, briefly, for a conference at the Capitol the day before, at which Maryland representative to Congress, Jamie Raskin spoke. Someone who ‘gets it’. Several days later Catherine attend another conference ( Consultation on Conscience ) at which the young firebrand progressive Joe Kennedy III (grandson of Robert Kennedy) spoke — another person who gets it. These speakers gave us hope (alas, short lasting).

Yes, the march and those activist activities took priority, but while we were there at the Seat of Empire we also spent time doing the very Gardenopolisy thing of looking in on almost all the gardens attached to the various and many cultural institutions around the mall and taking lots of pictures…. and these pictures tell a story about how the focus of landscape in these important public spaces is now about gardening with native plants.

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We can only applaud.  When Elsa was there in February for the Women’s March – 500,000 people strong – it seemed like every green space was being trampled, and it was hard to imagine anything withstood that trampling, but as you can see from our pictures, the landscapes look great.

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One sometimes forgets the distances between the Capitol building at one end and the Lincoln Memorial at the other (yes, this 73 year old walked the entire distance – it felt like more than once). Just crossing the width of the Mall is a trek on a 91 degree day. The monumental scale is such that one could use a horse.

I (Catherine) bring two key points from my conference that are eminently applicable to Gardenopolis Cleveland. First, we were told over and over again by politicians and activists that the voices of citizens are heard by our elected officials in Washington. We were encouraged to speak out, especially in person. Attending town hall meetings and participating in marches does make a difference. Phoning, writing and signing petitions have an impact. We do not have to wait for our next opportunity to vote. Officials in D.C. are harried by the confusion caused by Trump and his administration. They need our support. When someone does something right, let them know. 

Secondly, we were encouraged to become active at the local and state level. We can fight for the environment here at home, relatively untouched by what is going on in D.C. and we need to do so. So, what can we do? Gardenopolis Cleveland would like to open that conversation. Please respond in the Comments section about what you are doing, what you would like to be doing, and any of your own organizations that need help.

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Look Before You LEAP

GENERAL INTEREST

by Elsa Johnson

(That’s supposed to be a joke — and it’s not even April)

One of my favorite organizations, which works out of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, is LEAP, which stands for (take a deep breathe to get you through) Lake Erie Allegheny Partnership for Biodiversity. What is LEAP? you ask:  It is a collaborative umbrella organization bringing together a collection of regional environmental organizations falling within the ecoregion of the Lake Erie Allegheny Plateau. The list of collaborating entities is long and includes, as you would expect, our many local park districts as well as some not-so-local park districts, local and national conservancies, our natural history museum, the EPA, and more.

There are monthly meetings (10 AM second Wednesday of the month) with speakers. One recent talk was on building Chimney swift houses to provide homes for breeding chimney swift pairs: swifts are great consumers of mosquitos (Gardenopolis Cleveland plans to do an article on this soon). Another recent talk was on what kind of coyotes we have around here – which was timely, as there has been so much public talk recently about sightings of what people take to be coy-wolves. A recent long email sequence in Nextdoor Coventry went on — and on —  and on – and on, all from one sighting of what the sighter was convinced was a wolf (be assured, it wasn’t). This LEAP talk clarified the issue through pie charts that showed the genetics of various coyote  populations in the Eastern United States, and was able to  clarify what combination of genes we actually have right here (that too will make its way into Gardenopolis, someday soon).   

What is the The Lake Erie Allegheny Plateau? It is an ecoregion that includes almost everything on the United States side of Lake Erie that is in Lake Erie’s watershed, and somewhat beyond it, encompassing the Lake Plain and glaciated lands south of Canada from Sandusky Bay all the way to western New York. This area has a common glacial history and a climate that is influenced by Lake Erie. As a natural history museum visitor what this means to you is that in a place like the museum’s Perkin’s Garden and Wildlife Center, you can expect to see the plants and animals that are representative of this ecoregion.

Also, the LEAP Native Plant Committee puts out a yearly postcard of native plants which lists one tree, one shrub, and one perennial, and offers designing-with-native-plants workshops. Look for this in another coming soon Gardenopolis posting.

LEAP puts out a very handsome little booklet that tells about LEAP’s mission to conserve and protect our ecoregion from threats such as habitat destruction, destructive alterations to various physical processes (such as groundwater hydrology, and lake and stream levels) and destructive alteration to species interactions, especially via competitive pressure from invasive, non-native species. Garlic mustard and its effect on the West Virginia White Butterfly leaps (sorry – couldn’t resist) immediately to mind. And more. Some copies of this booklet, and the native plants for the year postcard, will be available at the Permaculture Potluck (see last week’s blog) on April 2nd .

My favorite part of the booklet is the breakout with description of our ecoregion’s fourteen natural communities — which are diverse and beautiful — and where you can find them. Climate change threatens many of our community ecosystems. We are seeing outbreaks of oak wilt and insect pests in some of our old growth oak forests, such as at Forest Hill Park, where the red oaks are being decimated by oak wilt

and two-lined chestnut borer, the latter of which is also affecting other oaks such as Chestnut oaks.

For more information about LEAP and our native community ecosystems go to www.leapbio.org.   

Reminder: it is garlic mustard season. This is what it looks like.

garlic mustard. It is an invasive species. If you find it in your yard, pull it. It’s edible. One of us likes to put it in his breakfast scrambled eggs.          

How the Orgy Begins

POETRY

by Elsa Johnson

Honeyberry leafed out    last night                                           Her pale

tiny flower buds are straining                         ( wait!   wait!       There

are no pollinators yet! )                                                    The first grey-

green buddlea leaves    uncurl —                                      Poking amid

half-digested leaf mold                                                    fragile carcass

of insect           :          possibly bumblebee            :           and    there

a scant handful of                                                    ultra violet     irises

while here               the rhubarb                  in its red                 unfurl-

ing            —          so      almost     obscene           —           like a bright

vulva        aroused from dirt                                      Last year’s debris

shouts     —      take me!   ( away! )              while this year’s new life

claws   out of the ground                And the sparrows call    :   what? 

who?/ where?/ there!  —  Is it time? —  now! /now! / quick? / quick!            

Good Planets Are Hard To Find

POETRY, POLITICAL

by Elsa Johnson

the bumper sticker said            and here we are   —                                 stranded

in this black vacuum of space filled            beyond full          with cold pinpricks

of far    and farther     distant stars            We are no longer ignorant creatures

cowering     beating our ape chests in fear    in domination           We know we

are not the center of      the ever-expanding universe            We know the sun

does not revolve around us                                           but we are still the center

of   our  universe       —      in this sense the worlds still spin around      not our

planet              but            we who ride her              A fine point   –   but telling  :           

Good planets are hard to find

Where is the awe      commensurate to truth?     Out there amid the glittering

of infinitude          the ice-hot brilliant stars    in the blank of space            there

are surely other planets         blue         fragile        like ours                       Do we

imagine        we will find one          once we’ve fouled this one ?              Escape

to a place that         —      once we found a way to get there          —           would

no longer   be   there                      Would be going               faster               faster                      

Perhaps ridden by its own                       brand                                            of doom