Life at the Margins

Puddock Hill Journal #63: An emergency cleanup reveals a big mess along the property line.

A few weeks ago, a tree came down in a storm near the east property corner by the road.

As the land lies a good fifteen feet higher than road grade there, the fallen tree was not something one would notice driving by. It’s also an area I rarely walk, but I do regularly peer down in that direction from the driveway assessing our rewilding efforts. (Okay, “assessing” means praying the future woods into existence.)

When I noticed something looked off, I left the car and walked over there to find a 20-foot-tall black locust lying on its side. At first glance, it appeared to have bracketed a young caged chestnut oak with its main limbs, but I couldn’t tell for sure.

This week, I went out with my chainsaw to rescue the bracketed tree and discovered it took more damage than I’d hoped. It had been doing well until then, and chestnut oaks are among my favorites, so I felt a pang of disappointment.

As I assessed the situation, I realized that this property line is perhaps the most neglected site at Puddock Hill. The corner feels especially remote from everything, and the seemingly wild bit of woods hid the neighboring property well enough, so I had not made a thorough examination. Now that I took a better look, what I considered benign neglect proved not so benign.

The black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia) that fell is a native to Pennsylvania but considered invasive in some areas. (One day I will parse out my opinion on whether a native ought to ever be considered invasive, but not today.) What brought it down was a collection of invasive Asian bittersweet vines, some as thick as my calf. Nearby, shrub Japanese honeysuckle and autumn olive, both invasives, had been overtopped by invasive multiflora rose and invasive porcelainberry.

In short, the whole area is a complete mess. I cleaned up what I could, killing the vines I could reach with my chainsaw and freeing the bulk of the now damaged chestnut oak, but I may have to bring in a bigger crew to take the invasives down to the ground.

We neglect the margins to our sorrow. It’s where the invaders get purchase.

Here at Puddock Hill, I lament the wetland just over the property line where  invasive common reed (Phragmites) flourishes. Of course, it doesn’t stay on its side of the fence. Nor do the masses of porcelainberry that have taken over a meadow on the neighboring development’s open space but, it seems, far enough away from their walking paths to go utterly ignored by what passes for a maintenance crew over there.

One doesn’t have to look very hard around town to see trees on the margins of the woods engulfed in vines. In Worton, Maryland, where my wife’s family has a farm, a nearby farmer has allowed the edges between field and road to be claimed entirely by autumn olive (Elaeagnus umbellata), bringing a curse upon the entire town. These invasive trees are now cropping up in fallow fields everywhere.

Back here in Pennsylvania, I often see the edges of meadows, farmland, and parks overrun by multiflora rose. Allowed to flower, it promulgates itself widely, and my property, as readers of this newsletter well know, is far from immune.

We regularly also drive native wildlife to the margins—to the places we can’t farm or build upon—the soggy areas or steep slopes where they suffer in silence, driven from the natural habitat we stole from them. I think of the wonderful John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge at Tinicum.

With the tidal Darby Creek spreading into a substantial wetland that hosts many birds, the land was mostly “useless” to humans, thus preserving it hardly counts as a sacrifice. Philadelphia Airport and I-95 and train tracks hem it in. When you walk certain trails near the margins, you can’t ignore the industrial roar—the clatter of trains, the hum of the highway, the whine of jet engines—nor, presumably, can the wild animals. Not content to relegate them to these margins, Sunoco ran five pipelines through the place. In February 2000, one of them leaked nearly 200,000 gallons of oil into “the largest remaining freshwater tidal wetland area in Pennsylvania,” according to the U.S. Department of the Interior. The same department, no doubt, that permitted the pipelines in the first place.

For the backyard steward, allowing the margins to be overrun by invasives is at best a lost opportunity. For those on smaller lots, these are some of the only wild places in a fragmented landscape.

With regard to those who farm crops or maintain meadows, margins are even more important as they provide refuges of diversity in an otherwise homogeneous landscape. A recent study of European hedgerows published in Basic and Applied Ecology concluded that “the structural diversity of hedgerows needs to be increased if their impact on biodiversity and ecosystem service provision is to be improved” and recommended that “hedgerow management measures should specifically consider the ecological importance of the structural diversity of hedgerows.”

One might apply the same principles to any marginal land, particularly sites squeezed between pavement, lawns, and other heavily managed areas. I realize that while I have been working to reforest our east woods I have neglected the mature trees and invasive species that have established themselves along the property line. The least I can do is kill the vines assailing them.

This summer, if I get the opportunity, I will go along with loppers and chainsaw killing as many invasive vines as I can find. Then I’ll mark invasive shrubs such as honeysuckle and burning bush (Euonymus alatus) for termination this winter.

The margins are too important to neglect.

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Update regarding an earlier post, "Murder at Puddock Hill":

I was notified last week that the female downy woodpecker hatchling I brought to Tristate Bird Rescue, seemingly full of life, did not survive. Their email didn’t specify a cause of death. This news made me immeasurably sad.

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The splash of color in this photo is a beautiful invasion of crown vetch (Coronilla varia) in the barn meadow:

Native common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca) gets set to open on the unmowed slope by the house:

Native herbaceous St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum) flowers off the upper path to the big pond:

To my disappointment, much of the pickerelweed (Pontederia cordata) we planted in the big pond last year doesn’t seem to be coming back, but this patch looks happy:

Swamp azalea (Rhododendron viscosum) flowers on the driveway bridge:

The view from my “office” includes a native ninebark shrub (Physocarpus sp.), native chokeberry (Aronia spp.), non-native atlas cedar, native tuliptree, native red maple, and non-native dawn redwood: