A Tree Grows in the Reservation—Or Does It?

Last autumn I took on the responsibility of monitoring one of the forty-two reforestation sites in the South Mountain Reservation. These fenced enclosures were erected last spring in an effort to protect the fragile native botany from the tearing jaws of too many hungry deer.

Though I take an uncomfortable but accepting stance on the annual deer hunt, when faced with forest devastation I am more than willing to do my part. So every time I'm up in the woods, I take a stroll past my little fenced-in acreage. As this summer's stifling drought has extended beyond even The Weather Channel's predictions, I started to notice a few things that worried me.

First, there were the twigs. Yes, those ones in the photo with the little yellow tags.  They line the edge of my reforestation site. I had no idea what they were, but I could tell that they were dead. And not much else seemed to be growing along the hill as far as I could see. Back in the spring I'd noticed mayapples blooming and plenty of fiddleheads unfurling above last year's leaves. Now there was almost nothing. Even outside the fence along the trails, the sturdy branches on all sides were fringed with crinkled, brown-edged leaves.

So I called Tricia Zimic, the visionary spearhead of the reforestation project, and begged her to join me on the trail. (Zimic has many talents actually, including crafting beautiful wildlife conservation art.) I knew she'd been doing a lot of work up at the Wildflower Preserve, a gorgeous, open vista of carefully replanted flowering species that have survived thanks to her careful watering and nearly daily attention.

But there are no water spigots on the Turtle Back side where my forest block sits—no water at all but what nature decides to give. I sensed Tricia knew that I was frantic. All that money, all that effort, all that high-minded talk about stewardship and forest management. I was fully prepared to report on the failure of good intentions.

I met Tricia at the Turtle Back parking area off Walker Road in West Orange. After a quick hike down the hill we came to my reforestation site. She had to help me jiggle the lock open, then we stepped inside.

"Hmmm….  Yes, I see," she said. "These are definitely dead."

She and I counted six or seven barren twigs, probably infant oaks. "Why don't you take some pictures? I'll send them to the landscape company we worked with and they'll replace them."

"Really?" I asked, amazed.  "At no cost?"

"No cost. As long as they died this season, it's part of our contract."

I was thoroughly relieved. At least, in these hard economic times, the County's controversial investment would not be wasted.

But as we walked further over fallen branches and a carpet of brittle leaves, Tricia pointed. "Look, there's some spotted wintergreen." A tiny, fragile stalk stuck up from the forest floor, topped with curious round buds.  "And over here, this is maple-leaf viburnum."

She bent down to examine the sapling, no more than a couple of sprigs about eighteen inches broad. "This is looking really good.  Over here, there's some sassafras. And this one is ironwood, and down there are Christmas ferns.  This is actually really healthy."

Most surprising, my site had almost no invasives, the plants I was supposed to pull for their weedy danger to this healthy crop. "Since no deer can get in here," Tricia said, "these native plants are beginning to take off."

But outside the reforestation site, Tricia showed me patches of stilt grass and Japanese knotweed, both hearty invasive plants that inhabit large stretches on either side of the wider trails, giving them their most drought-hardy, picturesque green.

"That's a lot to pull," I said, as she bent down and started weeding.

I suggested getting the local schools involved, building a kind of homegrown CCC that would view the forest as both civic duty and educational opportunity. My mantra has become: "In these times of tight school budgets, the forest is right here and it's free. Plus it's exercise and history." The benefits were so obvious, I scheduled a meeting with my school principal on the subject for the very next day.

Finally I took Tricia over to Turtle Back Rock. Since she lives on the Maplewood side of the Reservation, she'd never been there. Beside the fascinatingly textured basalt cliff that gave the Turtle Back Rock and the Turtle Back Zoo their names, what she saw was a forest that, despite the drought, was truly thriving. Low bush blueberries, Solomon's seal, sedges, ferns, thick green moss, sapling birch trees, and tiny, red fruited partridge berries clung to the cliff.

We both marveled at the heartiness of a forest where native species seemed inclined to survive despite the ravages of successive seasons of super-saturation, as we had last June, and relentless drought. Perhaps the "tough love" approach to forest maintenance that Tricia and others from the South Mountain Conservancy have been practicing really works. "With fewer deer here, the forest is really coming alive. I always tell people, we have to love all animals, not just one species."