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Community Corner

Replanting the South Mountain Reservation

Tricia Zimic leads the effort to replant South Mountain Reservation in 42 enclosures

At least Tricia Zimic didn’t have to worry about watering the Christmas fern, thin-leaved mint and hyssop, which she carried in a single pot to join with the more than 26,000 other native plants growing atop South Mountain Reservation.

It rained as Zimic, a Maplewood resident, carried her leafy charges to the fenced-in 14 acres surrounding the dog park on Crest Drive, where for the past two years she’s worked with the county, the Audubon Society and the South Mountain Conservancy to restore the mountain’s native vegetation.

“There used to be nothing here,” she said, gesturing at a field of penstamin, blueberry, goldenrod and Joe-Pye weed. “Now look at it.”

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The Wildflower and Forest Reserve is in the middle of its third year of existence, and already the results are blossoming. Literally.

Zimic, 52, said she got the idea to build a sanctuary in South Mountain for native plants from a West Orange man who had done something similar, though on a smaller scale, along the Watchung Reservoir. She took the idea to Dennis Percher, chair of the South Mountain Conservancy’s board of trustees.

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Soon, with cooperation from Essex County Executive Joseph N. DiVincenzo, Jr., work started on the Wildflower and Forest Reserve. Zimic, the project’s point person, consulted with many botanists, including Rick Radis, who in 1974 cataloged all the plants he found on South Mountain. A contracting company then ordered and planted the thousands of specimens originally native to the Reservation that had been driven out due to environmental factors ranging from deer overgrazing to the proliferation of non-native plants.

Around the Reservation, there are 42 reserves of varying size where people have tried to re-establish the native plants. The Wildflower and Forest Reserve by the dog park is by far the biggest. Zimic calls it, “The Jewel.”

Even in the reserves, however, non-native plants still have a stronghold. Plants such as Japanese stiltgrass, wineberry, Barberry, Japanese knotweed, angelica and trees like the cork and weeping cherry are all found on South Mountain, many in areas where Zimic is trying to re-grow the natives. Some she was able to eradicate through poisons; others she hopes to drive out through what she calls “outplanting.”

The idea of outplanting, she said, is that many of the non-native plants need plenty of sunlight in order to survive. With deer having eaten much of the underbrush, those non-natives have the sunlight they need to flourish. Zimic hopes that by planting a dense canopy of native bushes and shrubs among these non-native plants, the natives can push-them out.

Essential to Zimic’s plan is deer management, a contentious issue in the communities surrounding South Mountain.

Ironically, years ago the land where the Wildflower and Forest Reserve now sits used to be a fenced-in deer pen. Today, those fences keep the deer out. Zimic even refers to the area not as an enclosure, but an “exclosure.”

“We want to keep the deer out,” she said. “Controlling the deer population is the best herbicide we can get.”

She dreams of one day seeing the entire 2,000-acre Reservation restored as close as possible to its original state, with native plants everywhere and a healthy deer population living in harmony with the other animals.

“I don’t like killing deer,” she said. “But I don’t like deer more than I like any other animal.”

Zimic has been helped along the way by scores of volunteers ranging from Girl Scouts to Seton Hallstudents to regular citizens who love the Reservation and meet her on the third Sunday of every month to work in the Wildflower and Forest Reserve, provided it isn’t raining too hard.

In the two years since the native plants were re-introduced to the Wildflower and Forest Reserve, Zimic said she’s seen signs that native wildlife is returning also. She’s seen bluebirds, chickadees, titmice and orioles among the black-eyed Susans and snakeroot flowers. She’s hoping that the Eupatorium plant will bring back swallows. She was ecstatic to see a praying mantis, together with a nest of eggs, in a patch of milkweed.

“We had so much life that came back, it’s heartwarming,” she said. “This is a story of rebirth.”

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