Rewilding

2024 Summary-Better than Last Year

| Tim Parsons

This is the time of year I submit our application for staying certified as an Arbor Day Tree Campus, so also a good time to summarize our landscape year. And fortunately, we didn’t have the same amount of severe weather as in 2023, so it wasn’t as ‘sporty’.

We did have one windstorm, however, on January 10th, but only lost about 7 trees. The storm had a half inch of rain and a peak wind gust of 69 mph, so trees failing from ‘root plate failure’ were unsurprising. In fact, with that sort of setup, only losing 7 trees seems miraculous. My fellow co-workers think that’s because everything that could have fallen already did last year.

At any rate, we removed about 30 trees from campus, most dying of natural causes, along with a couple of preemptive Ash removals. The worst removal (that I’m still recovering from) was the giant Heritage elm on the south side of the Davis Family Library. It struggled but hung on for 25 years post construction, but eventually the interventions we were trying weren’t enough.

Offsetting that, we planted 34 trees, including around the new tennis courts, Johnson, and several locations on campus where we lost many trees in the ’23 storms.

In the winter our department helped the golf course crew remove many trees on the course for improved air circulation and game play (you’ve just reached the limit of my golf knowledge), and we also helped clear woods and remove trees for the new 9 hole disc golf course behind Hadley House in the woods. We got a normal amount of rainfall last year, so much of our crew was kept busy keeping up with the lawn mowing, but we were able to do some replanting of several beds to fill them in more and reduce weeding labor.

Another bed that got ‘redone’ was our Pollinator Garden outside of McCardell Bicentennial Hall. A new sidewalk to BiHall was installed as part of the landscape for the First Year Residence Hall, and this meant realigning the garden as well. The garden was first conceived and planted by Emily May ’09, who went on to get a Masters in Entomology from Michigan State, and is now a pollinator expert with the Xerces Society. She also lives in Cornwall, and returned for the replanting. I’ll post the plant list sometime this winter, needless to say this was a fun project.

We gave 13 tree and landscape tours in various classes and clubs in Middlebury as well as outside groups. Most importantly though, many schools, including St. Michaels, Amherst College, and others have been reaching out for advice and to research our landscape initiatives, mostly on Rewilding. In the late winter 3 students from Skidmore (froze) and researched our two green roofs for the Environmental Studies Senior Capstone course.

Lastly, we reached the end of our successful 2 year trial of Rewilding, and will continue the work into the future.

Part of the work entails researching to see if Rewilding actually works, and to do this we’re using volunteers to monitor nesting birds on campus. If the program does bring more native insects into our landscape we should see an increase in nesting bird populations. Shout out to our intrepid student and community volunteers-I had no idea one needs to count birds a half an hour before sunrise!

Rewilding Middlebury-Spring Update

| Tim Parsons

When starting Rewilding, we chose to trial all of the cover types in a single location on campus. Small meant we could make sure some of the techniques and cover types would overwinter well in our cold climate and look good the following year without a huge financial (unsustainable) commitment before expanding the program campus-wide. Two of the cover types in particular, the dwarf clover and the native fescue, have not been used here in Vermont on a large scale, so we were curious.

Happy to say, all is well, and at least from my point of view as a horticulturist, successful. Here are some mid June pictures.

Native Fescue

The native fescue zone on top of the hill by Centeno is spectacular. We treated this area last fall as an addition to the trial, and it is now nearly a pure stand of red fescue. It is going to seed now, and will probably ripen and turn a brownish green for the rest of the summer. We’ll mow it down in the fall, using a flail mower.

Near a Siberian elm in this area are some sprouts of the same tree, probably off of surface roots. Never a problem when this area was a mown lawn, we’ll probably go in there in a couple of weeks and manually cut them down to remove them. Not an area we want a grove of trees!

Going back down to the library quad, the large area of fescue in the center quad is also looking nice, though not as tall or fully in seed as the Centeno area. A couple of weeds are in there, including a stand of Milkweed we’re definitely leaving there for the Monarchs-no need to pull that. Overall, I’d give the Centeno stand an A, while this stand, looking back, is about a B/B-. (I’ve been told in my class evaluations I’m a tough grader, so take this as you will)

Lowest still in that quad, near the corner of South Main and Storrs Ave, is our final patch, coming in at I’m going to say about a C-. There are some nice patches of fescue, but they are scattered, and not a lot of it has set seed for this year. There are also a lot of ‘break through’ weeds, so it is not a pure stand. Even other types of grasses are still in there, including Red Top and Orchard grass.

Our suspicion is that Red Fescue prefers higher, drier ground, and soils not especially heavy in clay. This bodes well for large areas of campus, as we sit on a limestone ledge, and much of the campus is quite dry. We’ll keep going with this low section, see how well it does in succeeding years, but my gut says we’ll be better off picking these zones as other types, such as park lawn or Clayplain forest trees.

Clover Lawn

The dwarf clover zones are stunning. Coming up from Storrs Avenue they are on either side of the walkway, and have been in full bloom for a couple of weeks now.

First thing in the spring these started to green up, and it was about 60% clover and 40% grass, by eyeball. (We weren’t counting blades for a population study…)

However, how much of this is indeed the Dwarf clover and how much is Dutch white clover (the ‘lawn weed’)? Eyeballing it again, we’re going to say much of this is the standard white clover, and while the dwarf is present, as a sublayer lower down, but the standard dwarf white clover here probably would have worked fine. We’re rethinking our management of these sections, and while overall it’s successful botanically we’ll see if the height (closer to 4″) is acceptable this close to a building as we progress through the summer.

Park Lawn

We’re through Commencement (traditionally Memorial Day weekend) and Reunion (two weeks after that) so we’re starting a new area of ‘Park Lawn‘ below Gifford Hall on the tree covered ledge. Our management for this cover type was exactly this-get through the high trafficked and noticed times for our landscape in the spring, and then stop mowing sections of campus that don’t see much use, or sun.

These areas traditionally don’t grow too fast after the spring, and we’re taking a cue from area dairy farms. ‘First Cut’ when haying fields is always long, grassy, and bulky, made up mostly of our cool season grasses that grow and flower in the springtime, and then go dormant in the heat of the summer. In a hay field this means the clover, alfalfa, and other forage crops have their chance to shine.

In a lawn, this means that removing the bulky parts of the actively growing grass in the spring means we can time our dormant mowing season to theirs, and hopefully the remaining grass will get long-ish, but not overwhelming. We’ll probably mow these down in the fall sometime.

2023-A Year not to Repeat

| Tim Parsons

As part of our Tree Campus Higher Education Certification, we’re asked as an institution to summarize our year and activities managing our urban forest. 2023 has been, frankly, a year.

Our numbers for tree removals and plantings might seem a little off this past year, and are. The story is one echoed throughout the state, one of extreme weather events. I’d estimate in my 18 years here I’ve responded to 10-12 extreme storm events impacting our urban forest-ice, rain, wind, heavy snow, and the ilk. Of those 10 or so, 4 of them were last year, or more accurately in our reporting year, which starts roughly mid-December, when the information is due. Fortunately, we have a beautiful campus with a mostly healthy tree population, so while we lost some trees, we’re not panicking yet.

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