by Carl Strang
Restoration work continues at St. James Farm Forest Preserve, where I serve as volunteer steward for McCormick Woods, one of the highest quality forests in DuPage County. Over the winter, Wayne Schreiner and I burned the 14 brush piles accumulated in the previous 12 months.
Wayne has worked with me nearly from the start, and recently was named co-steward.
A little wind helps the brush piles to burn fiercely and fast. We don’t burn them unless there is snow on the ground.
The soil is sterilized by the burn. We seeded the scars with native grasses and asters. The seeds have been sprouting, but practically none in the centers of the burn scars.
I suspect that the ashes may raise the soil pH too high for the seedlings to grow. Rain eventually will resolve this.
Now that we have entered our third season, we can see positive results from our brush clearing.
Spring ephemerals are growing thickly in the part of the forest we cleared two years ago.
In contrast, areas we cleared this winter will need time to recover from years of suppression by buckthorns and honeysuckles.
Some liberated species grow later in the season than the ephemerals.
This colony of mayapples is one example.
Jack-in-the-pulpits soon will be joined by their green dragon relatives.
Woodland knotweeds apparently have posed challenges to botanists. The species name has stayed the same, but the genus has changed twice since I first became familiar with the species in the early 1980’s (Tovara to Polygonum to Antenoron).
Occasionally Wayne and I get a welcome assist from workday groups, most recently Naperville Boy Scout troop 505.
The scouts attacked buckthorns with bow saws and loppers.
Wayne took this group photo with one of the leader’s phones.
Elsewhere, I have been pleasantly surprised by the relatively low numbers of second-year garlic mustard plants in the forest. In about 10 hours’ work I have essentially cleaned them out. This was the low year for this invasive biennial, however, and dense patches of seedlings forecast the need for our workdays to focus on them next year. Three years of pulling, and some controlled burns by forest preserve district staff, have made this rapid progress possible. We are fortunate that garlic mustard had not been established very long in McCormick Woods.
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