town government Dummerston Conservation Commission Talk Illuminates Benefits of Native Plants and Grasses

By John Anderson

As I write, people’s minds are on haying, a cooling swim in the West River, bear cubs, and spotted fawns. By the time this reaches your mailbox swallows will be starting to line up on phone lines, a sure sign that they will soon drift south. Summer is all too short in Vermont and by necessity savvy people utilize every bit of good weather.

In April, the Conservation Commission hosted a workshop entitled Getting Started with Native Plants. Jocelyn Demuth, owner of the Native Plant Nursery at Checkerspot Farm in Colrain, Massachusetts graciously agreed to travel to Dummerston for this event. Demuth’s talk focused on native perennials and grasses that will thrive in our area and that are vital to the native bees, butterflies, and birds that we depend on as crop pollinators.

One need only walk into an elbow-deep field of native wildflowers swarming with myriads of butterflies, bees, beetles, and their almost as numerous insect predators to sense the health, the rightness, and the visual rewards of such places. The abnormal sterility of monocultures such as lawns and golf courses pales by comparison.

Having co-evolved with native pollinators, plant-munching beetles and caterpillars, and with regional climate conditions, native plants require no chemical pampering or irrigation. They are the low-maintenance, high-reward choice for creating a healthy and thus beautiful yard or old field floral display.

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Catering ~ Lunch ~ Dinner ~ Dine-in in the season, as water is drawn down to meet Brattleboro’s municipal demand, the violet’s habitat is exposed; they then flower and set seed, sometimes as late as October.

At our March meeting the Commission voted to submit a letter of support to the state legislature for a proposed Invasive Species Management Day. Chairperson Christine Goepp drafted our submission. Hopefully declaring an official invasives management day would raise awareness and spur remedial actions much as did the declaration of a Green Up Day some fifty plus years ago.

A rewrite and paring down of the text included in a booklet describing town trails is also underway. In recent years there has been a huge demand for outdoor recreational opportunities, and trail literature with clear, concise descriptions of trailhead locations, degrees of difficulty, and perhaps a few words about the natural communities hikers might encounter should be both inspiring and helpful to the first-time users of any trail.

Now, having dutifully reported, I’m going to ramble off into some observations about violets.

Last October as I raked leaves, the flowers of hundreds of ovate-leaved violets flecked my lawn. Common blue violets were scattered through the adjoining fields. Fall flowerings are not unusual, especially in mild years. October day lengths mirror those of April. Conditions tell violets to flower a second time and some always respond. Last year they responded en masse.

None of this will come as a surprise to those who spend time outdoors. Fall flowerings are a bit mundane. We always see violets in May and again in October. However, I have for some time been aware of a population of lance-leaved violets which, because of unusual circumstances, never flower in May. I have only ever seen them flower in the fall.

Lance-leaved violets are a state listed rare (S-1) species. Their favored habitat is said to be damp peaty soils in open grassy areas at lower elevations, which is not exactly what I’m seeing with this population. Crowded between the ever-encroaching forest and the uninhabitable lake, these violets cling to a narrow, rocky strip where they are submerged annually by a human-generated, months-long freshwater tide. It would seem that they are under huge stresses, yet they persist.

Not only have they persisted, at every opportunity they have spread to disturbed areas on camp lawns, damp roadside ditches, and any other slim fragment of favorable habitat. They have been found on mossy areas of the reservoir’s earthen dam. Most such colonies are ephemeral. As disturbed areas revegetate the violets are slowly crowded out.

Violets in any terrestrial colonies flower as expected in May and, sometimes, again in the fall. Violets in the annually-inundated population flower only in late fall. The lanceleaved violets at Sunset Lake are trapped in a perilously narrow habitat zone; human activity and forests hem them into an ever less favorable area. They persist where they persist only because there is little competition from any other species for that space. They have found a habitat that few others covet. They flower only when conditions are favorable. They prove their adaptability.

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These violets are at Sunset Lake, Brattleboro’s back-up reservoir, where early in the season water levels are kept at their maximum, totally submerging these plants. In April and May when most violets produce flowers the area involved is completely underwater. Later

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There are only a handful of places in Vermont where lance-leaved violets are found. This patch and its behavioral plasticity intrigue me. What I thought I knew got in the way of what was. I always looked for them in May. After all that’s when violets flower. Isn’t it?

For more information on the Conservation Commission to http://www.dummerstonconservation.com

Linda

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Catering- Lunch ~Dinner~ Dine-in

Curbside Pick up~ Take-Out

833Putney Road ~ (802)-579-1474 Fast Eddie’s

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