ADAMANT – For more than 40 years I have been conducting a field experiment in my Washington County home town of Calais. Literally, as in the 10-acre field that came with the old farmhouse I bought back in 1984.
To be honest, this doesn’t have much to do with the scientific method. It’s more an unplanned experiment, studying and informally documenting natural changes. What my eyes reveal is a significant shift in our native flora, not just on one gentle east-sloping hill that looks out at Marshfield Mountain, but mirrored on Vermont’s roadsides, riversides, and wetlands.
Located halfway between Maple Corner and Adamant, my field was part of an old farmstead with a wreck of a house, but 17 lovely acres I instantly fell in love with. I was captivated by the requisite Vermont stone walls, maple sugarbush with an old sugaring arch in the woods, two springs, and even the half-buried trash piles I mined for glass and old farm implement “treasures.” The big field I viewed merely as a vantage to admire views or to ski and snowshoe on in winter.
Four decades later, I have come to understand any field in Vermont offers a living education, inviting the study of ecology, botany, and forestry, sort of the way owning a herd of cattle “invites” you to learn about manure, fencing, forage, veterinary medicine, coyotes, grazing techniques, farm equipment, and did I already mention, manure?
None of this was clear back in the fall of 1984, but it turns out a field is a good teacher, if you don’t mind hard lessons and an old-school rap or two across the knuckles.
One of the first things I learned about, witnessed actually, was forest succession, the process by which forests in Vermont evolve, as different tree species move through a predictable growth and decline process, based on topography, elevation and forest soils.
That first spring I discovered an insidious insurgency underway in my field. Seedlings of white pine, apple trees, and willow had rooted everywhere, and at the margins colorful stems of red osier were not so stealthily creeping in.
Lesson Number 1: Vermont is always trying to go back to the forest primeval.
To sweeten the soil with ashes and start bringing it under control for haying, a neighbor and I decided we should burn the dry grass. But the calm morning we picked defied the forecast, and when the wind suddenly kicked up and shifted it sent the fire heading for the woods. Unnerved, we called the East Montpelier Fire Department to rescue us from our folly. A thankful donation to the department followed.
Lesson Number 2: Field experiments can go very wrong.
Through the years, the field has been cut annually, but the grass and clover prevalence has declined and a parade of nuisance and not very nutritional competing invaders has taken over.
First was bedstraw, a dense intertwining annual weed that creates thick green mats with pleasant-smelling white flowers. (One of my farming neighbors told me it first showed up in his fields in about 1960, after some excavation.)
Then came ferns and goldenrod, which have now widely populated the field. Since mid-season haying no longer happens and I now cut the field in fall, a boon for bobolinks and field birds, it has gone full rogue, with patches of milkweed, some thistle and stinging nettles, and goldenrod that sends clouds of white fluff into the air when I mow. The forest primeval thing has not subsided either, with poplars joining the willow and apple tree sprouts.
This disheartening invasion has expanded to include invasive wild chervil, which I have managed to keep at bay by cutting by hand as it rises above its competitors. This year, I am doing battle with a new field invader called broad-leaved dock, which has deep roots, grows five to six feet tall, and is topped by prolific spikes of brown seeds (up to 60,000 a plant). One more zombie in the field apocalypse! And don’t even get me started on the bishop’s weed creeping in, or Japanese knotweed, whose noxious stalks lurk not far away in nearby streams.
The bad news is that dock, a perennial relative of buckwheat, is now cropping up on my local roadsides as well, creating a dynamic duo of deep-rooted disaster with burdock. Or a trio, if you include wild chervil, whose array of white flowers now dominates interstate medians once populated by wildflower displays.
Whether spread by birds, wind, excavations and machinery, inadvertent garden store introduction, and even climate change, the native Vermont landscapes I admired in the 1970s, full of wildflowers, lupines and asters, are vastly different today. To my eyes, it has not been a favorable exchange.
Andrew Nemethy is a journalist, editor and freelance writer who lives in Calais. His commentary first appeared in The Bridge.
