Woodsy Domicile: Forest Gardening and The Elusive Return to Eden

 

Home ownership holds a mythical place in the American experience, alongside no taxation without representation, Paul Bunyan, Ichabod Crane, motherhood, and apple pie. It’s the foundation of the “American Dream.” A science teacher mostly having worked in low-paying private schools, I was fortunate enough to satisfy strict criteria governing this critical piece in our capitalist economy only once in my working life. It was in the late nineteen nineties when, for about five years, I lived in a ranch house on an acre and a half of oak woodland in NE Illinois. This is a story of how the opportunity to live in this “woodsy domicile” was more than just an escape from the world of rentals ruled by landlords.

 

 

The county was once dominated by an oak savannah “prairie” landscape that, historically, was plowed into corn fields. And by the present time, “Chicagoland” sprawl had come knocking, rather more like pounding, on the county’s door. The Clinton boom era was personally seeing to it that these farms filled up with housing developments and shopping malls.

 

Meanwhile, I was very busy spearheading the development of an innovative curriculum for a new freshman science course at one of the public high schools. The program was based on a unifying principle: Matter interacts within systems of varying scale, which cycle and recycle matter as energy passes through them. The object of study would be the local landscape. Students would learn science as they explored problems in the local community and their solutions, especially those resulting from land use issues due to sprawl.

 

 

Fashioning this curriculum took me on a driving tour all over the county studying forest preserves, farm communities, and housing subdivisions. My observations raised pertinent questions that ought to be asked students. For example, should some of the richest topsoil in the world be ignominiously stripped  from farmland, hauled away, and replaced by foundations for housing developments?

 

 

How do engineers mitigate the effects of periodic flooding due to rainwater having fewer natural places to go, because all the new development includes impervious asphalt and concrete? I was keenly interested in drainage patterns, following the flow of water through different parts of the landscape and observing how the county managed its developments in order to capture water that fell on them and channel it down the watershed. I studied modern detention and retention ponds that reflected a rather technocratic, engineer-head habit of mind regarding storm water abatement. I found that there were more intuitive, as well as “green,” approaches to channeling and dispelling water by using berms, swales, and native prairie landscaping.

 

Such were lessons in how the county landscape is part of a watershed system through which energy, provided by incoming solar radiation, causes winds to blow, bringing, in turn, water vapor that precipitates and drains away as gravity pulls it down watercourses.

 

Such also was how I was able to find the “woodsy domicile.” I had hired a realtor, but he only knew houses. I was more interested in the setting and had been keeping an inventory of interesting lots with “For Sale” signs as I wandered the rural roads in pursuit of my curriculum. One in front of a ‘50’s era ranch hinted at the prospect of living on a glacial moraine that, over ten thousand years since the retreat of the mile-thick ice, developed the kind of clay soils supportive of forest. The lot had been subdivided from an old private summer resort belonging to rich Chicagoans. The woodland was old growth; it had never been formally cut. Dominant white oaks cast  dappled shade. The lot was left as part of a “forest primeval,” zoned unincorporated township, with a fire sign for address number, a well for water, and a septic system for waste disposal. Languishing all winter, the owners already retired to Arizona, the house sold well below its listing price.

 

 

The oaks, Quercus alba, were some of the largest and tallest in the county. I remember marveling at the way the most distal sprigs of leaves filled in the canopy like perfectly fitted jigsaw puzzle pieces with no overlap so as to maximize space and minimize competition. Each little solar collector leaf got its share in the distribution of light.

 

 

Managing what amounted to a woodlot couldn’t have been considered more than mere “forest gardening.” What I had wanted was simply to let the lot with its native species return to a state of balance, based on the principles that had led me to this little Forest of Eden in the first place. That sounds easy, but it wasn’t. Previous owners had put in lawn grass where the forest floor once supported a diverse mix of herbs, shrubs, moss, and lichen. They had used the old tractor mower left in the shed to scoop up and haul off the autumn leaves to huge rotting piles along the edge of the property. Some of the huge 150 year old oak trees were chlorotic, exhibiting a sickly pale green color in their leaves, due to the absence of necessary nutrients that were supposed to have been made available by the annual leaf fall. Who knows what pesticides and herbicides they used to maintain the monoculture of grass at the cost of a mix of interacting ground cover plants, insects, nematode roundworms, fungi, and microorganisms, which tend to more efficiently utilize and move nutrients through their cycles? Where there wasn’t grass were thickets of exotic, invasive weedy species. It was going to take a lot of work giving the wood lot back its more natural and self-sustaining properties.

 

 

And that work couldn’t even start until a more fundamental problem got solved: what to do with storm water. During the nineteen nineties, the area experienced a five hundred year storm that dumped seventeen inches of rain in twenty four hours. Taking my cue from storm water management policies and procedures, which had bubbled prominently to the surface in local building codes, and had become a foundation piece in the high school science curriculum list of topics, I got a chance to model a miniature version of a municipal storm water abatement system on the lot.

 

 

Storm water pooled along the front of the long, ranch-style house and leaked terribly through a basement window, which had been sloppily bricked in to make way for a bay window sometime in the past. With a pick axe, a shovel, and a wheelbarrow, I dug out thirty cubic yards of clay soil and fashioned a drain tile channel that led to an eight foot deep dry well filled with septic stone. It took all summer and, by means of brute muscle and bone, taught a personal lesson that served to ratify that critical piece of the freshman science curriculum.

 

Tutored in botany and forest ecology, I had to marvel at how foreign-evolved buckthorn, Rhamnus cathartica, an understory shrub, dominated in the absence of competition under the oaks. First to leaf out in the spring and last to drop leaves in the fall, they hogged the filtered sunlight and living space, and prevented the natives from growing. In a fit of disdain, I dug up the buckthorn by their roots and dragged them all into brush pile after brush pile for burning. I used the same tractor set up to haul back the inadvertently composted, and thus organically rich, leaf litter, piling it onto the grass underneath the oak trees. I felt sadistic glee in smothering the grass while enriching the oaks with their long lost source of recycling nutrients. I drilled holes with an auger over their shallow roots systems into which I poured sulfur that would lower the pH to natural levels so that soil micelles would no longer imprison necessary iron.

 

I waited impatiently until the biannual garlic mustard, Alliaria petiolata, another invader from Eurasia, was in full bloom and then, in another fit of righteous indignation, either decapitated them of their flower tops with a weed whacker or laboriously yanked them up by their roots and bagged them until they suffocated to death. (Without bagging, the hardy little suckers would continue to grow and seed by the thousands, even though their lifestyle had been mercilessly reduced to laying in uprooted piles.)

County ordinances allowed open fires, so I applied carefully prescribed burns to keep weedy grasses and shrubs from becoming too dense. I hoped also to eliminate the seed bank of invasive species in the soil with its many years of accumulated annual deposits.

Oaks are mid-successional forest dwellers, dominant during the middle age of eastern deciduous woodlands. Their foliage is highly transparent to light. Such woods have high biodiversity. If allowed to mature in the absence of fire, these woodlands would fill with “climax community” species, including shade-tolerant maple. Only a few kinds of plants besides the maple themselves can thrive under these deep shadow-casting trees, so the biodiversity index is lower. Forest preserve enthusiasts rather prefer the bright, open, “park-like” effect that is maintained by prescribed burns under the more transparent oaks. The greater biodiversity that incoming sunlight supports in these communities enhances stability in the face of disturbances. In the case of drought, for instance, there will always be drought-resistant types to carry on. And if some critters were to be lost to species-specific predators, a myriad of other species would remain to maintain the efficient flow of energy and cycling of nutrients.

Without fire to clear away the competition, especially for light, oak seedlings don’t stand a chance. So like an expectant daddy, I welcomed little oak seedlings found sprouting in the understory and, in a spirit of doting parental investment, weeded around them and devised a caging system made out of chicken wire and chain link fence stretcher rods, available at Home Depot, to keep the deer from browsing them for brunch.

Oaks periodically “mast,” producing an overabundance of acorns. The adaptive advantage of this expensive behavior is that it overwhelms hungry squirrels and other predators. It also helps edge out the other sprouting plant competition. I remember falling acorns bonking the car top and roof all night long one autumn. The crop of plump, green orbs, after a winter of “scarification” by winter cold, a necessary step in the seed preparation process, resulted in hundreds of new born babies. I gave up the caging intervention strategy to let nature take its toll.

Also intending on successful rearing of new born babies were the dainty warbler commuters during the annual spring migration from Costa Rica and South American to their breeding grounds in Michigan and Canada. I remember chasing frantically with binoculars after a nervous little Blackburnian warbler, resplendent in his breeding plumage, as he desultorily zig-zagged from tree to tree all around the yard searching for insects with which to recharge his batteries before resuming the nocturnal flight north.

I did feel successful in gaining ground in the struggle to return the lot to a more primeval ecological state. Though it was part of an island of woods in an increasingly fragmented landscape, native forbs, such as shooting star, true Solomon’s seal, and Jack-in-the pulpit, much to my delight, began to make their appearance in the redeemed groundcover community.

 

As the lot recouped its losses, becoming more diverse in native species, it slowly began to showcase the twin concepts of greater efficiency in natural resource use and greater stability in the face of environmental disturbances that I struggled to teach students in my life science classes.

 

Still, I knew those giant old oaks were relics left over from a past governed by processes that maintained the forest system in a steady state of dynamic equilibrium untrammeled by human interference. In the back of my mind I sensed that this oak woodland replacing itself was wishful thinking, and I grieved whenever a big oak succumbed to the larva of beetles tunneling their way through its pulsing cambium layer, the life support tissue just underneath the bark. I also worried if and when the aggressively invasive gypsy moth might finally arrive to munch the food-making leaves of the remaining trees until they starved to death. Then the dramatic oak woodland would be gone. But I can say I enjoyed many moments when “all seemed quiet” on the ecological front, even though I knew that the goal of a post-glacial and pre-Columbian era-like Eden was, at best, an elusive one.

 

 Bird feeder in front yard

 

Circumstances necessitated eventually leaving this oak forest idyll and moving into the city, but I will always remember how living in that “woodsy domicile'” allowed, for a time, a real sense of respect and mutual aid in my cohabitation with these interesting forest friends.