Many waterways in Raleigh travel unseen, as does Pigeon House Branch above. Recent years have seen efforts to rehabilitate – uncover and often “un-straighten” – creeks. The process is called daylighting. It helps with flood control and improves the ecosystem. It happened in Northeast Raleigh last year, and it’s set to happen for Rocky Branch on the NCSU campus(pdf). So Raleigh has recognized the process as valuable, but it is still an unusual occurrence. For one Oakwood resident, stymied in efforts to have the city uncover his backyard branch, the benefits were worth the huge personal effort of unearthing the waterway himself by hand.
Grassy Branch in Oakwood
Chris Crew is a longtime Oakwood resident who co-authored the wonderful Oakwood nature essay I recently featured. He lives on Elm Street, almost at the bottom of Oakwood’s slope. Grassy Branch is a small but steady flow that passes under Elm Street and edges his backyard. Until a couple of years ago, it passed unseen in a large buried pipe.
Chris learned of the city daylighting program and tried to get Grassy Branch uncovered. During heavy rains, the water backed up and even spouted out vertically from broken places in the pipes. The city couldn’t or wouldn’t do the work because other contiguous neighbors would not enlist their properties. Tired of the geysers and wanting a healthier backyard creek, Chris decided to do the job himself. So he and his family hand-dug and wenched out two sections of the 42 inch pipes.
Grassy Branch re-exposed below Elm Street
I don’t have pictures of “the dig” – I just heard about Chris’ project recently. But there is one more section he can remove before Grassy Branch crosses his property line. I’m hoping he’ll invite me to help, and I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes!
Grassy Branch re-enters pipe
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Both Pigeon House and Rocky Branch involve daylighting projects that have or will be addressed in other posts. An interesting neighborhood daylighting project finished up a couple of years ago near my school, the Fletcher Academy. The picture below shows the view my students and I have on nature walks at the bottom of Cedar Hills Rotary Park. Three years ago we were looking at the creek disappear into a large pipe.
Today, the adjoining houses have less to fear from flooding, and the biological and geologic interactions missing from pipe existence have been restored to the creek. One slightly bizarre feature of the project was the city’s purchase and destruction of a house on Mapleridge which sat practically on top of the creek.
site of former house at Big Branch
A late snow and a schoolday off to blog about it! It didn’t take long to find a snow paradise. The Oakwood Inn’s block sported the lacy treetops above. But I was headed to the greenway. I decided to check out an old favorite – the east end of Buckeye Trail.
This wonderful view is the edge of the meadow at Buckeye Trail’s east end off Milburnie. Down this oldest section of Raleigh’s greenways is a vista that provoked one of the first thoughts that originated this project – and it was a book project long before I ever knew what a blog was. The scene used to look like a cathedral of treetops – but the loss of a huge red oak several years ago changed the look. What’s left is seen below.
The missing tree was on the right, and when it was there, I was ready to write a book partly to tell people to come here and take a deep breath. It is still a very nice section of greenway. I got to see the baby beeches of a couple of posts ago in a new light, literally. The gentle snow provided a chance to see water moving across the greenway: in a freshet, and being blocked by the asphalt. The creek was medium high, which I documented with a current shot of my favorite log-sitting spot. Once I had done that, I knew I should head over to Hodge Road and take shots of my water level standard spots, which I’m documenting over on the nature projects blog.
The March snow was mighty pretty!
Mistletoe is common in the Southern Piedmont and has a
strong herbal tradition as a medicine and as a
holiday superstition and game. This evergreen parasite is spread by bird defecation after eating mistletoe berries. The latter link from the
NC Museum of Natural Sciences tells us the name derives from the Anglo phrase for ”dung-on-a-twig.” Three different species have a complex role in all this. The species most commonly used as decoration,
phoradendron flavescens, is a native of North America. In California, it is
considered a parasitic pest.
Viscus album is the European species whose berries are poisonous and also useful as medicine. The species in my pictures is
Phoradendron leucarpum, oak mistletoe, considered less common and rare in Europe, but apparently it is Raleigh’s most common, and the one favored by European Druids for its alliance with the mighty oak.
Raleigh certainly has its share of oaks, and many of them in the area northwest of downtown sport the dusky green balls. The spots inside the Beltline I best remember mistletoe are gone. The
planted median of Glenwood north of Peace Street used to have oaks that were full of prominent mistletoe, but I just today realized they have been replaced (quite some time ago – another geezer moment) with crepe myrtles, which are doubtless less trouble for the Progress Energy linemen. But a
large oak with a
huge spread of mistletoe grows just across the street. Mistletoe is not endangered: in fact I
see it often in my travels, now that I have trained my eye to look for it. But it does get harvested, and some of what you see hanging in door jams is quite local indeed.
Where do you get yours? Maybe from Dan, who was set up on Person Street as I drove out to take mistletoe pics for this post. I explained our coincidence, bought a big branch and chatted about mistletoe. I mentioned the old strategy I’d seen out at my country cousins of shooting it down with a shotgun.
“Yeah, but that messes it all up. I got this here the hard way – thirty feet up.” From his yard, he said, but there is mistletoe in some public areas around town. Does much inside the beltline get picked each year? Wondering, I say goodbye to Dan and head out in search of unharvested mistletoe. First stop is the most hilarious spot for mistletoe to hang: the corner of Cook and Oakwood. The irony of this clump presiding over a corner where women of the street often hawk their sad-eyed wares in broad daylight is just too great for me to forbear mentioning.
Mistletoe at Oakwood Cemetery
Heading out of downtown, I find
nice groups at
Harvey Street but none on Glenwood north of 5 Points. Over on Wade, there are healthy stands at the
SECU facility and on
up that hill toward Oberlin. The Canterbury/Banbury neighborhood has huge oaks, but many of them are Willow Oaks, and I saw almost no mistletoe there. My schedule took me back toward home, and I saw the
nice batches at the edge of
Blount Street Commons. This was a very partial and cursory inventory, but I plan to make this an annual post and develop a map of mistletoe sites in Raleigh (as I will for pecans, thus the name for my
nature project blog).
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Have a great holiday season!
lower Longview Lake from south
This is the first picture I took with my new camera for this blog, in late January 2007. Longview Lake was the big body of water in my childhood. I was more familiar with the upper section, just below Enloe, which has been surrounded by development and is filling up with silt. This lower section is in good shape, and some of the homes have small docks, of which I’m quite envious.
Longview temporarily collects the waters of Bertie Creek, coming down Bertie Drive below Enloe, which then crosses Milburnie at Peartree Lane and makes its way down to Crabtree as seen below. This lowest stretch of Bertie, which parallels Milburnie and crosses under Buckeye Trail’s beginning, gets some interesting visitors exploring upstream from the larger creek. Just below the Buckeye bridge over it, the small creek pools up, and I have seen large sliders and snappers meditating a climb over the partly submerged sewer pipe blocking their way. Above the greenway bridge, there are some nice rock riffles, and I was once amazed ( and too startled to act) by lifting up a large flat rock to reveal an Amphiuma – my only sight ever of this huge, biting salamander.
Bertie Creek hits Crabtree
Crabtree and Bertie enclose a diagonal of East Raleigh neighborhood, east Rollingwood, that is bordered by rich upland woods. These high areas surround a large rock outcrop that turns the creek right after it has absorbed the waters of Marsh Creek. That union, Marsh Creek and Crabtree, creates a huge marshy area highlighted by Raleigh Swamp at Capital Boulevard. Below that, after the rocky overhang, Crabtree is steadily on its way to becoming a coastal plain waterway. It’s flat, meandering path is lined with deep, silt-lined walls of clay, gouged regularly by floods. It is not a pretty creek – the banks give the impression of accumulated eons of ring around the bathtub. But there are interesting tangles of trees and the occasional surprise.
Marsh Creek floodplain from Rollingwood
Crabtree at Milburnie
This “surprise” was a heron which scattered from behind a sewer tower and managed to get caught in my uplifting camera lense. As I’ve
mentioned elsewhere, this easternmost section of Buckeye is very “birdy,” with all three kinds of local woodpeckers, hawks being harassed by crows, and plenty of herons.
Nature News
The Wake County Quarterly
Here, like usual, are so many opportunities to learn about and interact with nature. Even if you don’t need the structured activities, it’s nice to be reminded of the beavers at Blue Jay Point, the farm history at Oak View Park, the bats at Crowder Park on Ten-ten, and the restored gristmill at Yates Mill.
This post was originally published Feb. 24, 2008.
This meadow off Sunnybrook is surely doomed, but it is sure fun to browse for now. I have seen deer and gray foxes, lots of butterflies and a wonderful diversity of plant communities that range themselves around the various landscapes contained on this old farm. It is the remnants of the very large farm bisected by the eastern stretch of the Beltline and displayed in all its historicity at Oak View County Park right across the highway. This privately owned portion contains two ponds, one large enough to be called Jones Lake, an abandoned farmhouse, and a small grove of pecan trees. The main pond is dammed at an unusually deep cut into sandstone that makes for an imposing ravine just below the dam, which then delivers the water to Crabtree, close by. You can walk from the Sunnybrook meadow down a hill to the pipeline cut that parallels the beltline, and follow that water all the way to the pumping station , to see where those teenagers flung their Dad’s sports car over the guard rail, and you can see the memorials left at the site, which is still slightly blackened and scarred from the conflagration. This floodplain zone is wet and full of animal tracks. The soil is sandy and obviously derived from the sandstone bowl which helps form Jones Lake. Or you can walk across the top of the dam, jump past the ravine, and walk around to the upper pond near Poole Road. Here you see the pecans and the upland plants that are taking over from them. Whatever subdivision gets created here will surely make some benefit out of the water holes and the many mature trees. You would hope, at least. I also used to park on Poole Road just past the fire station and walk in from that direction, but that end, between the upper pond and Poole, is now already under construction. The clear cut for that part is not promising. See below.
The meadow ends at the slope down to the creek that drains Jones Lake.
The upper pond and pecan grove.
And the clearcut.
At Buckeye Trail’s beginning there is a strange hill hump meadow thing that looks very out of place. It is an old rather small landfill that must have served Raleigh a very long time ago, but recently enough to be mowed and monitored as landfills now must be. It swells at the base of a ridge coming down from Peartree Lane across Milburnie Road into the Crabtree floodplain and diverts the waters coming down from Longview Lake into a deeply carved creek that parallels Milburnie and strikes Crabtree just north of the Bow Tie Club, where a very dubiously placed parking lot has been scraped out right next to the creek and seemingly in the water’s right of way. Anyway, this landfill meadow hides a local kids’ landmark on its wooded northern slope: two huge boulders that must have been unearthed in the landfill’s operation. I mean huge! You know how big they are? Check the title!
They sit in the middle of this woods in east Raleigh like alien monoliths. There just are no big rocks in this part of Raleigh - it’s either red clay or sand, but no rocks. Before the greenway got built, I would go every few winters and make a ritual of being able to locate, once again, these well hidden icons of my childhood woodcraft. Now, the cross-country trail which begins at the top of the landfill meadow takes me down the ridge to a spot where I can hop off and find them in minutes. Which is cool, and I still go. But only in winter. There are large number of sewer line cuts and various off-trail adventures which poison ivy forbids from me most of the year. But in the dead of winter, I can explore these spots with impunity – as long as I don’t grab any vines while hopping ditches!
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This stretch of greenway shows Crabtree slowing down and deepening as it winds through the marshy joining with Marsh Creek. The quiet stretch below is just before turning at Milburnie to slide under New Bern Avenue and curve with the beltline toward the Neuse River junction at Anderson Point. Another touchstone on this walk (available at all times of year, right next to the greenway) is the largest oak gall of which I know. These red bugs (and I mean true bugs for those in the know) come swarming out of it dangerously early in the spring some years.
There are all kinds of nifty finds on this easternmost stretch of greenway. Below are two interesting types of fungi: shelf mushrooms and slime mold.
