My Google search hits revealed someone looking for Marsh Creek Park, and having featured the creek, I thought we should visit the recently expanded park on New Hope  Road.  The name of the park derives from Marsh Creek Road, which begins just across New Hope and goes straight down to Marsh Creek.  But New Hope Road is a ridge between the Crabtree and Neuse watersheds, and the waterways in the park itself- mostly out of sight without hiking – head north through a large woodlot visible from Southall Road toward the Neuse, just a mile distant.

All pictures click to enlarge

The hot new feature in the park is the skate park, which was featured in a several media articles and is quite popular.  The large recreational center is fairly nondescript, but was constructed with green principles, as described in detail (along with other park amenities) at Get To Know a Park.  Beside the center is a large Piedmont prairie, and the extensive parking areas are adjoined by interesting ecotone areas, though the stilt grass is spreading fast.  The terrain is typical of Piedmont farmland after 50-60 years – upland pines and chestnut oaks with a slope down to loblollies, shrubs, and water.

My favorite find at Marsh Creek Park was the rain garden just below the skate park, with a wonderful stand of Joe-Pye-weed, as seen below.  I’ve only seen this handsome plant in the mountains, but it is listed in the Piedmont.  Somebody did a great job with this rain garden.

 To make the park’s name issue a little stranger, there is a really nice marshy area below the lower field, which leads to a very pretty old farm pond. It appears to have a fishing shack on the edge.  The expansion doubled the usable space of the park, but most of the acreage is still heavily wooded and ripe for exploring.  Overall, a versatile park with something for everyone.

photo album of Marsh Creek Park

Google map of Marsh Creek Park

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This section of Raleigh – the ridge of New Hope with the valley of the Neuse to the northeast and Marsh Creek’s drainage to the southwest – is of geologic interest because it is one of the transitions between the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain.  If you take Buffalo Road off New Hope, for example, you immediately start seeing sandy soils.  Just down the road from Marsh Creek Park, Skycrest Drive heads down to good old Raleigh Swamp.  Before it gets there, at the intersection with Trawick, you can find this meadow of wildflowers.  It is being sorely threatened by kudzu vines.  We will keep a closer eye on invasive species in our future nature travels.

The kudzu is right behind the dandelions.

An impressive array of wildflowers fronts the dandelions by a slope.

These blackberry flowers are beside Skycrest. This was in May, but this summer I picked almost ten quarts of these things!  They are everywhere.

Kudzu making its way toward the wildflowers.

Kudzu go’ne eat us all!!

Marty Baird's show at The Mahler documents experiences of NC waters.

     A personal post as I approach a new era of the blog: moving it toward my book, The Natural History of Raleigh, and recovering from the sabbatical of sorts imposed by other interests, my school year and most of all Meniere’s Disease, which is a non-lethal but incurable inner ear condition which has hampered all my work for the past year. As I have learned to manage my disease and its triggers, I have also become fully engrossed in work related to Raleigh Nature but not what I want on the blog: urban agriculture and the movement toward local sustainable farming in the area.  I’m posting about that work at Pecans and Mistletoe, a project blog which has taken on a life of his own.  Severely limited in screen time many days, I can always find relief from my tinnitus and relaxing pleasure in tending our garden, which we have converted to mixed herb, flower, and food crops.  And our new chickens have lifted the gardening into a whole new level.  It was a challenging school year, and now that summer is here I will try again to make more time for this blog.

     But speaking of Raleigh nature!  We have three wonderful art shows that feature a spectacular range of takes on the relationship between people and nature, and I thought I would kick off my Raleigh Nature comeback with an art column.  Marty Baird’s show at The Mahler is described on the website as

Paintings and drawings that document artist Marty Baird’s experience of the waters in several North Carolina Rivers and the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.  A percentage of sales during the exhibition will be donated to Triangle Land Conservancy, a non-profit that protects important stream corridors, wildlife habitat and natural areas in North Carolina.

Marty’s work in the show varies widely, but all the pieces display the action of gravity on liquids as they encounter the paper.  The piece at the top of the post is one of the most successful of her painted word lists, which evoke names for water and wetland features.  Much of the other work is literally water and gravity – deftly defined ink lines of water volumes, delicate featherings of outblown tributaries, patterns of action taken from flowing water.  The benefit to Triangle Land Conservancy will help protect stream corridors and riparian wildlife.  Be sure to check it out.

Hannah Costner has done a great job taking over Sarah Blackmon’s gig curating The Block Gallery in the municipal building downtown.  The current show combines two completely different artists, whose work nevertheless makes a complete show that works well.  Anna Podris has shown her whimsical encaustics all over town, and I love them every time I see them.  Fantastic creatures and pure nature animate every one of her paintings.  As she says, each piece creates its own world.  Gene Furr’s nature photographs reflect his journalist background – superb documentation of natural scenes and animals with over-the-top spectacular settings, lighting and details.  This show continues Block Gallery’s stellar offerings of recent years, as well as its fine tradition of providing a venue for cutting edge video, dance, and music at its openings.

Luke Buchanan offers intriguing and nostalgic cityscapes at Rebus Works.

Nature is what you make of it and Luke Buchanan explores what people have made of Raleigh.  His show at Rebus Works by the Boylan Ave. Bridge are large, even powerful painterly treatments of classic Raleigh street scenes.  Everything from Cup-o-Joe’s to Hayes Barton comes to life in highly recognizable images which still yield to well used artistic license.  The postcard image above is actually from the related group of drawings at Stitch on Hargett Street, which has been the venue for several “sideshows” out of Rebus, but here gets a lion’s share of the show with a dozen really nice drawings (many already sold) with the same themes as above.  Luke’s work does what I want this blog to do : wake up and pay attention to the wonderful Raleigh around you.

I will never  have the time I’d like for this blog and it’s eventual book project, anyway not until I retire from teaching in 5 years.  I hope the book is out by then.  I’m still caught up in Black Mountain College and Ray Johnson work over at Raleigh Rambles, and I now have a new daily item: my page on Facebook. But I’m looking forward to posting a lot soon here – if it will cool off enough to get outside!!  Peace to all. Get outside – and if it’s too hot, then go see some art!

A wonderful piece of graffiti has garnered some media attention for the stream restoration project along Smallwood Drive just below Cameron Village.  Cameron Village was the first shopping center in the Southeast, and when Willie York built it he diverted, ditched and straightened the headswaters of Pigeon House Branch, which gather between Cameron Village and the Raleigh Apartments.  The creek takes a straight shot right under Clarke Avenue into Edna Metz Wells Park, and after heavy rains the water, which gathers from a large section of the Oberlin Road ridge of Civil War fame, would roar through the tiny park, eroding and scouring and backwashing debris into the tributary water piped down from the glade along Forest Street above the park.  The City of Raleigh is working on a general rehabilitation plan for Pigeon House Branch, and the Smallwood project, which is pretty much finished, is part of that.  Apparently they are going to remove some invasive species before doing final plantings, both on Smallwood and in Edna Metz, in the fall.

From the main approach, the park looks beseiged..  But as you will see below, in the interior, all is well.  This spot is a real haven in Central Raleigh, and was a mainstay for my young children and me in the nineties.

 The Smallwood St. project involved using large boulders and some nice terraces to slow down and complicate the path of the water.

The media interest, started by a nice post from Goodnight, Raleigh, centers on a graffiti portrait of Edie Sedgewick, Andy Warhol’s muse, painted on the culvert where Pigeon House enters Edna Metz.  My picture of the scene is below.

Josh Shaffer called me and asked about the construction and Ena Metz, but never specifically mentioned the graffiti.  I’m pretty sure they won’t scrape it off as part of the re-hab project, but I can’t really say for sure.  Hope not.  It is indeed a nice harmless piece of art.  The figure says “De,” which is the word for power in Taoist philosophy.  I appreciate Josh’s feature of it and the park, as well as his kind words for my work.  And thanks as always to John Morris and his compadres over at another of Raleigh’s “splendid blogs!”

Goodnight ,Raleigh post on Edna Metz Wells Park

photo album of Edna Metz and Smallwood project

 The previous post talked about Crabtree Creek’s tendency to flood – last week again brought heavy rains over the Crabtree watershed that brought the creek up to the edge of  its large channels.  This also sends an impressive load of water over Lassiter Mill Dam, as seen above.  I shot a video clip of the rushing water from below the tailrace, as linked below.

video- Lassiter Mill dam at high water

What happens at Lassiter Mill vividily and intensely demonstrates what happens lots of places more gradually – the deposition of new soil by spreading flood waters.  This is an essential part of the natural systems of the Piedmont, and our flood control measures prevent the process from periodically enriching the soil with a layer of mud and silt – though the process continues to work just fine in the “waste” lowlands that remain in Raleigh.  An astounding number of these lowlands have become major thoroughfares – roads built relatively later in Raleigh’s long history, on land left undeveloped due to the floodplain.  The Beltline follows the low contours of Walnut Creek, House Creek, Crabtree Creek, Big Branch, Marsh Creek and then Walnut Creek quite precisely as it curves from Cary’s Buck Jones to Glenwood, over the crest of North Hills, and around southeast to Poole Rd and then Lake Wheeler Road.  The water is piped and rushed away from underneath these elevated roadways, carrying its minerals with it.

The suburbs and businesses near these roads certainly don’t need the sediments!  But the stuff has to go somewhere, and these days there is a lot of stuff.  When streams are buffered by a healthy band of water-loving trees and shrubs, erosion material is reduced greatly. In central Raleigh, Crabtree is clogged with lots of dislodged soil, construction materials and unnaturally exposed red clay.   But the deposition process is a vital one, and it gets exaggerated at Lassiter Mill, where the water brings its load of suspended minerals hurtling over the dam and then slows and spreads its course below.  As it slows, it drops much of its sediment load.  The area below Lassiter Mill changes yearly as the creek alternately erodes and builds up materials.  Check out the new load of sand deposited by the recent high waters.

There are several caveats and complications to consider.  This is a large load of sand!  Eight or nine inches at a dose, and not the silt and mud that the plants would prefer. But nature adapts, and the Lassiter “beach” is fun to browse, with a wide variety of weeds incubated from the loads of  soil and debris.  The silt and sand that currently washes down Crabtree is terribly unhealthy for the filtering mussels and other delicate aquatic life.  The red clay that paints Crabtree brown is such a strong pigment that Crabtree often changes the color of the Neuse where it conjoins.

Crabtree builds itself “shoulders”  as it repeatedly overflows, dropping the heaviest particles first as the water disperse into the floodplain.  This is why Crabtree presents such a tall ditched appearance as above at Hodge Road.  The plants arrange themselves in an orderly sequence beside or on top of these embankments according to their tolerance for flooding.

The next time Crabtree rises over it’s banks, put on your rubber boots and check out the glistening mica-rich silt that covers the greenways before the city sends its scrapers to clear it off to the side, where it enriches the plants as well as any landscaper’s mulch.  You are walking in the stuff that makes our floodplain soils, a rich muck delivered by the yearly floods.

Nature.org floodplain info

BBC floodplain story

Crabtree under Atlantic Ave at Hodge Road Nov. 11, 2009

Crabtree is a low -flow system that has carved itself an impressive channel through Raleigh over hundreds of thousands of years.  That course fills to overflowing fairly often, as Crabtree drains a huge swath of Piedmont terrain, from Brier Creek in north Wake County, out to west Cary and down to Walnut Creek south of Raleigh.  Flood control lakes such as Lynn and Shelley have eased flooding in Crabtree Valley, but Middle Crabtree Greenway in central Raleigh, as well as Walnut in East Raleigh, continues to flood after heavy rains.  Above is 12 hours after high water at Atlantic Avenue and Hodge Road.  Below is a high-low pair of pictures for the same spot.

I have posted about flooding here before at Raleigh Nature, and maintain an ongoing post of comparison pictures at my nature projects blog, Pecans & Mistletoe.  “The Gar Hole” is the most important feature of this favorite stretch of greenway, accessible at Atlantic Avenue on weekends (parking available then at the plumbing supply warehouse) or at the deadend east of the Longbranch on weekdays (unless it’s flooded).  So I take regular shots of the gar hole and the view from the railroad bridge at different seasons and water flows.  Below are some interesting pairs.

                              June 07                                       November 09

                                       March 07                              June 07

Gar Hole after December 07 rains

Crabtree from Hodge Rd RR bridge 7 November and 4 days later after “Ida” rains.

               Hodge Rd. RR bridge Jan 07 and after rains 11–11-09

Creek Levels at Pecans & Mistletoe

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box elder beetle at Hodge Rd RR bridge; barn spider

gar hole butterfly