Crow’s Nest: Opening a window

By Daniel Barringer, Preserve Manager.

Many plants grow very well here; we are fortunate for that. Some of our land stewardship, pruning and weeding, I think of as minor editing (I was, after all, an English major).

I’ve been pruning along Piersol Road, something I usually do in late summer to make sure that school buses can fit under the trees in the fall. This year, circumstances are quite different, though we still have trucks and farm equipment on local roads. I am also cutting back some of the invasive plants along the roadside woods and hedgerows. I took the opportunity also to “open a window”—limb up some trees so that passersby have a view into the preserve looking up toward the Chief’s Grove.

A few of those pruning cuts were for no other reason than the aesthetics of opening up that view, and that’s okay. We want people to enjoy the preserve, even if it is a glimpse of a beautiful vista when passing by.