Inside Cedar Creek

 

The morning after I arrived at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve, a cup of coffee in my hand, I leaned against the deck railing that frames ICON house. A ghostly cloud of mist floated five feet above the opera mauve inflorescences of an entire field of Little and Big Bluestem. Without weekday highway traffic, a mile or two away, rising sounds of pewees and katydids were audible. The sun rises, just as I'd like to always remember it, between the copse of oaks and a large, heavily-limbed birch on the edge of a tamarack wetland. Then the mist evaporates just as a breeze stirs, its whooshing through trees and tall grasses bring into and out of focus the trilling of a thousand crickets. 

The old farm field turned prairie is framed by a wall of oak, aspen, paper birch, and box elder, and where there is a lack of drainage, two perforations reveal the tamaracks and willows beyond. Its northwestern perimeter is stitched by undulating, pale gray utility lines that connect urban conveniences to the contemporary cabin I reside in. And this is enough. There is nothing grand at Cedar Creek —no river of great magnitude, nor hill of significant height, no rock outcrop stoically silent about its ungodly age, no chasm pulling humanity deep into its spell. No, on the whole it simply unfolds layer upon layer of details.

 

Roundheaded Bush Clover among Little and Big Bluestem

There is a car-width trail comprised of two parallel, nearly white lines of sand across Fawn Lake Drive. Walking it is like crossing a dry, sandy beach. Bordering the path are clumps of Big Bluestem, but more sparsely than in the field across the road. Gray stems of Artemisia ludoviciana flicker like ghostly flames among the grasses, and primrose blooms float like lemon drops here and there. A white-flowered species I've not yet seen at this location called Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium, Rabbit Tobacco, is now blooming.   

 

Pseudognaphalium obtusifolium, Rabbit Tobacco or Sweet Everlasting 

Countless grasshoppers bound with every step as move swiftly across the sand prairie toward the edge of the forest. Here, there is a slight descent into a flat that remains wet, even in some of the drier years. A perforated, aluminum walkway rises just as countless ferns reach over it. The pathway is shaded, yet punctuated by dappled sun, in a moist environment supporting purple stemmed aster, turtlehead, and tickseed, now in bloom. 

As the walkway angles to the right, things change. The once brightly shaded spaces grow much darker under the canopy of Minnesota's only native cedar, Thuja occidentalis, White Cedar. Although there are specimens in a few cooler, wetter pockets within some southeastern counties, the tree's contiguous natural habitat in Minnesota has its southern terminus at Cedar Creek. Cinnamon colored trunks grow upright, but some lean, and many have tangles of roots partially detached from the ground —a casualty of strong winds and soggy soil. The ground beneath has two layers, the uppermost a hummocky terrain of moss-covered, rotting dead wood and previously shed dry, rust-colored fans of scaly leaves. Underneath, it is dark, moist, and often filled with standing water. Despite the darkness, at least two species of fern can be found growing thickly among the cedars as well as occasional Marsh Marigold, Caltha palustris, Jewelweed, Impatiens capensis, Crowned Beggarticks, Bidens coronata, and a few patches of Bluebead Lily, Clintonia borealis.

The exit from the cedar swamp is a sandy rise of mesic forest that contains several spring ephemerals, such as Hepatica and Bloodroot. This spot is sometimes referred to as Crone's Knoll —named for Martha Crone, the self-taught biologist and horticulturalist who was the curator of Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden from 1933 to 1958. Crone and her husband, William, owned forty acres of what was then called Cedar Creek Forest. The rise was described by the Crones as an island as it was bound by swamp, bog, and a small lake. 

What is visible upon exiting the cedar swamp, today, is a large forest meadow of Pennsylvania Sedge, Carex pennsylvanica, appearing to flock the entirety of the knoll. It is beautiful and a testament to the idea that Pennsylvania Sedge thrives in formerly disturbed forest conditions. It is difficult to ascertain how this spot was shaped by a plant enthusiast such as Martha Crone, whose activities included digging and planting species at this site. Having been engaged with horticulture from her earliest years, she was undoubtedly a sharp observer of plant habitat, but also not bound by 21st century concepts. Several plants she found within the Cedar Creek Forest were relocated, successfully and not so, to the Butler Wildflower Garden. One species was the Ram's Head Ladyslipper, Cypripedium arietinum, which thrived in its first year at the garden and drowned the following, presumably from heavy rainfall and poor drainage.

Winterberry, Ilex verticillata in full fruit at the wetland's edge.

The trail follows an arc around the lower portion of Crone's Knoll, again reaching a boundary formed by water. Stepping onto the aluminum boardwalk, the deep space and ground-hugging vegetation of the forest sedge meadow immediately gives way to a wall of lush, wetland species. Winterberry, Ilex verticillata, a few feet from the walkway, announces this shift with brilliant red-orange berries. Water Arum, Calla pallustris, Arrowhead, Sagittaria latifolia, Purplestem Aster, Symphyotrichum puniceum, Jewelweed, Beggarticks, are blooming to either side of the bright metal planking. 

At the bog's perimeter, the walkway suddenly in full sun, a small body of water reveals itself. Here, the boardwalk terminates in a floating platform that resides at the acute point of the tear-drop shaped lake. American Water Lily, Nymphaea odorata, dots the water's dark surface. From this viewpoint, it becomes clear that the entirety of the lake is hemmed in by a single species, Swamp Loosestrife, Decodon verticillatus*, forming a sculptural presence around the plane of water. 

Although late in the season, I found a few remaining magenta flowers on stems extending up through the bog vegetation. Around the lake, however, blooms have withered to brown, some have set seed, and herbaceous stems form arcs of lanceolate leaves that, waterside, appear to be reaching for the lake. It can be unclear whether the stems lean toward the water or grow up from under it's surface. This is because the terminal ends of stems often root when they are submerged, or only near water, and its leaves reorient upwards, toward the sun. With the coming cold, decodon's herbaceous stems will die, detaching newly rooted plants from its parent, but most will survive and eventually root into the underlying peat or muck.

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Alone on the floating platform, I leaned on the railing and took in the entirety of the widening lake. Framed completely by decodon, then a stand of tamarack, and beyond that, white cedar, and just upland, possibly Jack Pine, and then...then nothing  —nothing but sky. The feeling of isolation, here, is far greater than what it should be. Could this lake and its scrim of trees be the entire world? Here, maybe, is a way of being inside the outside.

I wonder if Ray Lindeman picked up on this when he first emerged from the wetland thicket and thought, this is the place, here is where I will collect the data, here is where the numbers will reveal in detail what intuition had already insisted was true. Here is where my inside exists outside. 

 

Swamp Loosestrife, Decodon verticillatus and Tamarack, Larix laricina, behind.

*In Minnesota, the habitat favored by this MNDNR listed special concern species is centered in Anoka County. Despite all the lakes in this state, Swamp Loosestrife, Decodon verticillatus is uncommon. This is because the species is at the western-most edge of its natural range, here, but also because lakefront is so often developed into lake access and views where boulders and lawn are favored over natural vegetation.