Native plants get a boost at McCabe Preserve in Milton
Story Location:
Round Pole Bridge Road
Milton, DE
United States
Visitors to Edward H. McCabe Nature Preserve in Milton may have noticed an unruly field near the parking lot has received an au naturel makeover. Now it just needs a little time to bloom.
The Nature Conservancy has converted a 1-acre field on Round Pole Bridge Road into a natural meadow set to bloom with native grasses, flowers and plants, surrounded by a tenth-of-a-mile looped walkway. Earlier this spring, staff filled the space with about 20 pounds of seed, including a variety of little bluestem grass, butterfly milkweed, black-eyed Susan, purple coneflower and more.
“Imagine you have your lawn, and you just forgot to take care of it for five or six years. This conversion from, basically, a weedy, forgotten lawn into a meadow is going to be really cool,” said John Graham, one of two land stewards with The Nature Conservancy who helped design the meadow.
“The walkway is a way for people to feel like they're walking through the middle of the meadow,” said Graham's colleague, Natasha Whetzel. “Once it gets to be full grown, with grasses and flowers surrounding you, it will feel like it's just taking you through the meadow.”
When those grasses and flowers reach maturity next year, they'll provide much more than a warm welcome to human visitors. The declining monarch butterfly relies on milkweed for survival, using the plant to lay eggs and as the caterpillar's sole source of food.
“Milkweed had been seen – hence the name ‘weed’ – as a pest, so over the years people have been killing it off, and there's less and less of it, which is evident in the decline of monarch migrations. They have severely declined,” Whetzel said. “All of these native plants we're planting are going to attract other native pollinators as well, like bees and our native insects.” As one of our main pollinators, she said, “We really need them. We're just losing bees and that's a national crisis at this point.”
CONSERVATION UPGRADES IN THE WORKS
The Nature Conservancy has recently centralized operations, closing its office in Dover and moving from a Federal Street location in Milton to 703 Chestnut St. Now that staff have completed planting the new meadow, other area projects also are underway.
On the Broadkill River, the wooden dock that connects the Milton-McCabe Preserve Greenway Trail will be replaced with a floating dock, hopefully before the end of 2016. TNC staff also plan to mulch trails throughout the summer, in addition to regular conservation efforts throughout Kent and Sussex counties.
Butterflies, bees and other bugs won't be the only critters benefiting from the new meadow, Whetzel said.
The grasses will provide tools for nesting birds and seeds for food. The McCabe Preserve provides habitat for more than 100 bird species, including shorebirds, wrens, owls, swallows and many more.
“Meadows are just kind of fun things because the look of a meadow changes from week to week, from season to season,” Graham said.
“A really cool meadow is a random mix of grasses and perennials and wildflowers all stirred together. That's how wildlife works, too,” he said. “The more stirred up, the more diverse it gets. The more diverse your plant community, the more diverse your insect community is, and then you have more birds and the cycle continues. Diversity makes diversity.”
Other upgrades to the McCabe visitor area included resurfacing and re-fencing the parking lot and adding 10 bike racks for visitors. Graham said the preserve's information kiosk will also be updated in coming months.
For more information about The Nature Conservancy and the McCabe Preserve, go to www.nature.org.
