Nature Notes: A Treasure Trove

The South Fork of Long Island has hundreds of beaches, woodland trails, sidewalks, and other stretches for walking and communing with nature. 

On Friday, I accompanied Jean Held, a Sag Harbor naturalist and historian, and Victoria Bustamante, a Montauk botanist and naturalist, on one of the most interesting walks I have taken in my 81 years. No, it wasn’t through Montauk’s Hither Woods or Shadmoor Park. It wasn’t across Barcelona and East Hampton’s Northwest or along the Long Pond Greenbelt south of Sag Harbor or in North Sea’s Scallop Pond-Sebonac Creek Wilderness. It was in an area not noted for nature walks and rural scenery at all: the Oakland Cemetery in Sag Harbor. 

The large cemetery is filled with trees, trails, low vegetation, and, of course, tombstones. I wouldn’t have thought of it for a nature walk had Jean Held not talked it up based on an earlier visit when spring was just beginning to get into high gear.

When one thinks of a cemetery, one pictures a well-kept green dotted with engraved stone monuments in neat rows with grasses in between and perhaps a few trees here and there. The monuments are many and varied, detailing a history 200 years old. They themselves were worth the walk. But the spaces in between the stones were not merely the same old grass commonly found in local lawns. There were more than 50 species of herbs and miniature shrubs, half native, half not. 

Cemetery trees create an arboretum, with most of the eastern Long Island species represented, many very tall and some very old. One sawed-off stump of an oak almost three feet across had about 190 concentric rings from the outside in. It was nearly two centuries old. There were stately white oaks, chestnut oaks, black oaks, scarlet oaks, hickories, beeches, maples, white pines, pitch pines, firs, red cedars, spruce, and many others. However, we were not there for these historical trees with their magnificent canopies as much as for the rich tapestry of herbage below.

On Jean’s prior trip she had found many pussytoes, a species in the sunflower family in which the male plants are small and inconspicuous while the females are conspicuous and fuzzy, resembling the toes of cats. They  flower early and are the favorite plant for the painted lady butterfly. Some were still flowering on Friday, and, sure enough, a painted lady was visiting them.

What was most interesting is that different species would dominate different areas. Almost each grave marker was host to an ecotype or micro-ecotype. Several species were in flower, a few just like the frostweed or yellow rockrose in the genus Helianthemum. Vicki found another that could be the bushy frostweed, which is very rare to the state. It had yet to flower and she planned to compare it to the ones she has been watching in Montauk.

Among the non-natives were yellow tick clover, rabbit-foot clover, two plantains, several mints, and, of course, dandelions. There were also three different species of sedums, “stonecrops” that are more characteristic of drier landscapes of the kind found in America’s Southwest.

Two quite rare plants were found in goodly numbers. One was the common cedar, Juniperus communis, a low-growing spiny shrub, only a handful of which I have seen elsewhere on the South Fork. In Asia this species becomes a tree, in the United States it is mostly found in the low shrub form. The other rare species is one with very small, almost fleshy, opposite leaves along a stem that almost hugs the ground. It had yet to flower.

There were the obnoxious plants, of course, the Asiatic bittersweet, garlic mustard, and one mugwort just starting out. One wonders if the garlic mustard and mugwort will wage a war to take over most of the territory the way they do along so many of our roadsides. We may also have found one small mile-a-minute weed, the most obnoxious of all imports, methinks.

Vicki has the most incredible ears and Jean’s aren’t half-bad either. When a bird such as the chipping sparrow would sing, she’d call it out, but its trill was above my hearing range. She also heard cedar waxwings flying over. Locally, they have the highest notes of all. Jean identified one trill that we all heard: It was a gray tree frog, a species that is doing monumentally well these days on the South Fork and one that I heard at more than 50 percent of my stops when I was out searching for whippoorwills two weeks ago at night.

While we were there an argument broke out between the fish crows, the new kids on the block with the more nasal caws, and the common crows. Looking up, there went an osprey like a bullet flying north at an altitude approaching 300 yards. A fish crow, looking half its size, made a beeline right behind it. Another osprey, this one with a fish in its talons, followed behind that.

We were all alone with all those dead souls. Jean would look up from the plants once in a while to point out a historical Sag Harbor name or two, most belonging to whalers. There was the very nice and well-kept grave of George Balanchine, the great choreographer and artistic director of the New York City Ballet, and another of a well-known ballerina close by. 

At one point a very large and obviously old female box turtle looked up at us as we stopped to check out a plant. She was too old and too proud and too longstanding an inhabitant to close her eyes and pull her head inside her shell. She merely gave us the once- over and went on with her business. Had she just deposited her eggs or was she about to?

The keeper of the cemetery deserves high praise. Without him or her, how else would there be such a trove of flora and fauna, and except for the crows, all in a quiet harmony. 

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].