Cootes North Shore #071209
See also Borers-Cootes #071013 and Cootes South Shore #071104
History
At one time, this property would have been part of 200 acres of land purchased in 1802 by James Forsyth from Robert Hamilton, father of George Hamilton, the city's founder.
The Cootes name comes from Cootes Paradise (the Dundas Marsh), which was one of the early names for the town of Dundas. Captain Coote was an English soldier who was known for hunting at the marsh.
Cootes Paradise, Royal Botanical Gardens Trails
Cootes Paradise, formerly known as Dundas Marsh, is 800ha (2,000 acres) of marsh and forest at the mouth of Spencer Creek near the Dundas Valley on the west end of Lake Ontario, just off Hamilton Harbour (Burlington Bay). Much of the marsh itself is open water less than 1m (3.3ft) deep, although manna grass and cattails grow at the edges. The area is a refuge for at least 100 species of birds during migration, while another 80 species nest in the area. Some of the species you might spot include black-backed gulls, black-crowned night herons, blue-gray gnatcatchers, common moorhens, double-crested cormorants, eider ducks, green herons, marsh wrens, northern mockingbirds, orchard orioles and wood ducks. European cormorants that began moving into the area four years ago have already destroyed all the trees on Hickory Island. Hikers should look for the large platforms that naturalists have built to prevent the birds from coming ashore. This trail guide includes Captain Cootes, Marshwalk, Macdonell, Pinetum Trails, North Shore , Hopkins Trail, North Shore, Arnotts Walk and Chegwin Trails, South Shore, Ravine Road and Calebs Walk, Ginger Valley Trail, and Sassafras Point Trail.
Garlic mustard: Eat it to beat it
Pull it, spray it, burn it. And now a new tactic in the war to defeat public enemy No. 1 -- eat it.
We're talking garlic mustard. Ian Hendry, who runs the Interpretive Centre at the Royal Botanical Gardens, tries to be fair. "I hate to say a plant is evil. It's a plant in the wrong place."
Garlic mustard has been around for a century. It arrived from Europe as a garden herb and medicinal plant. And for decades, it behaved itself.
But in recent times, and it's not completely clear why, it's turned into a tyrant.
It is taking over our forests and crowding out the trillium, the trout lily and other spring flowers. Now it's feared garlic mustard may even hurt Canada's maples.
So Hendry is holding a session on garlic mustard. He's billing it as a chance to learn how to add the muscular weed to your menu. For instance, he'll show how to use garlic mustard to spice up a pasta dish.
He'll show people what the weed looks like and how to avoid spreading it. And he'll tackle the big issue of what can happen when we introduce non-native species. "There's always the potential for unforeseen consequences."
An example he likes is the cane toad. Australia imported it to control agricultural pests. Then the toads started eating everything else in sight.
There's nothing in Australia that can safely eat the big, poisonous toad and its numbers have swelled. Now some stretches of road are downright hazardous due to the slicks formed by squashed toad.
In our own back yard, there's purple loosestrife. It was introduced to North America for ornamental and medicinal purposes.
The weed became a huge problem in wetlands here.
Several beetle species from Europe were found to eat it. But researchers had to make sure the beetles wouldn't chew up wheat crops or cause other damage. Tests were promising and the RBG was one of the first places the beetles were introduced. It's worked wonders.
But no such solution has yet been found for garlic mustard. It is part of the mustard family and its leaves smell like garlic when crushed. (And when dairy cattle eat it, their milk tastes like garlic.)
In year one, it's low growing, with triangular to heart-shaped leaves, with wavy edges. In year two, it grows tall, with small, white four-petaled flowers. They'll bloom in about a week.
Shiny black seeds follow, in beanlike pods. A plant can have up to 800 seeds.
And if you pull that plant after the flower is gone, you're spreading all those seeds to the four winds. Animals spread the seeds. Hikers, too.
The RBG has set up test patches, where they have tried pulling out the garlic mustard at different times of the year. They've tried spraying in these test patches, but the challenge is to find a substance that kills the garlic mustard without killing everything else.
And this past weekend, the RBG conducted a burn at Sassafras Point and Bull's Point. That's an attempt to control introduced species such as garlic mustard and allow the re-emergence of the native oak savannah.
But garlic mustard is especially wily. It produces chemicals that linger in the soil and can kill other plants. "It's basically using chemical warfare," Hendry says.
In tests, maple seedlings were planted in soil where the garlic mustard had been removed two years earlier. Even then, the maples' growth was stunted.
We don't have to go far along the Captain Cootes Trail to find the problem. A carpet of trillium belongs here. But the forest floor has already been occupied. It now belongs to garlic mustard, the silent invader that can't yet be beaten.
