A Little History of ECWA's Early Years

Founded in 1999, ECWA turns 20 this year. In recognition, the story of the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association's founding and early years has just been added to this website.

In this photo from the early days, Sofia Hiltner draws a meandering creek along the front walk of her home in the Watts Hospital-Hillandale neighborhood. The founder's first encounters with Ellerbe Creek were in the park where he took Sofie to play.

Irreplaceable Ellerbe Headwaters Land Threatened With Rezoning

Update: The rezoning request was defeated, providing a reprieve of uncertain duration for this oasis of beauty and biological diversity in western Durham.

A developer is proposing to bulldoze this land, the prettiest and most biologically rich in the Ellerbe Creek headwaters. The 270 proposed units, which in the developer's presentation were referred to as "product" and appeared unattractive and of cheap construction, would obliterate the natural features and impose a massive increase in impervious surface on a headwaters site that biologically and hydrologically is essentially pristine. There are salamanders within a stone's throw of the meadow of undisturbed native, deep rooted grasses, with Atamasco lily in the swale.

In addition to being a window into Durham's rich biological past, the land also shelter cultural history. A section of the colonial Fish Dam Road, dating back to 1600, and an important Indian path prior to that, is still visible in the woods, running parallel to Berini Drive.
There's another beautiful view where the land drops off to the south and east, with mature hardwood forest and deep rooted native meadow.

The land borders the Berini Drive neighborhood, which lacks a park. The proposed dense development would add to the number of residents who will have to drive to find a park for their children.

Chad Hallyburton's Fish Survey of Ellerbe Creek

In 2000, a year after the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association was established, ECWA board member Chad Hallyburton, who was working at the time at the NC Museum of Life and Science, surveyed fish populations along the full length of Ellerbe Creek, from the headwaters in western Durham easterward to Falls Lake. It was a singular effort, as no surveys have been done since then, to my knowledge. He also invited residents along the creek to participate, giving us an opportunity to learn fish seining techniques, and get our feet wet, so to speak.

As the list below shows, he found a surprising diversity: 37 species, 29 of which are native to the area. It can also be found on page 122 of the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Plan that we put together in 2003.

I remember Chad being excited about discovering what he thought to be the remains of a nest built of stones by some species of chub. The location was just up Goose Creek from its confluence with Ellerbe Creek, several hundred feet upstream of the East Club Boulevard bridge. I also remember seeing bright red fish in spring, not in Ellerbe Creek but clustered at Fews Ford on the Eno River, north of the Ellerbe, which may have been chubs in mating season. A brilliant mating display like that can give a small glimpse into the abundance and beauty that must have been present in these piedmont streams at one time, and serves as inspiration for work to return Ellerbe Creek to a more healthy condition. Here's a link to info on nest-building chubs.

In the list, the tolerance rating refers to how tolerant each species is to pollution. Being polluted by urban runoff, Ellerbe Creek is populated only by tolerant or intermediately tolerant species. If and when fish species with less tolerance for pollution are found in Ellerbe Creek, that will mean the water is getting cleaner.

Chad's fish survey was a great contribution to knowledge about Ellerbe Creek.

Glennstone Detention Basin Clogged

The nicest entryway into ECWA's 82 acre nature preserve at the Glennstone development is next to one of the sediment ponds that catches and temperarily holds runoff from the houses and streets. The developer, Craig Morrison, built a nice shelter there with sidewalk and plantings,

overlooking what in 2008 and through to last year was a healthy pond with cattails, soft rush and lots of pickerel weed that blooms all summer.

It was surprising, then, to return this year to find most of the cattails and other vegetation dead, and the view from the pergola quickly being obscured by fast growing willows.

What could have caused the dieoff? Are a lot of herbicides washing off nearby yards?

First thing I noticed was the ring of dead grass around the pond,

and the pickerel weed is doing fine along the edge. What's likely happening is that the drain in the back of this photo is blocked. Storm runoff is supposed to collect in the basin, then slowly drain down until the water is shallow again. If the drain gets blocked, water will remain high for too long, the grass along the edge of the pond will die, and even cattails will drown.

The detention basin likely needs some maintenance to free the drain of debris. Interesting to see that the cattail is killed by high water, because its tendency to take a pond over completely may make future flooding a good option for reestablishing some room for other aquatic plant species to grow.

Ellerbe Headwater Prairie Provides Seed For Eno Refuge

Up Shoccoree Drive, in the headwaters of Ellerbe Creek, a beautiful prairie stretches beneath the three WDNC radio towers visible as you enter Durham on I-85 from the west. I happened upon this prairie back around 1999, and realized that, unlike most meadows, it was packed with native grasses and wildflowers. Milo Pyne helped me with an initial inventory of its native plant diversity. The site was later included on a tour of local prairies during an Eastern Grasslands Conference.

More recently, the NC Botanical Gardens took an interest in the site and got permission from the broadcasting company to harvest seed, for use in restoring prairies at Penny's Bend along the Eno River, and also at Mason Farm in Chapel Hill.

On March 16, the botanical garden crew conducted a prescribed burn at Penny's Bend, as part of its management of prairie and savanna habitat there. Into the ashes they will scatter seed collected in Ellerbe Creek's headwaters. This project underscores the importance of preserving those places in the Ellerbe Creek watershed where exceptional native biodiversity has, through serendipity, survived.

Prescribed burning: For any readers surprised by the intentional burning of a landscape, fire once played an important ecological role in sustaining diverse native landscapes. The careful application of fire by trained crews aims to replicate natural conditions and sustain rare species like the smooth coneflower. The WDNC prairie has survived because it has been consistently mowed once or twice a year, imitating to some extent the fires that would formerly have prevented succession to forest.

Penny's Bend: Where the Eno River runs into a massive protrusion of diabase rock, northeast of Durham, it takes a sharp turn known as Penny's Bend. As part of the construction of Falls Lake, the land within this bend was bought by the Army Corps of Engineers. Management of its rare habitats and wildflowers was turned over to the NC Botanical Gardens. I'm proud of having been part of the committee, led by Johnny Randall, that oversaw management and re-instituted prescribed burning of the prairies there. Since then, more of the special diabase-rich lands have been preserved and carefully managed for biodiversity.
         The preserve is out Old Oxford Rd, and is open to the public. (Photo collage of recent Penny's Bend burn provided by NC Botanical Garden.)

New Invasive in Durham's Duke Forest Neighborhood

Here is an exhilarating but scary detective story about a pretty but ecologically dangerous plant. After finding Lesser Celandine (Ranunculus ficaria, also known as fig buttercup) in a yard in the Ellerbe Creek watershed, which feeds the Neuse River watershed, I described the plant to my friend Perry, who knows Durham and the NC piedmont very well. He said he had seen the species in a backyard in the Duke Forest neighborhood, which drains into the Cape Fear River. He had at first wondered if it was a rare wildflower, until he later saw it running rampant over a stream restoration site in Greensboro, NC.

When he showed me the plants he had seen in the Duke Forest neighborhood yard, I began tracking them upstream, using the instinct I had developed in tracking the similarly invasive Garlic Mustard in the Ellerbe watershed.

Close up, the plant looks like this. These flower stalks seemed longer than those in the Watts-Hillandale neighborhood yard.

Upstream were a series of larger patches. I felt like a sleuth in a detective movie, or maybe it was the primal rush of the hunt--something our minds evolved for but seldom have the chance to do.

When the brush became too dense, I returned to the road to explore further upstream. At Pinecrest and McDowell, I found one of the plants growing on the curb, an odd location since the rest of the infestations had been down along the stream bank. Note the storm drain that feeds straight into the floodplain of the creek this road crosses.

I looked down into the woods near this curb, and found the floodplain blanketed with the invasive, showing just how dominant and exclusionary of any other low-growing species it can become. Lesser Celandine has the potential to outcompete the many native species of spring wildflowers, and thereby impact the wildlife whose taste buds have not evolved to eat exotic plants.

Though the neighborhood has the protection of speed limits and Neighborhood Watch, there has been no one looking out for exotic plants that are able to invade gardens and speed downstream to infest natural areas.

Upstream of the intersection, the trail went cold, meaning that the infestation must have been entering the creek there from one of the side streets.

I followed a false lead to the left, then headed up McDowell Street. Near the top of the rise, I saw a hillside of yellow and knew I'd found the source of the infestation.

It's hard to predict how the homeowners are going to respond when you knock on their door and let them know they have an ecological menace growing in their yard. But this time, the news was very well received. At first they were puzzled, then tremendously thankful for having someone explain what was going on with this super aggressive plant.

They had liked the flower at first, but had grown increasingly concerned as it invaded the Vinca minor they had hoped would populate the hillside. The blue flowers of the Vinca can be seen amidst the sea of yellow in the photo. Though Vinca minor can also be thought of as an invasive, it doesn't spread downstream to new areas like the Lesser Celandine does.

We speculated that the seeds or perhaps the underground bulbules of the invasive had been washed down the driveway, then down along the curb until they reached the creek at the bottom of the hill, where they quickly began to spread downstream.

I had to return to New Jersey the next day, but Perry said he would track the flower downstream to determine the extent of spread. This sort of invasives work benefits from a Swat Team mentality, where swift action determines whether the invasion can be stopped while still limited in scope. Once the plant stops blooming, it will be much harder to track. In another month or so, the plant will turn brown and "melt" back into the ground, where it will remain dormant and be invisible until it emerges again next spring.

Fortunately, the homeowner promised to spray the plants in his yard. He also said he'd remove the plant from his sister's yard in the headwaters of the Eno River, where he planted some before realizing how invasive it can be. In speculating how it might have gotten into his yard, he remembered having gotten compost from the Durham landfill somewhere between five and ten years ago.

This means a visit to the Durham landfill compost site, long since closed, is in order, to see if there is an infestation there. Still to be determined is how to deal with all the plants that have already spread down the creek.

A Wetland Garden Survives at Durham's Williams Water Treatment Plant

If you drive west on Hillsborough Road, past the Durham city reservoir, glance towards the reservoir and you will see a special but largely unnoticed feature with a long history. When it rains, stormwater from the road flows down this slope and settles in a circular area surrounded by lawn. Swampy, hard to mow, it proved a perfect place to put a wetland garden. The white sign, installed by the city and visible in this photo, says "This Natural Area Maintained By Volunteers From the Watts-Hillandale Neighborhood Association." Well, sort of.

On March 30, two volunteers showed up to give this wetland garden a much needed spring cleaning. Cynthie Kulstad lives in the Northgate Park neighborhood, and is preserve manager for the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association. I'm a former member of the Watts-Hillandale neighborhood now living in New Jersey. It's fair to ask what's so special about this place, other than its location next to a beautiful, historic water plant. Why would two people descend on a drab-looking cluster of dried stalks to work on a hot spring day for two hours?

Here's one of them, the remains of the flower stalk of wild senna, a beautiful native wildflower that thrives in wet soils. Some years back, we planted this and other wetland wildflowers here, taking advantage of the consistently wet ground. Elsewhere on the reservoir grounds, a demonstration xeroscape garden was planted in the early 90's with grant funds. The idea was to show how to grow a garden that didn't need much water (and thus help prevent Durham from running out of drinking water during droughts). They also applied a fertilizer called Bull Durt, which was made by composting together mixed paper and sewage sludge--two materials that otherwise would have gone to the landfill. I'm sure the garden looked great at first. It won an award, then went in to steady decline due to poor maintenance by untrained city staff. After moving to the Watts-Hillandale neighborhood in 1995, I organized neighborhood volunteers to try to resurrect the gardens, which were in three "pods" over near Hillandale Road. We made some progress, but the dry conditions there made the garden susceptible to drought. One of them, I later realized, was located atop a buried old asphalt basketball court. 

After a few years of experience growing native plants in Durham, and after lugging many a bucket of water during extended droughts, I figured out that the easiest way to sustain a wildflower garden is to locate it in a wet, sunny area.

Thus, we finally got smart and moved the remaining plants to the lowest ground at the reservoir, where this brick-lined spring once quenched the thirst of golfers playing what used to be the third hole of Hillandale Golf Course. The water is muddy because the site now receives runoff from Hillsborough Road during rains. But I love this hidden historic feature, and the mystery of how a spring could have been so close to a ridge dividing the Neuse and Cape Fear river basins. (Hillsborough Road runs along that ridge.)

Along with the periodic influx of water from the road, this garden's longevity owes to it being cared for by knowledgeable gardeners rather than untrained staff with little interest in plants. City maintenance crews are good at mowing grass, however, and we are thankful to them for respecting the boundaries of this garden.

Since I now live in NJ, it's hard to do much maintenance myself. You can tell that no one in the neighborhood has yet fallen in love with this garden, because it was getting overrun by brambles, and one of the weed trees was ten feet high. It's a callery pear, a noxious, thorny invasive tree whose shade was a threat to the sun-loving wildflowers. We cut and treated the tree sprouts, cut, trampled and treated as much of the brambles as we could, flattened the old flower stems so they could rot back into the ground, and admired all the wild senna, cutleaf coneflower and iris emerging. Without this periodic selective weeding, the wildflowers would fade away under a wave of brambles and trees. In coming months, this wetland garden will bloom and provide food, water and cover for wildlife in what is otherwise a large expanse of turf.

The garden could use more attention. Even someone unskilled with caring for native plants could come by and pick up the litter carried down the hill by the stormwater. Its a fine destination for any neighbor wishing to combine an evening walk with a little care for the neighborhood. But in the meantime, Cynthie and I did the basic maintenance. A garden kept going by four hours of work per year? That's the magic of a wetland garden.

INVASIVE ALERT: Lesser Celandine Found in Watershed

While visiting Durham this past week, I was driving through the Watts Hospital-Hillandale neighborhood when I saw a blaze of yellow and thought "Oh, oh."

First time I saw this plant, in Princeton, NJ, I thought it was pretty. Then I saw how it was spreading rapidly through nature preserves, displacing native wildflowers as it forms dense, impenetrable colonies.

I happened to know the woman whose yard it was growing in, and stopped to knock on her door. She gave me a tour. She was quite proud of the yellow flower (Ranunculus ficaria--sometimes called Fig Buttercup or Lesser Celandine), and had received many compliments from neighbors on its beauty.

She had, though, noticed that it was starting to take over.

In the five or so years since it spontaneously showed up in her yard, it had spread along her walkway, made blotchy mounds in her front lawn,

and even started to push back on her english ivy.

It's hard to ask any homeowner who has been pleased with a flower to begin viewing it as an ecological threat to the watershed. Just beyond this quickly spreading patch in her backyard is a small tributary of Ellerbe Creek, which in turn is a tributary of the Neuse River.

If, or more likely, when, the lesser celandine in her yard gets in to the creek, it will spread rapidly downstream.

But it's pretty, one might say, and survival of the fittest is nature's law. But this exotic plant left its natural predators back in Europe, and so has an unnatural competitive advantage over native species. Since nothing appears to eat it, any floodplain or yard that Lesser Celandine comes to dominate will become devoid of food to sustain wildlife.

The best thing that can happen in this instance is to have the invasive sprayed, and replaced with plants that won't take over. If the homeowner can be convinced the lesser celandine is a menace, there's hope it can be stopped before it spreads to the creek.

For a fact sheet on this plant, go to: http://www.invasive.org/weedcd/pdfs/wgw/lessercelandine.pdf Note that the distribution map doesn't even show it as having spread yet to NC.

Painted Buckeye

Painted buckeye is a native shrub common on the low bluffs overlooking Ellerbe Creek at Glennstone. It blooms in early April.

Sun-Loving Prairie Wildflowers of Glennstone

Walking along the trails of ECWA's nature preserve at Glennstone, downstream from Durham, out towards Falls Lake, you will find many wildflowers that still flourish where trees have yet to cast their shadow. In the first photo is Carolina rose (Rosa carolina), a low-growing rose common at Glennstone. My most memorable encounter with this flower was in the middle of a very hot day when the landscape had already been parched by severe drought. Fortunately, I "stopped to smell the roses", and was rewarded by a fragrance sweet and soft, refreshing as a cool drink after a long trek through the desert.

Snowdrops, a kind of primrose, is another bright flower in May.

The last photo is of Round-Headed Bushclover, the native wildflower at Glennstone that I have encountered growing nowhere else in all my travels. It's discussed in a previous post on this website.

Native Flowers Near the Landfill

One of the richest deposits of irony paradoxide in the Ellerbe Creek watershed is at the Durham city landfill, which was closed some years back and planted with grass to protect the clay cap carefully spread over several decades' worth of Durham's garbage.

People tend not to have fond associations with landfills, but this one is an extraordinary landscape. Essentially a mountain, it boasts an extraordinary panoramic view of Durham county. Watching a glorious sunset there years back, I saw fifteen wild turkeys foraging just down the slope. Many years ago, during a tour, while the landfill was still in operation, a city councilwoman who had recently returned from Africa gazed out across the side of the landfill, turned bronze by broomsedge grass in the winter, and said it reminded her of the Serengeti. At the time of its closure, residents living nearby had requested that it be turned into something akin to a botanical garden. Currently, the landfill is not open to the public.

Though the landfill is a profoundly altered landscape, along its edges are some of the best preserved remnants of Durham's natural heritage, as can be seen in the first photo. Looking across a beaver pond, you can see the landfill rising in the distance. But in the foreground is a pinxter azalea, a beautiful native shrub that is rarely seen in the watershed.


Growing near the azalea is a patch of blue crested iris, which, if one can judge by the ten foot wide clone, has been growing there a very, very long time.


Viburnum dentatum (3rd photo) is another of the less common natives growing there. Their prevalence suggests that the small slope next to the beaver pond was never plowed.


Very close by is another rich remnant of native plant diversity, also on city land. Though it looks like a plain bit of roadside grass under a powerline (fourth photo), it in fact harbors 111 native species of wildflowers and grasses, including big bluestem--the dominant grass of the tall grass prairies in the midwest.

Most people don't know that bison once lived in what is now North Carolina (traces of a bison migration route can still be found north of Durham), or that in precolonial times the piedmont was a mosaic of forest and prairie.

Remnants like this one near the landfill, which survives only because roadsides were left unplowed and trees are prevented from growing under powerlines, serve as valuable windows into an extraordinary past. Because this remnant is biologically special and irreplaceable, ECWA officially adopted it some years ago, through an arrangement with Duke Energy, to prevent it from being sprayed with herbicides. ECWA maintains the site by cutting down any tree growth.


One of the unusual wildflowers growing in this roadside prairie remnant is leather flower (Clematis ochroleuca). Unlike the clematis we're accustomed to seeing, this species is not a vine but instead stands erect. Leather flower is one of a number of rare wildflowers in the piedmont that only grows on a soil called diabase, named for the characteristic rock from which it forms.

The sustainability of this site's rich botanical legacy would be greatly enhanced by expanding it into the adjacent city-owned land.

A Detention Basin Becomes a Wetland

Neighbors weren't too happy when a large swath of land was cleared to make this detention basin. The developer, who had long wished there were a way to make these government-required stormwater features more attractive, was sympathetic to the homeowners' strident complaints.



With the help of the Ellerbe Creek Watershed Association (ECWA), to which the developer had donated 82 acres adjoining the new subdivision, a plan came together to transform the unsightly detention basin into a wetland full of native wildflowers.

This all sounds well-intended--the sort of ambitious project that would never quite come to fruition--but in this case everyone involved followed through. ECWA provided a detailed plant list. The developer designed and installed a walkway and pergola overlooking the basin, and paid a landscaper to do the planting. Volunteers from ECWA worked with neighbors to plant additional native grasses and shrubs on the slopes, which had previously been seeded with annual grass to prevent erosion.

The last two photos show the basin in May of 2008, as it began its third growing season. The basin has in fact been transformed into a wetland, with soft rush, pickerelweed, cattails and other native plants.

The one less than ideal aspect is that the cattails will likely take over the whole basin unless controlled in some way. But having gone into the project with both enthusiasm and some skepticism about whether such a feel-good transformation, from ugly pit to verdant wetland, could actually be achieved, I'd have to say the it's been a great success.

Nature and Culture at Glennstone Preserve

Just to the west of the preserve, at the end of Davie Drive, is an impressive assemblage of antique vehicles and farm equipment rusting in the sun. Some would consider them a blight on the landscape. I see them as historic scuptures, evidence of the lower valley's past, mixing with the rushes and cattails that thrive in the wet ground. The tradition of mixing sculpture and garden is alive and well in the piedmont, whether at the N.C. Botanical Garden some fifteen miles to the south, where the sculptures are actually intended, or in this casual juxtaposition in the lower Ellerbe Creek watershed.

In the second photo, Bushclovers and Eupatoriums thrive in the sunlight above a sewer line that runs underground through the preserve. Long ago, these wildflowers would have grown where periodic fire limited tree growth. Now, with fire banished from the landscape, these shade-intolerant species survive only where trees are prevented from growing--along roadsides and sewer right of ways.

Healing Construction Wounds at Glennstone

This detention basin caught sediment from the Glennstone housing development during construction. After the houses were up, it was left to be reclaimed by whatever would grow there. Some seeds were already in the soil from years or decades past. Others came in by bird, wind or stormwater.

In the foreground of the first photo is one pleasant surprise--passion flower, a vine that spreads underground and sends up shoots each year with beautiful, incredibly complex flowers.

In the second photo is Butterfly Pea, a native legume with large pink flowers that crawls along the ground.

These first two plants prefer the dry ground on the berm. The last photo shows Woolgrass, an attractive native sedge that thrives in the low spots still fed by runoff from yards up the hill.