Heights Wilderness Explored; Invaders Felled

Environmental advocate Aaron Goode, loppers in hand, smiled as he looked over the hikers who had just waded through ankle-deep mud to get around a fence built across Hemingway Creek, behind the Bella Vista apartment complex. 

“We’re now in East Haven. If someone calls the police on us for trespassing,” he joked, ​“it’s the East Haven police they’re going to call.”

The crossing was part of a Saturday morning hike with the New Haven Bioregional Group, founded in 2005 as ​“a collaborative effort to ​‘walk the watersheds’ of the Quinnipiac Bioregion,” as its website states. ​“The New Haven Bioregional Group sponsors walks, films, canoe trips, potlucks, and other events to help residents of the Quinnipiac Bioregion connect with their natural and built environment, and to build community and local resilience.”

In its 16-year history, the organization has organized trips to nature preserves and parks around the area, among many other activities, from rain barrel and garden workshops to tai chi practice to partnerships with Gather New Haven and the Sound School.

This past Saturday’s hike had two missions: first, to visit and learn about Fairmont Park in Fair Haven Heights and a nearby butterfly garden that had recently been created; and second, to scout along the overgrown banks of Hemingway Creek in the hopes of drawing attention to and possibly creating a trail along it that could connect it to Fairmont Park and, by extension, the entire system of parks in New Haven.

Hikers gathered at the parking lot of Fairmont Park, 2.5 miles from downtown, where Goode explained the overall viewpoint of the Bioregional Group. It is about ​“walking your watershed, learning your watershed,” he said, ​“learning to live respectfully and interdependently.”

He held up a map of the state that had none of the familiar lines of towns and neighborhoods, streets and highways. Instead, it was a map of waterways, from creeks, streams, and tributaries to the state’s largest rivers, forming a dense network that was a good reminder of just how much of the area of Connecticut is taken up by wetlands and water, particularly toward the coast.

“We would like everyone to look at this map and recognize it,” Goode said.

He asked members of the group to share why they were interested in the hike. Many said they had come because, until they’d gotten the notice from the Bioregional Group, they didn’t know there were any trails or access to woods in this part of New Haven. With that knowledge, ​“suddenly your mental map changes,” said one hiker, ​“in part because of the new people you encounter.”

“Anything we can do to connect ourselves with the larger world in New Haven feels important to me,” said another hiker. ​“Remembering that there’s some version of wilderness right here in our backyard is a good thing.”

Another hiker described her experience of discovering all of the parks and trails in New Haven, forming an ​“emerald necklace” through the city. ​“Every now and then there is such an incredible view of the river here that it takes your breath away,” she said.

The group then took the trail up the hill heading deeper into the park. This part of the walk was led by Sylvia Dorsey, a volunteer for the park who was helping organize the effort, started during the pandemic, of removing invasive species from the park and planting new native plants.

Most of the invasive species in the first part of the hike — especially the ivy, which was growing in large patches — had been planted in gardens among the houses below, and it would take over the woods if the volunteers let it.

Instead, they were pulling it and several other species up by hand, and meanwhile putting orange tags on native plants to ensure they wouldn’t be pulled.

Dorsey stressed that rehabilitating the forest this way is a long-term effort. ​“This park is seven acres. It’ll take us many, many years,” she said.

The volunteer crew goes out Friday afternoons from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. to pull invasive species; anyone interested in joining them can show up then.

As the hike continued, Dorsey and Goode offered some history of the property. In the early history of the city, the area had been a quarry. Later, it became the estate of lawyer and State Representative Charles Ives, who was instrumental in passing a law in 1868 outlawing segregated schools in Connecticut. He built a Victorian mansion on the property that was reportedly a stop on the Underground Railroad; later, the mansion was dismantled and the parts used to construct other nearby houses. 

The hike paused at the top of the hill where Ives’s mansion had stood.

“This is a quick stop to show you invasive hell,” Dorsey said, by which she specifically meant a hardy stand of Norway maples, or as Dorsey called it, the ​“tree of hell,” a riff on ​“tree of heaven,” the nickname for another invasive species, ailanthus. The nearby community garden needed serious weeding of both Norway maples and honeysuckle, for which the Fairmont Park volunteers were working alongside New Haven’s parks department.

Good news, however, came in the form of a pollinator garden that was just starting to wake up from winter.

“We leave our leaves because insects nest in them,” Dorsey explained. Likewise, the flowers were untrimmed because insects nested in the dry stalks. ​“You can often see the moth sleeping in the flower,” Dorsey said. The garden contained over a dozen species, from milkweed and great blue lobellas to goldenrod, purple coneflower, and several species of aster. 

“You have stuff blooming all year if you follow nature,” Dorsey said, attracting birds and butterflies in the process. ​“It all works together,” she said. 

Down the hill from the park, on Eastern Street, Quinnipiac East Management Team member Kat Calhoun could report that Mariposas del Mundo, a butterfly garden she had officially proposed in early 2020, was well underway, with native plants in the ground sourced from several local nurseries and picnic tables provided for people to enjoy the space. The garden is supported by the Quinnipiac East Management Team, Community Foundation for Greater New Haven, the Livable Cities Initiative, the parks department, Urban Resources Initiative, and Yale School for the Environment. The plants in the garden, Calhoun said, were ​“especially designed to support monarchs and three species of swallowtails,” but all pollinators would benefit. 

The hike then continued on what Goode called the ​“adventure” portion of it, which involved blazing some trail along Hemingway Creek, which had its origins in springs somewhere in the city’s Alling Memorial Golf Course.

“A lot of the water features in the golf course are actually part of Hemingway Creek,” Goode said. ​“I’ve hit a lot of golf balls into the watershed.” 

From the golf course, the creek wended its way through a small gully to Eastern Street, and flowed on to the Quinnipiac River. Reaching the creek required first entering a stand of trees and undergrowth behind the Bella Vista apartment complex. 

Following the creek upstream led to a black fence that required traversing some deep mud to get around.

The fence marked the border between towns. We were now in East Haven.

After making his trespassing joke, Goode and fellow hikers talked about how the water level of the creek could change, and how it was part of four square miles of New Haven’s total of 18 that were considered to be in a flood zone.

The creek, however, could be made into a more accessible green space. ​“Long term is to think about having a greenway along Hemingway,” Goode said.

The hike continued along the creek bed, the undergrowth (of invasive species) getting thicker, requiring Goode to use the loppers more often.

We crossed the creek itself just below a low 19th-century dam that had collected a pond behind it. After a few people crossed, one hiker put down a board he had found to help the rest of the hikers get through the water with surer footing.

“Our first bridge!” Dorsey joked. ​“We’re building it!” Goode riffed. ​“We’re making it happen.”

Following a fence on the other side to the edge of the pond, we encountered our thickest thicket yet, which Goode cut a trail through.

The thorns soon relented, and a spot of greenery lay ahead.

The green turned out to be a sliver of Alling Memorial Golf Course, which Goode described as an ​“ava-fauna paradise” in the off-season, a refuge for birds. It was still that on Saturday. On the way out of the golf course, the hikers stopped to check out one of the ponds that we now understood was part of Hemingway Creek. A small group of turtles basked in the sun on a small outcropping in the water. To the turtles, it wasn’t important whether the pond was on a golf course or in the middle of the woods. The sun, the water, the wind, were all that mattered.