Penbrook Park

“I had a dream. Crazy dream.
Anything I wanted to know, any place I needed to go

Hear my song. People won’t you listen now? Sing along.
You don’t know what you’re missing now.
Any little song that you know
Everything that’s small has to grow.
And it has to grow!”

Martin Luther King had a dream. Led Zepplin had a dream. Dream a little dream now with The Buckthorn Man. I’m in a peaceful village set among ridges and kettles, dotted with oaks and splashed with wetlands. A river runs through it and the people care deeply for the land. Flowers, grasses, ferns and sedges grow in wild profusion covering the wet meadows and hillside prairies. Creatures of every kind share our neighborhood and entertain us with their little songs. Well-trodden trails take us to special places that feel like home.

The Village of Hartland 1937

My Hartland Marsh dream is slowly becoming a reality. With a little help from my friends, I’m cutting the buckthorn thicket that was choking my imagination. First it was the Ice Age Trail Alliance property at The Marsh, then the Waukesha County Land Conservancy land — the old Parker Brothers Homested that Marlin Johnson help them acquire, then the Village land around the Cottonwood Wayside and more Ice Age Trail land at the Aldo Leopold lookout on Maple Avenue (where others, notably the IATA and the Rotary club, had already done most of the work). The trail took a jog north on Maple Avenue and I found myself at the entrance to Penbrook Park, possibly some of the prettiest landscape in the area — under siege from buckthorn and surrounded on all sides by development.

My dream to rehabilitate the land and foster healthy ecosystems in the primary environmental corridor from Hwy 83 all the way to the east side of Penbrook Park was put on hold for a few years back in 2011, but now it’s Dream On. Please join me at the Village of Hartland Board meeting on Monday, January 25, 7:00pm at 210 Cottonwood Avenue, where I will be making the case for the Village to take a leadership role in restoring the ecosystems in the primary environmental corridor in the Village starting with Penbrook Park (click to check out my presentation — Village of Hartland Comprehensive Development Plan: 2035).

The gallery below documents the changes at Penbrook Park from 1941 to 2015, as the buckthorn moved in to dominate the understory of the uplands and encroach into the the wetlands.

The future Penbrook park. That is Maple Avenue on the left.

You can almost count the isolated trees.

Canals were dug, visible in the center-left and center-top

By 1990 the brush is getting thick but you can still see the trails in the center-right and even a little bridge over the canal.

Year 2000, there has been no effort to control buckthorn in this area and the trails are becoming obscured.

Year 2010, the buckthorn is dominating the understory and the trails are disappearing.

2015, the trails in the center-right area are completely overgrown with buckthorn.

I’m going to go out on a buckthorn limb and declare that Penbrook Park is in a world of hurt. The understory that has filled in since 1941 is predominately buckthorn and it is steadily encroaching on the wetlands in the center of the park. Last Tuesday Pati and I took a tour and I want to show you what I’m talking about. Bear with me, there are a lot of pictures here. The map below shows the route we walked marked by the yellow trail and the numbers will correlate to the photo galleries that follow.

#1, The south west corner of the park as seen from Maple Avenue

The hillside rim around the wetland is thick with buckthorn

#2, the park entrance

An asphalt path, widely mowed passing through a buckthorn thicket on either side.

A huge buckthorn

The view north or to the left as we walk the path would be stunning absent the buckthorn brush

When the buckthorn leafs out, you can’t see the wetland below

Thick buckthorn is obscuring the beautiful landscape

#4 Everywhere you look it’s buckthorn

There is a bench in the swale here, the only relatively open view into the wetland from the trail

I guess, if you’re The Buckthorn Man, that is all you are going to see.

Mr. Buckthorn and his buddy honeysuckle

There is a little spur “trial” that leads to the high ground above the wetland we first saw from Maple Avenue at #1

The wetland below is the one we first encountered at #1 along Maple Avenue, here seen from the east rim

The subdivision on the south west perimeter of the park

heading back to the main trail

a buckthorn tunnel

Just west of the play ground in the park “proper” there is a beautiful vernal pond completely encircled with buckthorn, honeysuckle and box elder, #6 on the map.

#5 west side of playground

The wetlands north of the playground are barely visible through the buckthorn thicket

This is the view into the thicket from the west side of the playground near the cyclone fence, which is protecting “who” from “what”, I don’t know

The play area on the west side of the park

looking back west on the paved path we took to get to the park

I don’t understand the need for cyclone fences here… oh well

Note the view into the wetlands below, we’ll soon be looking this way from down there

There are many, many excellent trees in the park. I wonder if they are all counted as “Park Trees” (see my presentation — Village of Hartland Comprehensive Development Plan: 2035 for the reference to “Park Trees”).

Now we are turning north at #7 on the route mapped above

I don’t think this “trail” gets much traffic in the summer when the buckthorn is in full bush

There are som every nice trees here, most of which are visible in the 1941 picture above, and they need some tender loving care

vines scale the buckthorn and get into the oak canopy where they wreak havoc

Awesome wetland are just below us

and you can almost make out hickory ridge on the other side

If it’s an ugly tree, it’s probably a buckthorn

Obscured by buckthorn, the view from the east side of the park into the wetland

Ok,

Pati and I love exploring new areas. We finally made it down to the wetland.

#10 glossy buckthorn encroaching all along the wetlands

Oak Ridge

#11 that is the railroad bed crossing in the distance

Aspen clonal colony spreading into wetlands

#12

I hate buckthorn

#13 frozen pond

Nice oaks nearby

another look at those oaks

A trail up to oak ridge

#14 emerging into the big open wetlands

Can you see the cyclone fence on the edge of the playground on the top of the ridge?

buckthorn shoreline

#15 the condo owners in this unit removed the buckthorn from their front yard,

which is the thing to do if you live on Parkview Court!

Nice work, imagine if all the property owners on the perimeter of the park cleared the invasive species from their properties!

Contrast the cleared area on the left with the wall of buckthorn in the “conservancy”

The view into this wetland from Maple Avenue would be 100x better if this single row of buckthorn were cut

I think you get the idea. The landscape is varied with ridges, steep slopes, vernal ponds, open wetlands and kettle style bowls or depressions. There are many, many excellent oak and hickory trees in the park but the understory is totally dominated with buckthorn and honeysuckle. My dream is to see the ecosystem in this primary environmental corridor restored to health. I would also like to see the trail system expanded in Penbrook Park by the addition of the two segments marked in blue below. The lower loop takes you to an overlook over the kettle that is right off of Maple Avenue, then it would swing down to the vernal pond and connect up at the play ground. The other new blue loop would follow the high ground on the east side of the park and then take you down into the wetlands and then back through some beautiful oak uplands to the play ground (existing trails are marked in yellow).