The Navy Posts Their Brunswick Landing Properties

Many of you may have seen a host of new “No Trespassing, Federal Property” signs at Brunswick Landing. This includes trails that lead off of BTLT’s Neptune Woods property. These signs now clearly mark what has been, and continues to be, Navy owned land.

The US Navy is currently enforcing their no trespassing regulations through signage and video monitoring because the land is undergoing further environmental study and remediation work. Trespassing on federal land is a federal crime and the Navy can pursue appropriate legal actions against violators, THEY ARE SENDING PHOTOS OF TRESPASSERS TO THE BRUNSWICK POLICE.

Please only use the trails that you know are publicly accessible – including BTLT’s Neptune Woods, and the Town of Brunswick’s Kate Furbish Preserve. Stay on trails that are included on the trail maps to be sure you are staying on publicly accessible land.

BTLT is working diligently to help assure that the land designated for use as recreation lands in the BNAS Redevelopment Plan is ultimately both accessible and safe for the community. We hope that the recreation lands on the east side of the Landing are appropriately remediated and turned over by the US Navy soon, and we will continue to actively advocate for public access on these lands and for appropriate remediation to assure that those lands are safe for the community and the natural systems that are resident on the land.

For questions or concerns about Navy lands, you can contact local Navy officials at #207-406-2290

BTLT in the News, “Spring Slippers”

Sandy Stott, BTLT Board Member and local writer, recently began a regular series published in the Times Record all about the Mere Brook Watershed here in Brunswick.

Your Land: Spring slippers

By Sandy Stott on June 11, 2020

Perhaps the days have you talking to yourself, or, better yet, revisiting an old ability many of us developed in childhood — that of talking with imaginary friends, perhaps from other eras. Surely they can be helpful making sense of a time that seems beyond our experience.

The other day, I did what I do daily: I went for a walk in the woods, and, after a long, stuttering start, I noticed that our coastal Maine woods have begun to say, “It’s the warm season; take a look at this.” Three favorite flowers colored this voice in my head — the trout lily, trillium and, finally, the pink lady’s slipper. I love each, and they arrive each spring in an overlapping sequence of their mention above.

Just so in the woods I walk or run often — our Town Commons and the Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust’s trails at Crystal Spring; each flower has been a welcome flag of the season. and each has nudged me to pick up a reread a favorite small volume, Wildflowers of Maine — The Botanical Art of Kate Furbish, and resume conversation with the painter.

Furbish (1834 – 1931) lived in Brunswick throughout her life and became one of the era’s better known botanists, and then, late in life and after her death, as her illustrations gained a broader audience, a revered painter. She was, it turned out, that rare combination — scientist and artist (though by now we should be alert for the core of curiosity and close observation that brings alive both disciplines; they seem deep complements). This little book (DownEast Books, and available at Bowdoin College’s museum) of narrative and illustrations helps me look more fully at what’s rising.

Being brought to season by the emergence of flowers and imagined talk with a former resident seems a steadier route than that of our daily weather, which often packs all seasons into short stretches of time. Frost and rogue snowflakes can give way to sudden sun and intense warmth, especially in corners away from the wind; then the clouds can make muddle of what just was. What to wear, what to be? seem fair weather questions each day. “Be aware; pay attention to what’s at your feet,” Kate Furbish says to me.

For me, spring’s emergence culminates with the pink lady’s slipper, our common orchid of the woods, and my habit of notice spans enough years so I know specific patches of them, look for them each spring in remembered places. There is, for example, a stretch of lady’s slippers to the left of the main trunk trail just as it leaves the second development and turns left to the central Commons.

Like many slipper-gatherings in the Commons this one exceeds my numeric tic of counting these flowers as I pass by, though, during one spring, that impulse grew strong enough so I’d end my foot-time with tallies in the hundreds. But what keeps me swinging my eyes side to side as I walk or run are the outliers, those lady’s slippers that rise solo or duo, that possibly foretell a collection of descendants some years from now.

Just yesterday, I stepped off a trail near Crystal Spring to allow another walker good distance for passing by, and there, next to my feet, was a lady’s slipper, the only one visible in this patch of forest.

Neighbors tell me that, before the Bowdoin playing fields south of the campus were hewn from forest some years ago, those woods were rife with lady’s slippers. Now, they say, there are none in the narrow, big-treed remainder between

those fields and the first of the Meadowbrook neighborhoods that fringe also the Commons. Ah, but there has been one flower in recent years, not far above the gully that guides Mere Brook in an intermediate mile.

And this year, they are two, with a third plant that hasn’t flowered. Solo, duo… perhaps trio next year? And then?

What, I wonder aloud to Kate Furbish while we are searching our local woods, is the word for a grouping of lady’s slippers? It turns out that there is no word, even as aardvarks — for instance — have their own collective noun. They, in their numbers, are an armoury. Some snakes too — you may one day meet a sum of adders, or you may hope to avoid such an addition. But flowers? Bunch or bouquet of…ho hum. Shoes? pair…yawn; but, shoes, scandal of…ears perk.

Your suggestions?

BTLT in the News, “Your Land: To be a (Mere) brook”

Sandy Stott, BTLT Board Member and local writer, recently began a regular series published in the Times Record all about the Mere Brook Watershed here in Brunswick.

Your Land: To be a (Mere) brook

By Sandy Stott on May 15, 2020

Here’s a little local footwork you may be interested in following. It all happens at appropriate distance, and it offers the intrigue of looking for origins.

We all must start somewhere. Our origins often shape character and possibility, and that, even given its wildly various midstream selves, is true of Mere Brook.

Not far southwest of Brunswick’s clustered center, the land opens to agricultural fields and wetland woods and grassland and blueberry sandplain. A driver or cyclist headed for neighboring Freeport rides through this open land and then sees Pleasant Hill Road rise to a minor ridge, where it scoots between two apparent farms. The farm on the right features a vibrant flower garden in season and always neatly clipped fields. On the left, a series of signs enjoins us to support our local farmers. Then, a sign in the shape of a once-bitten carrot introduces the second farm, Crystal Spring Farm. It’s a working farm, its nature clear from a mix of machinery, buildings and paused labor. There’s always more to do, says that composition…always more.

Next to that scene of active, traditional agriculture, through a bank of stately maples, is a parking area and a roped-off patch of flattened grass; every weekend from May to November, vendors and customers flatten the week’s grass-growth in attendance at the Brunswick-Topsham Land Trust’s Saturday Farmers’ Market. The market, a regionally revered gathering of appetite and community spirit, anticipates, animates, and celebrates the local growing season. (Note: during current closures and relocations brought on by COVID-19, the Farmer’s Market will take place outside Brunswick High School, where room for distancing and parking make possible the continuation of this important source of and support for the produce of local farmers.)

Crystal Spring Farm is owned by the land trust, which runs the market and leases the majority of the remaining agricultural land long term to farmer Seth Kroeck and his family. The farm is its own fascination with a 200-year history of cultivation, but we are brook bound, and so it’s the Spring in the name we want to know, a bit.

The farm’s water rises from the aquifer that underlies its land. Perhaps it is the fine filtering of the glacial sands that lie in our subsurface, but there is local agreement that the aquifer’s waters are outstanding, in taste and purity. Some religions suggest that we all begin in such a state, welling from ground into being, all open to what’s around us. An initial stem of Mere Brook begins by rising from the same aquifer. Two other stems start and then join a little farther to the north, behind Thornton Oaks and near Matthews Road.

Visiting these Mere Brook headwaters takes some footwork, preceded by mapwork. I like both, and so, on an April day promising rain, with shoes on foot and map studied into mind, I set out to find and see our brook’s outset(s). I followed Richards Drive up its slight grade, while the brook ran audibly on my left. Near the Coffin School, I ducked behind the idle yellow busses and buildings and found a pocket woodland park through which the fledged brook meanders, and where its two initial stems join. But I couldn’t bust through to Baribeau Drive without trespassing, it seemed, and so I returned to roads and went up via Peary Drive.

Beyond Baribeau, I walked left and out to the Settlemire Community Gardens, slipped into the woods on the right and took a path that parallels for a little while a shallow depression. During this season, it reads as a succession of vernal pools, with slight flow evident between. No sign says, Brook Begins Here, no gush of water issues from the ground, but when I walked back along the depression southwest for some yards, I came upon Brook…as defined by water flow, by hints of banks and a bottom. Yes, a dry season may make this thin water vanish, but its course says, I’ll be back. Whenever water falls and rises enough.

I was, I realized, directly opposite the Labyrinth, a contemplative construct set in the woods and maintained by the Brunswick Topsham Land Trust, which also oversees the nearby Settlemire Gardens. That our urban brook gathers itself and sets out near a labyrinth seems apt. In its 5-mile trip to the sea, Mere Brook must navigate all manner of bafflement and blockage before it reaches Harpswell Cove. Which it does, and which, with our help from the just-begun planning task force and subsequent actions over the coming years, it may do better. (For more on this work, see December’s Your Land column, It’s (No) Mere Brook, published on 12/6/19); link: https://www.pressherald.com/2019/12/06/sandy-stott-its-no-mere-brook/

Even as I knew some of these waters come up from the aquifer below, it seemed false to say that Mere Brook rises; rather, in the trees and under last year’s leaves, this brook-to-be collects. If you would be a brook you must cup your lands, give the waters a place to gather. Once together, they know where to go.

And if you would see waters gather, I recommend this walk in the rain, with pauses to watch wherever the land shunts the water one way or another.

Sandy Stott is a Brunswick, Maine resident, chair of the town’s Conservation Commission, and a member of Brunswick Topsham Land Trust’s Board of Directors. He writes for a variety of publications. His recent book, Critical Hours — Search and Rescue in the White Mountains, was published by University Press of New England in April, 2018. He may be reached at fsandystott@gmail.com

Sandy Stott: It’s (no) Mere Brook

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