While working on a lecture concerning conservation for a garden club, I had occasion to consider soil types.  For many people in suburbia, the history of the ground has little reason to intrude upon their conscious.  The North American appetite for the bulldozer means that most house lots created after 1950 have been regraded with topsoil taken away and/or added.*  This tends to create a uniform surface, the whole lot is one type of soil.**

However, Esperanza has generally lacked in the bulldozer department and it also happens to have a rather large lot and a fairly complex history.  This history is recorded in the soil and does not vanish.  The soil is predominantely a heavy clay till with a good scattering of rocks.  However, there are other pockets. The old abandoned road-bed is a compacted sand/gravel mix, well draining and low in organic material, despite the surrounding area growing up to trees this road-bed remains open. On the other hand the two old tennis court areas demonstrate very different tendencies. The most recent one is a fast draining sand/clay mound created artificially and abandoned circa 1930, that has happily regrown as pine trees.  But the early one was a packed clay court, probably created simply by rolling the native clay, and it reverted to Norway maples and multiflora rose, both invasive species capable of dealing with that type of compacted clay.  It continues to be a difficult area to grow plants on, despite over a century of organic material having been laid down.  Elsewhere, the less disturbed soils tend to revert to oak and birch, with cherry, red maple, and cucumber magnolia also appearing.

And then in the hayfield…the two ploughed sections, the horse’s paths, they will probably continue to show up on Google Earth’s imagery for decades.

 

*yes, I actually saw one house lot where the builders took away the soil, and the house-owner later (no doubt at great cost) re-imported soil.  Someone’s genuis at work there.

**For those of us with a bent towards archeology, it is also somewhat worrisome: one bulldozer can, in a matter of minutes, remove thousands of years of stratigraphy, leaving one with a blank slate, no doubt appropriate for today’s culture.