Pondering Mill Brook

Everyone has an opinion when it comes to managing a stream bank.

The Mill Brook, which runs along Chester Avenue, then between some dykes where horses and cattle graze and, finally, falls into the Cornwallis River; has been subject to many of them over the past century or so.

The stream was straightened, according to folklore, to encourage the water to flow with more power for the mill. Some sharp bends remain where the Mill winds through The Flat on its way to the Cornwallis, with no trace I can find that ever a mill was there.

The man who sold us our house on the Mill Brook told us, when he was a child, he could run out the back door and splash into the water. He believed building the wall which now edges the brook along our stretch of the bank was a big mistake: the rush of water around the stones seemed to be lowering the stream bed every year. At low tide, there’s a drop of about 10 feet from the top of the wall to the water. A child could only run out to splash into the water if he or she were on stilts!

Three years ago, the wall lining the brook in back of our house was repaired. It had sagged away from the bank and was ready to tumble into the water. The wall, I was told, was built from cement slabs which had been lifted from the sidewalks, removed to make way for the brick paving in Centre Square. The renewed wall had been piled higher than before and topsoil filled in behind it on the land side.

Friends with connections to the geology department at Acadia and an ever-changing brook chuckling along their own property line told me such a wall was a mistake. They claim all the research done over the past few decades shows the healthiest, most stable stream banks are those knit together with the roots of trees and shrubs.

The reports of these studies are full of technical details and hard for an ordinary landowner to understand. The current state of the wall, though, seems to agree with what my friends tell me: at each side of the property, a maple grows. From the opposite bank of the brook, it is plain to see the roots of the maples are supporting the wall. Between the trees, and after only three years, the wall dips down like a stretched out clothesline.

Across the brook, a tangle of floribunda, blackberry and milkweed casts a net over the gently sloping bank, with living greenery sweeping into the water below the tide line. One neighbour is annoyed at this, complaining the powers that should be overseeing the neatening up of this jumble are falling down on the job.

As for me and my house? We’re letting the wild come back to the stream bank, counting on the living roots to do what a man-made wall cannot.