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By Cherrie Corey, the first education director of the New England Wild Flower Society and former executive director of Harvard's Museum of Cultural and Natural History. She now pursues her commitments to environmental and cultural preservation and personal development through her private consulting and mentoring practice. She can be reached at ccorey@ma.ultranet.com. |
...It is in vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves. There is none such. It is the bog in our brain and bowels, the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that dream...Consider how remote and novel that [Gowing's] swamp. Beneath it is a quaking bed of sphagnum, and in it grow Andromeda poligolia, Kalmia glauca, Menyanthes, Gaylussacia dumosa, Vaccinium oxycoccus, plants which scarcely a citizen of Concord ever sees. It would be as novel to them to stand there as in a conservatory, or in Greenland...
Henry David Thoreau -
August 30, 1856
The author balances on hummocks of roots and sphagnum moss as she forays to the heart of the bog last fall (click image for larger view). |
These words above were written by Thoreau after an initial visit to Gowing's Swamp, one of seven sphagnum bogs in Concord. How is it that bogs stir some of our deepest and most ancient passions and fears? In literature, oral traditions, science, and the media, bogs represent primordial beginnings, dark repositories of death and rebirth, landscapes of mystery and intrigue. And so it is with Gowing's Swamp. The lure that attracted Thoreau some 145 years ago, has continued to draw admirers and scholars ever since.
In Massachusetts, sphagnum bogs are ecologically unique and geographically isolated from the habitats they reflect far to our north. Gowing's Swamp (aka, Thoreau's Bog) is a classic, bowl-shaped, floating bog nestled in the hollow of a glaciated woodland. Its fragility is protected by concentric rings of defense -- first, a shrubby tangle of highbush blueberry and leatherleaf and, on the outer rim, the foreboding moat of a red maple swamp. The bog itself is an undulating carpet of luminous sphagnum moss gently supporting plant species that are characteristically northern, including black spruce, tamarack, leatherleaf, sheep and bog laurel, and bog rosemary along with more exotic cotton grass, red pitcher plant, and round-leaved sundew.
(click on images for larger view)
Thoreau was enchanted with this place and made detailed studies of its nature. He tested its depths, counted its inhabitants, speculated about its age, and reflected on its more universal purpose. Herbert W. Gleason recorded numerous images of the bog in the early 1900's. In 1969, the Massachusetts Audubon Society published Richard Eaton's updated view of the bog including additional plant species not mentioned in Thoreau's account.
Throughout the past thirty years, Thoreau's Bog has held particular interest for MIT Professor Harold Hemond and his students. The detailed findings of their hydrologic, chemical, and historical analysis, along with a summary of Thoreau's and Eaton's findings, and careful mapping enhances the scientific portrait of this gem of the Concord landscape and raises a provocative question. Dating of the peat layers suggests the bog is only 500 years young -- counter to previous scientific assumptions. From where then would the seeds of such remote, northern plant species originate, if not germinated from the residues of the receding glacier? Another bog mystery that invites further interest.
Last fall, I made a pilgrimage to the center of Gowing's Swamp -- my second in twenty years. In the '70's it was my desire as a field botanist that drew me; this time the experience was symbolic of a spiritual journey with familiar friends along the way. In the intervening years, it was my respect for it's fragility that held me to its shore. I've had a visceral attraction to northern bogs for much of my life and have communed with many over the years. When I moved to Concord twenty-five years ago and discovered Gowing's Swamp within minutes of my home, it felt serendipitous. More recently, I have wondered why.
(click on images for larger view)
View of Gowings Swamp from the woodland rim. |
A dense tangle of highbush blueberry, leatherleaf, swamp azalea and black huckleberry protects the bog within. |
Now I'm aware that my ancestors feel at home through me there -- northern Quebec Scottish and Cree -- and the landscape echoes an experience of coming back to origins and the unconscious depths of my soul. Standing on the mossy threshold between vessel and sky, there is a sense of peace, of coming to center -- stark and clear -- mixed with the trepidation of where next steps should be taken for all the dark water and mystery that lies beneath. I am grateful to share this reflection with my ancient neighbor -- bog and soul as one.
Concord's other most famous bog is now identified as the Nuclear Metals Superfund Site. Once home to the locally rare and powerfully medicinal shrub, Labrador tea, it is now receptacle for our most toxic of human waste. In this case, bog has become a projection of our refusal to accept the responsibility for all that we are. In the end, these fragile environments mirror the respect that we have for ourselves. Frequent glances in this mirror will have much to tell us.
References and Links:
- Angelo, Ray, Associate of Harvard University Herbaria; Curator of Vascular Plants of New England Botanical Club, NEBC Herbarium; and author of Concord Area Trees and Shrubs. personal communication, August 2001.
- Eaton, Richard J. "Gowing's Swamp" Massachusetts Audubon (Boston, MA: 1958). Vol. 53, no. 4 (June 1969).
- Eaton, Richard Jefferson. A Flora of Concord: an account of the flowering plants, ferns, and fern-allies known to have occurred without cultivation in Concord, Massachusetts from Thoreau's time to the present day. (Cambridge: Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University), 1974.
- H.F., Hemond, "Biogeochemistry of Thoreau's Bog, Concord, Massachusetts," Ecological Monographs 50 (1980), 507-526.
Examines the hydrology, geology, chemistry, and natural history of the bog that Thoreau knew as Gowing's Swamp.
- Robbins collection of Herbert Wendell Gleason photographic negatives of images taken between 1917-1920 of Concord, Mass. Special Collections, Concord Public Library.
- The Thoreau Homepage: Thoreau's Journals on-line, search for "gowing's swamp" for numerous entries.
- Beowulf and the Bog -- Biology/English Literature Curriculum. An innovative high school curriculum integrating the studies of bog ecology and the historical poem of Beowulf.
Photos: ©2001 Deborah Bier and Cherrie Corey
Background: Culprit Fey.
 
 
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