Imagine stepping into a world of eternal twilight and deep silence where the earth is not quite firm and carnivorous plants lurk on iridescent green ground. It’s as if you’ve entered a zone beyond recorded time. Such a place is not far. Welcome to Black Spruce Bog in Cornwall’s Mohawk State Forest.
More common to our north in colder areas, bogs are rare in Connecticut, found mostly in the state’s northwest. Acidic wetlands with precipitation the sole source of water, bogs are nutrient poor and dominated by sphagnum mosses that accumulate as peat rather than decompose. Able to hold water fifteen to twenty times its weight, peat moss is used as a soil amendment by gardeners, the closest most of us get to a bog. Often called “quaking” bogs, a mat of vegetation generally grows over water, causing surface undulations when stepped upon, like a waterbed.
Sensing deep time in an older, forested bog like Black Spruce is fitting since it began as a meltwater-filled glacial depression hosting among the first plants when ice retreated about 10,000 years ago. As is typical, vegetation began filling the edges, growing toward the center until the water’s surface was completely covered. In a bog’s long life, pond edges are colonized by acid-loving herbaceous plants
Although bogs contain fewer plant species than “an average city vacant lot,” according to a Sierra Club naturalist’s guide, intriguing insectivorous vegetation more than makes up for lack of variety. Vase-like pitcher plants are several inches tall, threaded with reddish purple veins and half filled with water. The opening’s flaring lips are lined with downward pointing bristles trapping insects that then drown in
Not all bogs are alike. While the Black Spruce Bog is a bit gloomy under a thick tree canopy, much of Beckley Bog in Norfolk, a National Natural Landmark owned by The Nature Conservancy, has a shrubby mat that in midsummer shines golden in the sun with a slightly reddish cast against a background of somber spruce. Bogs and habitats with bog-like characteristics (called peatlands) exist in Salisbury, Bethany, Litchfield, Chester, Windham and elsewhere. Many are primeval, but new boggy areas are being formed in places like beaver ponds. They are often inaccessible, sometimes dangerous. In addition to unusual ecological characteristics, they share a profound dissimilarity with the places we experience daily.
Mediating between solid ground and water, bogs are peculiar, inscrutable environments that sometimes feel creepy. Often mind bogglingly ancient, they are
Bogs are also enchanting, magical feeling. They evoke storybook fairies and sprites as my wife Mary, a children’s room librarian, is wont to point out while we stand in the dimly lit, virescent silence of Black Spruce.
Valuable for their beauty, scientific interest, and natural functions, a bog’s fragile otherness has even greater virtue. In a world increasingly regularized and homogeneous, we need these tiny islands of mystery to feed our creativity with refreshing contrast to the spaces we inhabit daily. Merely knowing such spots exist can be inspiring. But by visiting, we open ourselves to deep awe connecting contemporary experience in some small way to the worldview of earliest peoples. Without fear of getting “bogged down,” here we step beyond the ordinary.
