Vegetation
The bog is a wetland woods. In the 1960s, there was still a noticeable open bog. This has effectively closed. The woods is dominated by Red maple and Yellow birch. There are tamarack, Paper birch, and White pine, which together only reach numbers equal to the Red maple and Yellow birch separately. Immature trees exist in all the lower layers of the woods with the Red maple and Yellow birch still dominating.
The Shrub layer is along the bog’s edge and fills the center area of the bog. Dominant here are spicebush and poison sumac. The predominance of poison sumac makes access to the bog very difficult. Additionally, there are quantities of witch hazel, red osier, grape and blackberry.
At ground level, the herb layer includes columbine, boneset, jewel weed, nettle, twinberry, May apple, hispid greenbrier, meadow rue, narrow-leaved cattail and grape.
Orchids are becoming increasingly more common as restoration work has been going on putting orchids back in their natural habitat. Purple pitcher plant (Sarracenia purpurea), while once common, has been poached from the area and no longer occurs.
Read more about this topic: Cowles Bog
Famous quotes containing the word vegetation:
“When the ground was partially bare of snow, and a few warm days had dried its surface somewhat, it was pleasant to compare the first tender signs of the infant year just peeping forth with the stately beauty of the withered vegetation which had withstood the winter ... decent weeds, at least, which widowed Nature wears.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood.... What a perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature. What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in the midst of our decay, like the poke!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage, but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)