Gowing’s Swamp

Concord naturalist and photographer Cherrie Corey, whose walking tour in Great Meadows I joined last month, also leads walks in Gowing’s Swamp, Concord’s only surviving peat bog, which she has helped to protect from development. The excerpt below is from a long and extraordinary entry in Thoreau’s Journal.

The person who had recently received a lucrative appointment to Liverpool, prompting Thoreau to go in search of the cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccus), was fellow author and Concord resident Nathaniel Hawthorne. Rupert’s Land refers to the region around Hudson’s Bay once owned by the Hudson’s Bay Trading Company. It includes all of Manitoba, most of Saskatchewan, parts of Alberta, Nunavut, Ontario, and Quebec, and a small area of the northern U.S. Cherrie has noted that Thoreau’s comparison of Gowing’s Swamp with Hudson’s Bay is not just metaphorical but reflects his understanding of the similarities of the terrain and flora.

August 30, 1856. Better for me, says my genius, to go cranberrying this afternoon for the Vaccinium Oxycoccus in Gowing’s Swamp, to get but a pocketful and learn its peculiar flavor, aye, and the flavor of Gowing’s Swamp and of life in New England, than to go consul to Liverpool and get I don’t know how many thousand dollars for it, with no such flavor…. I left my shoes and stockings on the bank far off and waded barelegged through rigid andromeda and other bushes a long way, to the soft open sphagnous centre of the swamp.

I found these cunning little cranberries lying high and dry on the firm uneven tops of the sphagnum, — their weak vine considerably on one side, — sparsely scattered about the drier edges of the swamp, or sometimes more thickly occupying some little valley a foot or two over, between two mountains of sphagnum. They were of two varieties, judging from the fruit. The one, apparently the ripest, colored most like the common cranberry but more scarlet, i.e. yellowish-green, blotched or checked with dark scarlet-red, commonly pear-shaped, or more bulged out in the middle, thickly and finely dark-spotted or peppered on yellowish-green or straw-colored or pearly ground, — almost exactly like the smilacina and convallaria berries now, except that they are a little larger and not so spherical, — and with a tinge of purple….

I seemed to have reached a new world, so wild a place that the very huckleberries grew hairy and were inedible. I feel as if I were in Rupert’s Land, and a slight cool but agreeable shudder comes over me, as if equally far away from human society. What’s the need of visiting far-off mountains and bogs, if a half-hour’s walk will carry me into such wildness and novelty? But why should not as wild plants grow here as in Berkshire, as in Labrador? Is Nature so easily tamed? Is she not as primitive and vigorous here as anywhere? How does this particular acre of secluded, unfrequented, useless (?) quaking bog differ from an acre in Labrador?… 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. I shall never find in the wilds of Labrador any greater wildness than in some recess in Concord, i.e. than I import into it…

Consider how remote and novel that swamp. Beneath it is a quaking bed of sphagnum, and in it grow Andromeda Polifolia, Kalmia glauca, menyanthes (or buck-bean), 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.

Photo of Andromeda polifolia is by KingsbraeGarden at Flickr.