Geology is destiny, and geology
is a product of time plus luck. I failed
to absorb that lesson back in college, but it was finally made clear when I was
recently part of a group taking a hike through the Myles Standish State Forest.
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| 12,000 years ago, Massachusetts was under a mile's thickness of ice. Double-click for a full-screen slideshow |
It took until the later half of
the 19th Century for scientists to understand the role of ice-age
glaciation. Until that time, ‘Noah’s
Flood’ (I promise I am not making this up) was the accepted source for the
creation of everything from the Great Lakes to Cape Cod. The notion that the top half of North America
was under more than a mile of ice was something we humans couldn’t wrap our
minds around.
Glaciers, we gradually came to
understand, advanced and ebbed over tens of thousands of years, finally
retreating to the poles and high mountains about 11,000 years ago. It was a messy business. Acting as hundred-mile-wide bulldozers,
glaciers pushed debris out in front of them, forming moraines when the sheet of
ice reversed course. Cape Cod is
visible evidence of that final push, as is Long Island. The glaciers’ retreat was quite uneven, with
glacial remnants settling into low areas scraped out when the ice advanced
hundreds or thousands of years earlier.
We call those pockets ‘kettles.’
If they have water, they’re ‘kettle ponds.’
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| Myles Standish State Forest survived as a native plant habitat because the land was unsuitable for crops. |
The inland part of Southeastern
Massachusetts got the fuzzy end of the glacial lollipop. Instead of dumping rocks and silt to break down into soil to support
vegetation, the glaciers retreating from the area that is now Myles Standish
State Forest left behind sand dozens of feet deep, plus more than its quota of kettle
holes, where frost could be found 11 months of the year.
Which is all to say it was
rotten farmland. Settlers came, planted,
saw their crops wither for lack of nutrition (sand is notably lacking in nutrients)
and water (which just perked down to the aquifer in minutes), and left for greener
pastures. As a result of this benign neglect, the
area is a near-perfect repository of the plants that would have been
encountered when the first Europeans arrived.
It was pine forest plus scrubby vegetation in 1616, and so it was when
the state forest was created 300 years later.
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| Bryan Connolly, left, provides an introduction to the Pine Barrens |
That near-pristine provenance is why I was part of a
groups of about 15 amateurs and two experts walking fire trails through the
forest – technically called the pine barrens – on a Saturday morning. Our leaders were Bryan Connolly and Meredith
Gallogly. Bryan has many titles. One of them is Assistant Professor at Framingham State University (sadly, being a full-time native plant naturalist requires multiple
part-time gigs).
He is also one of the
authors of ‘The Yellow Book’; an exhaustive index by region of plants native to
the Commonwealth. Meredith has the good
fortune to be the Manager of Programs for an organization called Grow Native
Massachusetts, more about which in a moment.
She is one of the group’s two employees.
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| This kettle, about seven acres in size, has frost 11 months of the year |
We, the amateurs, walked and
tried to keep up – physically and intellectually – with our two professionals
who spoke largely in Latin binomials. We
started with the overview: Myles Standish State Forest encompasses 12,400 acres (19 square miles) of pine barrens; the third largest such preserve in the world. Apart from some ill-conceived efforts to
plant ‘useful’ (read: commercially harvestable) red pines by the Works Progress
Administration in the 1930s, the land is as it was when the Wampanoag were its
residents. The red pines, incidentally, have
almost all vanished, leaving behind the native pitch pine that somehow finds
sustenance in the sand. We learned the
pines need to burn periodically to reproduce, and forest managers periodically
burn areas of the barrens to ensure the next generation of trees.
The really good stuff, though,
was underfoot. What might appear to the
uninitiated as ‘weeds’ and ‘brush’ was instead a Noah’s Ark of native plants
plus a few uninvited interlopers. A few
plants were easy to identify, like native blueberries and dewberries (a cousin to
blackberries). Otherwise, we were like a
gaggle of kids, pointing to plants and saying ‘What’s this?’
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| A rest stop along the walk. Meredith Gallogy in the red hat, looks up an unidentified plant |
We learned to identify white dogbane
(Apocymum cannabinum) by its delicate pink flower, and tiny
sickle-leaved golden asters (Pityopsis falcata). We found lots of miniature Baptisia and even a
clutch of mayflower (Epigaea repens), Massachusetts’ state flower.
And it wasn’t all ground
covers. The forest hosts large stands of
Kalmia latifolia, the native rhododendron or mountain laurel, and sweet
pepperbush (Clethra alnifolia).
They’re especially lush around the kettle ponds. Over two hours, we learned a lot of botany.
Which brings me to the real
reason for this blog entry. An old
friend, sadly now deceased, accumulated enough money that organizations used to
come calling asking for donations. To each one, my friend would ask one
question: if your organization did not already exist, why would it be started
today?
The question flummoxed many
visitors because, truth be told, their missions overlapped those of dozens of
other organizations. Other non-profits
had long outlived their purpose and continued on because of they were ‘brand name’
charities. He gave to those that passed
his litmus test of knowing why they were in existence, and why what they were
doing was unique.
Grow Native Massachusetts is
such an organization. It is now ten
years old and came into being at a time when ‘native plants’ was a marketing
phrase used by the landscaping industry to foist off things that stretched the
definition of ‘native’ beyond the snapping point. Grow Native Massachusetts has the most comprehensive
website on the subject of any I have
seen, puts on seminars (especially Evenings with Experts but also smaller
events like the one of which I was a part).
In this season of giving, it is well worth supporting.
