Bogged Down in Andover, and Loving Every Minute of It

On Saturday morning, I discovered just how much I still have to learn about horticulture. And the gaps in my knowledge of glaciation. And, even of apples. And I had fun doing it.

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The Trustees of Reservations has more than 120 properties under its care. Those properties encompass nearly 29,000 acres in Massachusetts. Until Saturday, I was unaware of the existence of the Charles W. Ward Reservation. It is more than a square mile (729 acres to be exact) spread out across the towns of Andover and North Andover, some 30 miles north of Boston.

I was invited by Grow Native Massachusetts, about which I have written previously) to be part of their annual ‘Ramble’. Fifteen hardy souls with hiking shoes gathered outside a house on a hilltop – excuse me, a drumlin – to explore a nearby rare quaking bog.

That's Boston in the distance

The first thing I noticed was the view. A drumlin, for the uninitiated, is a glacial deposit. As the Ice Age passed its peak 11,000 years ago, rock-laden glaciers – once a mile thick - retreated north from the coast of what would become Massachusetts. Occasionally, part of a glacier would melt, leaving behind a pile of stones collected centuries earlier. One of those deposits became a 300-foot-high hill. Looking south, I had a clear view of Boston’s skyline, with seemingly only a forest between where I was standing and the city. The vista will stay in my mind for a long time.

A boardwalk through the bog

There are 13 miles of trails on the Reservation, but our specific destination was a hundred or so feet below us: a quaking bog in a kettle hole. Translation: as glaciers retreated, they also scraped the ground bare. Occasionally, they left a large, saucer-shaped stone depression called a kettle hole. Rain would fill the kettle hole to a maximum depth of a few feet and, at its fringes, vegetation would establish itself. Over the centuries, the vegetation would gradually grow deeper into the kettle hole, putting down an advancing layer of sediment in the form of rotted leaves and such. But with no outlet for water, the oxygen in the water became depleted and, where there is no oxygen, the sediment never breaks down; it just accumulates and solidifies – sort of.

One of our guides, in orange,
identifies bag-specific plants

The result is a bog. On top, there are trees, shrubs, ferns, moss (lots of moss), and ground covers. It is all quite dense and beautiful to look at. But stepping on it is a bad idea. What looks solid on top is largely an illusion. To that end, Trustees of Reservations built a winding boardwalk through the bog. Two experts – volunteers from the Trustees – led us deeper into the bog and identified the highly specialized plants that had learned to thrive in this most unusual of environments. I managed to confidently mis-identify more than a dozen plants and shrubs before I learned to listen rather than speak.

The ‘quaking’ part of the bog came as we approached its center: to Pine Hole Pond, an acre-sized pool of open water that remained un-colonized. Here, driving footers into the bog was pointless: there was nothing solid below the vegetation. So, everything floated, even though we were ostensibly amid dense vegetation. 

Pine Hole Pond, the last 'uncolonized' 
part of the bog

I managed to keep my footing, but there is something quite disturbing about feeling the ground under your feet ‘quake’ as you walk.

One of our guides, who has lived in the area most of his life, related the extent to which the bog pond is shrinking. He opined that it will disappear in a few decades. A warming climate emboldens species to grow more aggressively. More than 90% of the pond has been ‘colonized’ over the centuries. Pulling out vegetation might delay the inevitable, but not change the outcome.

We returned to the hilltop to enjoy the view and to discuss among ourselves what we had learned.

Our luncheon spot atop a drumlin;
a beautiful space forever preserved.

At the same time, I was curious how more than a square mile of prime land had managed never to be developed. Our guide provided the answer. A wealthy colonist, Nicholas Holt, purchased much of the land in the early 18^th Century as a means of escaping the overly religious environment of Andover. Generations of his family farmed the site, leaving behind one of the most intact system of stone walls in the region. In the nineteen-teens, the Ward family acquired the estate; then about 500 acres. They were dedicated naturalists who sought to preserve the land and keep it in trust.

The first parcels were conveyed to Trustees of Reservations in 1940 with the death of Charles Ward. His family continued to gift additional parcels for the next 50 years, and Trustees purchased additional land to ‘fill in’ the Reservation. As the accompanying map shows, it is a remarkable achievement to have conserved such a large site so close to a major city.

Oh, and as to the apples, both the Holt and the Ward families had extensive apple orchards on the property. In the past decade, Trustees has sought to honor that legacy by planting small orchards. The apple variety chosen was the Baldwin, which was first identified in the Merrimack Valley in the 1850s. A few of the century-plus-old Baldwin trees are still producing. I confidently identified the apple as a Macintosh. I was gently corrected.