The Bog Blog

One of the most thilling placements of the Moore exhibition is Oval with Points. Positioned high atop a pedestal, the dark, massive form constrasts powerfully against the city skyline, framing portions of the borrowed landscape inside its central void. The vivid flowers and bizzarre plant forms of the Bog Garden rise up all around it. Most of our visitors have never seen, or even imagined, the colors and shapes of Southeastern pitcher plants and their flowers.

Dr. Jenny Cruse-Sanders, Director of Conservation and Research and this week's guest blog contributor, regularly visits native bog gardens like the one you'll see at the Garden to help develop sustainable habitats. Here's what Dr. Jenny's been up to lately...

Over the Memorial Day Holiday I took to the road like most Americans for a fieldtrip. I travelled to the panhandle of Florida to meet my colleagues from the Florida Park Service and University of Florida at Torreya State Park, just south of Chattahoochee, Florida. We were planning to conduct two days of field research to track down the critically endangered Florida Torreya (Torreya taxifolia), a coniferous tree (a tree that produces cones, rather than flowers) predicted to be headed for extinction in the next few decades. Through our research we are working to map the additional populations, identify the disease that is killing the trees, and bring additional genotypes into our ex situ (outside of the habitat) collection at the Garden for safe keeping. We hiked through a beautiful stand of forest that is an odd mixture of plants that you might expect to see in the Appalachian Mountains. In these ravines on the eastern side of the Apalachicola River it is not unusual to see a large Tulip poplar (Liriodendron tulipifera) growing right next to a Needle Palm (Rapidophyllum hystrix). During the trip, I took some time to drive to the Apalachicola National Forest just south of Torreya State Park. This is one of my most favorite places on Earth! Just a few miles south of Bristol, Florida are the large expanses of flat woodlands with a tall canopy of Longleaf Pine (Pinus palustris) and an understory of wiregrass (Aristida sp.) that used to extend across the Southeastern United States. It is deceptively simple in appearance, but it holds one of the most diverse communities of plants in North America. As I approached the forest, I drove slowly, helping several turtles reach their destinations on the eastern side of the road. Heading south along a long flat road in the general direction of the Gulf of Mexico I scanned the grassy woodland and wetlands for the distinctive yellow-green pitchers of the Yellow Pitcher Plant (Sarracenia flava). Once spotted, I sloshed out into the wet ditches in my sandals to peer into pitchers, poke orchid fruits, finger the rough leaves of sunflowers, and photograph the gorgeous sedges in full bloom. These pitcher plant bogs are special places that are nutrient poor, sandy, acidic, and wet from a perched water table in the flat woodlands. The pitcher plants and their companions are only found in areas where these habitat conditions are right. As the sun was setting, I walked back to my car with my notebook, camera and only a few fire ant bites on the bottoms of my feet.
Upon my return to Atlanta, I went to our bog garden to compare the plants in bloom with what I’d seen in the Florida bogs. In the center of the Atlanta Botanical Garden’s bog is Henry Moore’s Oval with Points (1968-70). Massive and also deceptively simple, it rises out of the bog and frames the midtown Atlanta skyline. Moore’s piece was inspired by an elephant skull, native to a habitat vastly different than the one that now hosts this piece. Moore’s piece is huge and seemingly unchanging; it does remind me of the soft rounded forms of an elephant’s torso with two sharp points like tusks in the center. Although the piece appears immutable, its surroundings are ever changing. Day to day the Atlanta skyline is misty, rainy (often this spring), or lit up by the late afternoon sun. The bog below Oval with Points changes weekly and will continue to do so throughout the year.
Before the piece was installed we burned our bog (with permission) because pitcher plant bogs are naturally fire maintained. (Click here for a video of the burn: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdaVU8VOKg4&feature=related). The burn mimicked a natural process in pitcher plant bogs and ensured the health of our community of special bog plants. By the time the Oval with Points was installed the bog had already recovered, and pitcherplants, orchids, sedges, and Baptisia had sent up new green shoots. Over the past few weeks, the yellow pitcher plants and white-topped pitcher (Sarracenia oreophila) plants have been putting on a show; first with their large leaves shaped like pitchers to catch insects, and then with their flowers displayed like up-side-down umbrellas. Pitcher plant flowers are uniquely designed to encourage bees carrying pollen to enter one way and allow those same bees carrying new pollen to leave a different way under a petal, therefore promoting cross pollination among flowers. This week the orchid, Tuberose grasspink (Calopogon tuberosus), is lighting up the bog. This sun-loving orchid is terrestrial (rooted in the soil) and native to Georgia.
The Atlanta Botanical Garden has recreated the special growing conditions of a pitcher plant bog to display these unusual native plants. The bog around Oval with Points will continue to change in appearance with each new species that develops and blooms over the year. Henry Moore is quoted as saying that “the observation of nature is a crucial part of an artist’s life.” I hope that the Garden visitors will return often to observe Moore’s piece as the native garden around it changes during the exhibit.