“But of what matter is a little water in one’s boots, when seeking the Garden of the God.”
— Grace Greylock Niles
While researching Australian plants on the shelves of the Forbes Library in Northampton, I noticed a black book with gold lettering on its spine, Bog-Trotting for Orchids. I immediately pulled it from the shelf, checked it out, and brought it home. It was a source of amazement and pleasure for many a cold winter day, a travelogue through wild places not far from our corner of New England. Botany is the central theme, but diversions into history, geology, and mythology provide a broad background into the native flora.
The author, a teacher and botanist, Grace Greylock Niles, was born in 1864 in Pownal, Vermont, just over the state line from Williamstown. (Her given middle name was Stoddard.) Bog-Trotting for Orchids, published in 1904, was her second book. Though written over a century ago, her vivid commentary about traveling by horse and buggy through the New England countryside feels familiar and captures the anticipation and exhilaration of plant discovery.
Bonny hitched to the old buggy, my faithful old Major at my side, and I, with my vasculum for rare flowers, a basket containing drinking glass, carving knife, and bog-hoe for gathering special roots, started down the hill on an easy trot toward Pownel Pond. As I passed School Fourteen, I was cheered and hailed by the children, who shouted, “Going a-flowering? I nodded “Yes” with a “Get-ty up” to old Bonny, who had thought I wished to visit along the way.
Lady’s slipper orchids, the Cypripedium, were the main quest in Grace’s bog-trotting. Orchid flowers are recognizable because one of their three petals is modified into a structure called the labellum. In lady’s-slipper orchids the labellum takes the form of a large inflated pouch. An early name for the lady’s-slipper orchid in Europe was Calceous marianus, the shoe of the Virgin Mary. When Linnaeus, a devout Lutheran, introduced his plant classification system, he removed any reference to Mary. The genus name, Cypripedium, is derived from the Greek Cypris (the island Cyprus where the goddess of love, Aphrodite, arose from the sea foam) and pedilon means shoe. Still, our common name is a contraction of “slipper of our lady.” The native Algonquin called the flowers mawcahsun or makkasin. Moccasin flower is the term Grace preferred to use.
Observations of other native orchids, the Pogonia and Habenaria, as well as ferns, pitcher plants, and mushrooms are as enthusiastic as those of the moccasin flowers. When Grace found a remarkable Polypores, a shelf mushroom, she commented, “A beautiful species of the Polypodes is worshipped by the natives in New Guinea. I also have found and worshipped several specimens of great beauty.” Old nicknames of plants are often used, lending poetic language to her writing. Our native Iris versicolor, is the fleur-de-lis; the mountain laurel is calico bush; and the pitcher plant has three descriptive sobriquets: St. Jacob’s dipper, side-saddle flowers, and dumb-watch flowers (the pitcher plant flower appears as a watch face with no hands).
When Grace Greylock Niles was trotting through the bogs, she traveled by horse and buggy. Today, we have easier and faster ways to get places. Two preserves are not far from Ashfield, the Hawely Bog and High Ledges. As my earlier column, “The Hawley Bog,” details, seven different orchid varieties can be observed near East Hawley Road, protected by the Nature Conservancy and Five Colleges, Inc. They are the smaller flowers of five different Habenaria, grass pinks, and the snakemouth pogonia. Among the other native plants are three varieties of laurel bushes, cranberries, cotton grass, pitcher plants, and sun dew. In the hills of Shelburne at High Ledges,
the nature reserve owned by the Massachusetts Audubon Society, twenty species of orchids and thirty of ferns, are among the native plants. Both the pink and yellow moccasin flowers so loved by Grace grow in the wooded areas of High Ledges.
Bog-Trotting for Orchids is a masterful, informative, and inspiring work of art. I will forever remember Grace Greylock Niles when I am hiking through our wild lands and appreciating the natural beauty.
“Sleeping at my feet lay those sphagnous bogs which had already yielded me so many rare flowers, and so much pleasure.” — Grace Greylock Niles
February, 2020