9 km. Bog’s Smaller Plants – Terry Thormin

I went to 9 km. Bog yesterday with the local botany group, part of Comox Valley Nature. The bog is right at the 9 km. point on the road up to Mount Washington and is at an elevation of about 800 meters. This is a beautiful little bog that is a favorite location for me, mostly because of the dragonflies, but also because it has many unusual and showy species of plants.

On this trip however we were exploring the bog fairly early in the season and many of the more spectacular flowers were not in bloom as yet. But with a couple of very good amateur botanists along we were finding some of the smaller and less showy plants that can still make great photos. I have selected four plants that I thought made quite attractive photos. The first is a deer fern, Blechnum picant. I’ve wanted to photograph this fern for quite some time, but I have never found a plant that I could isolate enough from the background to make it stand out. On this occasion though I decided to photograph a single fiddlehead. One of the neat things about this fern is that there are two types of fronds, sterile fronds that are often in a whorl close to the ground and fertile fronds that stick straight up from the middle of the plant. This photo is of a single fertile frond as it is just unfolding.

The next plant is the seed head of the leather-leaved saxifrage, Leptarrhena pyrolifoli. This is one of the earliest bloomers in the bog, and we were too late to see it in flower. I have never seen this plant in flower, but my botanist friends informed me that it is more impressive when it is in seed anyway.

The next two plants are both sedges. I tend to overlook sedges for the most part, first because they are generally not very impressive, and second, because it takes an expert to identify them. Fortunately we had an expert with us and we were able to identify several species of sedges. The first one is the few-flowered sedge, Carex pauciflora, a tiny little sedge that is easily overlooked but was quite abundant in the bog although it is rather uncommon in the valley. To get this photo I had to pick three stems and stick them in a crack in a log to isolate them from the background.

The final plant, and the second sedge is the many-flowered sedge, Carex pluriflora. Although quite small and easily overlooked, I think it is a very pretty sedge and makes a great photo. This one was easily photographed in situ.

I have set myself the task of photographing as many species of plants as I can from Vancouver Island, and this trip added a few. I have largely ignored the sedges so it was nice to be able to get photos of a couple of species the could be identified.