The Northern Thrust

While the higher elevations of the Appalachian Mountains commonly feature floral extensions of the great northern forests as far south as Georgia, what most people do not realize is that remnants of great bogs can be found even at lower elevations as far south as parts of Ohio and Indiana.  The inhospitable conditions of a  bog, along with occasional cool groundwater seepages, means that our hardier northern friends are often the only plants that can thrive.  While more southerly trees and flowers might make it even to the edge of the peat, they are forced to yield to the true survivors.  Such is the scene captured below, in a rather damp, nearly bog-like place between two lakes around Cement City, Michigan.

Taken from Hallson's Gardens which neighbors the wetland.   

The large conifers sticking out of the wetlands are tamaracks (Larix Laricina), northern trees which grow all the way to the Arctic Treeline and find their climactic southern limit not far from here in extreme northern Indiana and Ohio, with, of course, the exception of higher ground in the Appalachians.  Southern Michigan is where a few more northern sentinels start to pop up, including spruce, pines, birches, and northern willows.  Like so many native plants that could otherwise be seen as the delightful blessing that they are at the edge of their range, diversifying an otherwise familiar landscape, these trees are often dismissed as scrub and uninteresting, and are often consigned to a fate of being chopped down as their wet ground is drained away to make room for a far less interesting condo development or mini-mall.  

Granted, your author is a bit passionate about having something boreal practically in his backyard.  To me, it is what makes the western Great Lakes region so interesting: we can have a tallgrass prairie a stone's throw from a boreal bog, again only a walk away from towering forest of maples, beech, oaks, hickories, and more.  Let's just say that nature makes our housing developments look mundane, what with nothing but mile after mile of carefully chopped lawn grass and manicured trees serving as green background rather than a reminder of how we can still dominate a planet that we can keep largely natural.