July 2026
Author: Phyllis Root
Photographer: Kelly Povo
It’s been twenty years this summer since we first set foot on the boardwalk into the Big Bog up by Waskish, Minnesota. I was working on a picture book that became One North Star, a counting book about some of Minnesota’s many habitats, and as I started doing research I learned that Minnesota has bogs. In fact, Minnesota’s peatlands are vast, the most of any state except Alaska. And I knew that to write about the bog I would need to go to the bog.
Kelly and I love taking road trips, so when I told her I was headed up to the Big Bog, she said, “I’ll come, too.” And we went.
The walk out on the mile-long Big Bog boardwalk took us into a landscape I had never experienced before. By the time we reached the end of the boardwalk I was in love with the bog and wanted to write a whole book about it. And Kelly had begun to take wildflower pictures, something new in her photography career. Eventually our mutual love of native wildflowers took us criss-crossing the state and creating a wildflower-chasing blog and two wildflower books.
So what could be better, twenty years later, than to head up to where it all started? When we arrived at Big Bog State Recreation Area at the camper cabin we had rented, we were worn out from the heat of the day and some serious wildflower chasing stops on our drive north. We agreed that we could better appreciate the bog and the boardwalk after a good night’s sleep and some excellent Mexican carry-out we had picked up in Bemidji.
We have always been crack-of-dawn risers, and the next morning we left early (but not before coffee, never before coffee) and drove the few miles north to the Big Bog Boardwalk. Would the magic still be there?
Yes.
As we made our way along the boardwalk, we compared what we remembered with what we were seeing. In our first wildflower book I wrote that it was one of the wildest places I had ever seen. It still is.
The tamarack and black spruce trees were still stunted, although they seemed to reach farther out into the bog along the boardwalk than we remembered. On our first trip, almost all the plants and flowers were new to us. This time we could name them — bog cranberry, wild calla lily, round-leaved sundew, leatherleaf, cottongrass — and we were able to figure out the difference between bog laurel gone to seed and bog rosemary gone to seed, something we had no clue about twenty years earlier. Near the end of the boardwalk purple pitcher plants poked their pinwheel flowers up above the many-colored mosses stretching out under an endless sky.
The biggest difference we noticed was that the bog seemed dryer than we remembered. Was this because of climate change? A dry year? Or simply that memories are chancy?
We have learned, in our wanderings, how places change. Habitats aren’t static. Flowers don’t always stay put, sometimes spreading, sometimes vanishing. Trees encroach when they can.
We have changed, too, although it’s hard to believe that we’ve changed twenty years’ worth. Surely we’re not really twenty years older? But we are, and we’re always grateful we can still be chasing flowers, in bogs or woodlands or prairies or along roadsides–wherever we find them. It’s good to come back after twenty years to a place that feels like the beginnings of our flower-chasing and find that the bog remains mysterious and vast and wild. It fills us with the same stillness, the same magic, the same otherness that we remembered.
I wonder what we’ll find when we come back twenty years from now.
We can’t wait to find out.
