Relatively soon after I moved to the Pioneer Valley, my father gifted me a membership to the Trustees of Reservations and encouraged me to visit Bartholomew’s Cobble. It’s a bit of drive, in the extreme south-west corner of the state. But it’s an amazing place with the highest plant diversity of any site in New England. This spring, I visited again to see the spring wildflowers.
A friend and I made a road trip out of the adventure. We masked up (due to my health issues) and drove on back roads so we could keep the windows down. We drove first to Westfield and stopped at Skyline Trading Company for lunch. Then we took a new (to me) route through the back roads, criss-crossing over the Connecticut border to get there.
I’ve always been fascinated by plants. As a child, I frequently went with my father to natural areas where he introduced me to plant identification. As an undergraduate, I took a lot of botany classes: plant morphology and structure, spring flora, and plant systematics. And, as a graduate student, I studied wetlands hydrology, for which plant identification was essential.
Bartholomew’s Cobble is a promontory of quartzite and marble situated by a bend of the Housatonic river. This creates four distinct zones: cool dry, cool wet, warm wet, and warm dry. Plus the marble limestone, relatively rare in Massachusetts, creates regions with higher pH which adds to the range of available microhabitats. This produces the high plant diversity at the site.
We arrived in mid afternoon and, after paying the admission fee, set out walking. There are several trails through the reservation, but the one I always take is the half-mile Ledges trail. It simply follows a route around the promontory and takes you through each of the habitats. You start at the cool-dry quadrant, then pass into the cool-wet segment along the river, then turn west into the warm-wet, then warm-dry, and then finally return to the parking area.
The progression of spring wildflowers was markedly different between the cool and warm sides. In the cooler areas, spring had only just started to arrive. There weren’t many flowers or fiddleheads. But mosses, lichens, and older growth were apparent. The warmer sides had many of the classic early spring wildflowers: triliums, dutchman’s breeches, trout lilies, spring beauties, etc., etc. It was lovely.
My friend is a molecular biologist who was intrigued by the variety of plants. Like me, he teaches the writing class at the University. He was fascinated by the number and variety of plants and began thinking about adapting his version of the course to have students look at plant diversity in the fall. It’s a lot easier than it used to be.
I spent years and years studying plant identification. Nowadays, I find that although I can still recognize a lot of familiar plants, there are vastly more I never learned. I even wrote a haiku (published in Ideoj Ĝermas) about the experience of seeing the plants that bloom after your spring flora class is over.
Also identifications have changed. A lot of the nomenclature I learned has been replaced, as molecular systematics has reorganized the phylogeny of plants.
Nowadays, you don’t need to learn plant identification at all. People can use apps to identify plants. I’ve used LeafSnap and, more recently, iNaturalist, that also keeps a record of plants you’ve observed and has experts that help confirm identifications. This can allow students — even with little experience with plant diversity — to make observations about plant species and distribution.
I’ve visited Bartholomew’s Cobble perhaps five times over the past thirty years. Maybe someday, I’ll walk some of the other trails.
