A brand new bog!

We’ve just put the finishing touches on our bog habitat after it went through an extensive renovation project.

Creating a replica of a natural bog is no small task, so we enlisted the help of Landscape Designers Matthew Brown and Sandra Cooke from Brackish Design Studio in Halifax to come up with a plan.

We knew that some plant material would have to be sacrificed along the way as it had become clear that our 20-year-old liner had failed and a new one needed to be installed. So, we called our friends at the Nova Scotia Community College for some help with propagation. A class of students in their second year of Horticulture and Landscape Technology took cuttings from our bog plants and grew them in their greenhouse over the winter.

We also knew that we’d need a good supply of sphagnum moss to plant back into the bog once the construction dust settled, so we took on the task of propagating some in our Wetland Research Greenhouse at the K.C. Irving Environmental Science Centre.

Once we had a plan in place and the plants taken care of, we hired a crew of landscape professionals to dig out our failing liner and replace it with a new one. Thanks to technology improvements in the last 20 years, we know this one will last!

We also installed a drain under the bog boardwalk to catch water and nutrient runoff from the adjacent woodlands to ensure that our new bog would stay low in nutrients just the way our native bog plants like it! This spring we completed the plantings and are very excited to watch our revitalized bog grow.