For peat's sake

A bog can store 10 times more carbon than a forest; calling a halt to the use of peat-based products in horticulture is long overdue

- Mark Griffiths

I’VE always had a soft spot for bogs. Some of the happiest days of my childhood were spent exploring the Gower Peninsula’s mires and marshes. They gave me my first intimations of the fittedness, the supreme specialisation and intricate interrelationships of ecosystems— their denizens the sundews and orchids were my earliest lessons in the marvels of adaptation. Their sphagnum substrate was no less of a wonder.

‘Blanket bog’ this habitat is called, although its wobble put me more in mind of the waterbed owned by a friend’s racy parents. On a visit to the Swansea Museum, I learnt that, yes, the moss was not merely a covering, but the landscape’s very body; that, down the ages, the same strands of sphagnum had grown at one end and decayed at the other to form a deep seam of peat.

We speak reverently of ‘ancient woodlands’, meaning that the trees date from 1600 or earlier, but bogs are millennia in the making. Unlike trees, they don’t proclaim their growth and age. On the surface, they appear to be time stood still. The peat beneath, however, is the chronicle of aeons.