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Misunderstood Asters: A conversation with Horticulturist Deb Munson
August has come and gone at last, the kids are back at school, and the forest floor is blanketed in white. While recent weather patterns have made anything seem possible, this is not the result of a historic Labor Day blizzard, but rather the on-schedule flowering of Eurybia divaricata, or, as it is commonly known, the white wood aster.
Expert horticulturalist, native plants advocate, and close GMF neighbor Deborah (Deb) Munson advises homeowners who see that snowy carpet abutting their yards at the forest’s edge to welcome the asters. They bring a host of late-season benefits to the garden and broader ecosystem alike.
“I think asters are very misunderstood,” said Deb in a recent interview, “which is unfortunate because they’re one of the greatest plants for pollinators and caterpillars,” second only in caterpillar hosting to fellow autumn-flowering goldenrod. The white wood aster is among the first of the New World asters to bloom in late August, and it has already brightened the dry and shady corners of Northwest Connecticut’s yards and woodlands.
If you’ve glanced out from your kitchen window in the past week, taken a recent stroll on one of GMF’s trails, or paid a long-weekend visit to your garden, chances are you’ve seen these late bloomers thriving under dappled sunlight, their individual stems mingling with their neighbors to create a veritable stronghold of delicate white blossoms.
The white wood aster’s ability to cover ground so extensively can alarm home gardeners and yard keepers who may find them to be “messy and weedy,” Deb said, but she assured that they provide a wealth of services.
That ability to provide a herbaceous groundcover is actually one of the aster’s greatest assets, she explained. “I believe in plants sort of being their own mulch,” Deb said, and the white wood aster can provide a perfect “carpet” in shadier portions of one’s garden or at the fringe where the yard meets the forest. She explained they flourish in the “ecotone” area at the woodland edge, or under a canopy that provides dappled shade.
Letting the garden, yard, or woodland mulch itself with understory plants and autumn leaf fall keeps the ecosystem contained, protecting against diseases or invasive species that could be brought in by an external material. Plus, it’s cost effective: “you pay people to take your debris away, and then you pay them to bring in mulch.” Deb suggested it’s cheaper, simpler, and safer to let the plants do the heavy lifting for you.
Plus, they’re self-sufficient. As they self-sow and are generally hardy, they require little maintenance. In Deb’s words: “They’re pretty carefree.”
Deb pointed out that like many other native fall-blooming wildflowers, they are drought-tolerant, unlike lots of non-native species that are sold at garden centers: “Native plants are adapted to our region, and they have more resiliency… I feel like it’s pretty dry right now, but it doesn’t seem like the asters are skipping a beat.” As erratic weather patterns, including droughts, persist, species that are able to withstand dry weather will continue to provide vital ecosystem functions and also, in the case of garden and yard populations, save water for homeowners.
Photo by Alec Linden
And finally, aesthetics matter – as Deb put it, “they’re beautiful.” Since they are plants that flower in autumn, their comparatively humble springtime appearance of green, serrated foliage may entice many gardeners to pull them prematurely, unaware of the decorative potential in just a few months when the most glamorous spring ephemerals have long since shed their petals. Their good looks serve an ecological purpose too, bringing in bees, butterflies, and other late-season pollinators whose options for a meal are dwindling.
“If you’re not too tidy and antiseptic about your woodland edges, you could have an amazing display of asters and goldenrod,” Deb said, among other misunderstood yard-dwellers such as white snakeroot (Ageratina altissima). “I look out on my woodland edge, right off my porch, and I’m looking at goldenrod and aster divaricata (Eurybia divaricata), the white wood aster, and there’s Symphyotrichum cordifolium there.”
Deb advised the curious to keep their eyes peeled for a number of other fall flowering perennials just starting to show their colors: the deep purple New England Aster (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae), the flat-topped aster (Doellingeria umbellata), and the smooth aster (Symphyotrichum laeve), in addition to many others.
Deb said that she feels American landscaping aesthetics have erred too far in the direction of the sterile, and that she encourages homeowners and land managers in the Northwest Corner to embrace a “wilder” sensibility in their gardens and properties. Not only does welcoming fall wildflowers bring a jolt of color to one’s yard as the days ruthlessly shorten, but it establishes a communion between the home and the broader ecosystem that has largely eroded in much of modern Western life.
“I think learning your land is an important thing to do,” Deb said, and she has the resources for those looking to get started. For field guides, she recommends Lawrence Newcomb’s Wildflower Guide and Ted Elliman & New England Wild Flower Society’s Wildflowers of new England. She also suggests two introductory guides on local native plants: Native Plants for New England Gardens by Mark Richardson and Dan Jaffe and The Northeast Native Plant Primer by Uli Lorimer.
For those looking to chat directly to expert gardeners or start preparing for their own native plant garden, Deb has a list of local nurseries specializing in wild plants to check out: Lindera in Falls Village, the Native Plant Trust’s nursery Nasami Farm in Whately, Massachusetts, Earth Tones Native Plants Nursery in Southbury, Connecticut, and Helia Native Nursery in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Future Forests in the Making: Climate-Smart Thinning at Great Mountain Forest
As New England experiences increasingly extreme weather, including hotter and wetter summers, keeping forests healthy and resilient to pests and disease is an ongoing challenge. Work has begun implementing Connecticut Land Conservation Council’s (CLCC) Climate Smart Land Stewardship Grant at GMF! Great Mountain Forest recently began a pre-commercial thinning project, which is a forest management practice that involves removing trees from a young, dense stand before they reach a size where they can be commercially harvested.
Managing Competition
In areas at GMF where trees were harvested 20 years ago, young trees have grown back fiercely, racing to become the future forest. Most of these new trees will end up being shaded out underneath their stronger brethren or succumbing to damage or disease. By applying management methods that support a diversity of tree and animal species and provide more resilience to pests and other disturbances, our foresters are controlling that competition to enhance traits we hope to promote.
We start by marking a “pre-commercial thinning,” or PCT, in three stands that are approximately 20 years old. “Thinning” means removing the trees that are competing with those we want to keep strong and healthy. “Pre-commercial” means that we are implementing this treatment when the trees are too small to be sold as wood products, which is where funding directed by CLCC comes in to support this work. We chose trees spaced on average 10 feet from one another, giving them the light they need to grow quickly when they are “released” from competition by this treatment.
Stand marked before treatment (note very high density of stems).
Stand after thinning treatment (only marked individuals remain standing).
Shaping the Future Forest
In selecting which trees to keep, there are a few things we keep in mind. The first is health and form. We choose trees that are going to last: those that aren’t suffering from disease, that have stable trunks and full crowns, and that have no obvious wounds.
Unfortunately, we have to remove most of the beech in these young stands. American Beech, or Fagus Grandifolia, is currently under a dual attack from beech leaf disease and beech bark disease. Nearly all of the beech in our forest are succumbing to one or both of these diseases. While we save any individuals that seem to display resistance, we know we cannot count on the majority of them as our future canopy.
The other factor we consider is species composition. Presently, these stands are almost entirely beech and black birch (Betula lenta). We therefore want to promote the other species within the stand to make it as diverse as we can. Tulip poplar, white, yellow and grey birch, ash, cottonwood, and oak are growing in these stands too, and we select for them to prevent the stands from becoming near-monocultures of black birch. While there’s nothing wrong with black birch, aiming for as much diversity as possible helps to increase stand resilience and support additional non-tree species in the forest. We’re also making sure to leave species like serviceberry and highbush blueberry. While these species won’t be our canopy trees, the fruits they produce are important food sources for birds.
Looking below the canopy, the effects of this treatment will also be seen on the forest floor. In this stage of competition, the amount of light that can reach the ground is quite limited. The trees are so densely packed that nearly nothing can grow beneath them. But by thinning the trees, we are allowing that light back in.
Forester Emeritus Jody Bronson inspired this project through his implementation of a similar PCT on a smaller scale over many years. What he saw after thinning was an understory full of not only herbaceous plants, but a new cohort of tree seedlings, particularly oaks, a group of species that has wonderful ecological value but can be difficult to regenerate. Now, should an ice storm come through and knock out the canopy trees, that young cohort is waiting in the wings to take off and swiftly become a forest again instead of having to compete for establishment.
Great Mountain Forest’s 2025 summer interns got to mark this treatment, selecting which trees to cut and which to leave. From the first week, they started thinking like foresters, making decisions that they would not see the full effects of for decades.
We are so grateful to CLCC for funding this work, which has provided young foresters with unique learning opportunities, added resilience to our forest, and created an excellent demonstration of sustainable forest stewardship.
Funding for this project was paid for by the Climate Smart Farming: Agriculture and Forestry Grant. Funding awarded and administered by the Connecticut Department of Agriculture and the Connecticut Land Conservation Council.
An afternoon in the Pleistocene
Peeking around the berry bushes into the Tobey Bog’s central clearing
The oft-maligned swamp, despite holding a persistent legacy in the cultural imagination as a place of decay with little utility or aesthetic appeal to humans, has garnered several famous fans over the years. The animated ogre Shrek, famed for his protectiveness over his marshy homeland, comes to mind as a recent example, though bogs have another, arguably more eloquent devotee: Henry David Thoreau.
“Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human art contrived, or else of a Dismal Swamp, I should certainly decide for the swamp,” the Transcendentalist thinker wrote in his 1851 treatise to wildness, “Walking.” In that lecture, Thoreau waxed poetic about replacing his cultivated front yard with “a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog,” romanticizing the rawness of the bog in comparison to the orderliness of human landscaping.
Before I embarked on an afternoon visit to the bog on a gorgeous day in early June, GMF trustee, forester, and founding member Star Childs told me that he’s always identified with that particular fantasy of Thoreau’s. In fact, he’s been lucky enough to have lived much of his life with a swamp in his figurative front yard – namely, Tobey Bog in the “North Forty” region of GMF.
Tobey Bog is no ordinary wetland, at least not in Connecticut. In his as-yet unpublished paean to the forest, the late naturalist-poet David Leff, whose lifelong love affair with the GMF landscape began with an encounter with the bog, described it as “a subarctic fragment stranded about as far south as possible,” and, “a world unto itself where the usual ecological rules did not apply.”
A glimpse of Tobey Pond from beneath the hemlocks
Paddling out
Aided by the convenience of a canoe (courtesy of the Childs family), I took advantage of some rare good weather to ferry myself across Tobey Pond for my first visit to the bog. Paddling across the pond’s dark, serene waters, fringed by drooping hemlock boughs and tall stands of white pine, the experience felt more North Country than southern New England.
Tobey Pond, like the bog with which it shares a namesake, is a specter of the ice which once weighed heavily upon these hills. When the glaciers retreated at the end of the ice age, they left behind chunks of ice lodged in the ground, which created holes known as kettles that filled with meltwater. While Tobey Pond became a lake, suitable for things like canoeing and town beaches, Tobey Bog was poorly drained and poorly fed by water sources, eventually filling with a thirty foot thick bed of sphagnum moss from which now sprouts a strange array of conifers, berry bushes, and carnivorous plants. As I would soon find out, it was, in Thoreau’s words, “the jewel which dazzled me.”
A pocket of the cold north
Parking my canoe in a shady cove of the pond, I ambled by Skinner cabin and down a gravel road to a thin boardwalk leading through a claustrophobic tunnel of highbush blueberry, huckleberry, and invasive buckthorn shrub. Eventually, the brush parted to reveal a panoramic view of the bog which Leff described as resembling “a shag carpet of the 1970s” due to the mosaic of “heathered green and reddish highlights.” I agreed with Leff that the amphitheater-like space conjures the feeling of being within a “huge oculus in a massive rotunda.”
Ecologically, it recalls imagery of the boreal peat bogs of high latitude North America and Europe. Scrubby conifers perch upon a squishy bed of sphagnum moss that compresses at depth to form peat, a thick mat of organic material that is used as a fuel source in many parts of the world, or as in Scotland, to flavor liquor. Trees like red maple, larch, and white pine dominate a patchy overstory, while scrubby black spruce mingle with the berry bushes in the shrub layer, reminiscent of the landscapes of northern Maine or Atlantic Canada.
“It’s a little mini-ecosystem all of its own that attracts these northern species,” Star said.
One of the only deciduous conifers native to the US, the eastern larch, also known as the tamarack, thrives in boggy soils
These trees and shrubs can survive in the nutrient-poor, acidic soils that the bog provides, as can a much stranger, smaller, and hungrier flora: carnivorous sundews and pitcher plants. While the tiny sundews eluded my layman’s eye, the purple pitcher plant – the only species of its kind that tolerates cold weather – was obvious, with deep green and magenta leaf furls curling into the eponymous pitchers that trap prey to provide the valuable nitrogen the bog itself cannot provide. In little hollows beneath the shrub branches, the fleshy, bulbous blossoms of the plant, just opening at the time of my visit, stood from the moss like troupes of elves in dappled, emerald sunlight.
While this bog took thousands of years to form, it feels like a vestige of the Pleistocene era, when the land had just shaken itself free of its icy burden. The effect is amplified by the drone of frogs echoing through the larches and the thrum of dragonfly wings beating past my ears. It’s easy to grow fanciful here. Michael Gaige and Yonatan Glogower’s 2016 field guide to the forest recommends that readers should “go [to the bog] when you need to find some peace in your life, albeit of the soggy, acidic variety.”
The bulbous blossoms of the purple pitcher plant looking very Dr. Seuss among the moss and sedge
Timeless – but vulnerable
Tobey is “a true quaking bog,” said Star before I embarked. And quake it does. While the two-plank boardwalk feels solid enough underfoot, a subtle bounce under each step suggests the true nature of the gelatinous substrate beneath.
This shake, just a hint of unsteadiness, reflects the fragility of the ecosystem itself, no matter how ancient and timeless it may feel to a human visitor in this strange blip in geologic time. The existence of a peat bog is defined by the input of water outpacing its loss through evaporation and plant respiration, which makes them particularly susceptible to changes in temperature and precipitation.
Bogs further north, known as ombrotrophic bogs, receive the entirety of their water from precipitation, and are reliant on cool temperatures to keep from drying up, which is why they don’t occur as far south as Connecticut. As abnormally warm summers increase in frequency, disproportionately impacting arctic and boreal regions, these bogs are at risk. A 2020 study conducted in the Black Forest region of Germany (which somewhat resembles the rugged but low hills of Northwest Connecticut) found that biodiversity in temperate bogs has already been impacted by climate change, and remains threatened due to rising temperatures and decreased precipitation. The study maintains that there are few management options available to combat these trends.
When these bogs dry up, they can also burn. There has been ample research conducted in recent years on the environmental impacts of smoldering wildfires on peatlands, which can quietly burn in the soil for years, overwintering deep in the peat layer. Peat bogs contain a large percentage of the world’s terrestrial carbon stores, similar to the amount held in the atmosphere, and fires can release massive amounts of the gas. A 2021 study on northern peat fires reported that arctic wildfires are on the rise, and have been contributing significantly to greenhouse gas emissions. If warming temperatures continue unmitigated, the study predicts that annual carbon loss from peat souls could total almost 550 megatons per year.
As this carbon is released, it contributes to global warming which is already disproportionately affecting northerly regions. This warming in turn melts more permafrost and dries out the soil, thus allowing more fires to ignite, which as a result puts even more carbon into the atmosphere. It’s what climatologists call a positive feedback loop.
Tobey Bog is minerotrophic, meaning it receives supplemental water through ground seepage. Due to its limited size it is not a great carbon store itself, and its moisture content is supported by the additional groundwater it receives. It too, however, is at risk from rising temperatures and changes in precipitation patterns, as decomposition rates can increase “dramatically” with warmer weather, penetrating the deep peat layers of preserved organic material, according to Gaige and Glogower. Its reliance on peripheral water sources also puts it downstream of any impacts to those resources.
A window to the north
Connected futures
Former GMF director Hans Carlson ran a column in the “Norfolk Now” contemplating the natural and cultural history of the region’s landscape in the late 2010s, including an article on Tobey Bog, a place which he said has largely remained on the outskirts of Western interest. Now, though, the bog is no longer able to sustain an existence separate from the human behavior, even as it gains value in the eyes of conservationists and nature-lovers. Carlson’s words on the subject, written nine years ago, are more potent now than ever: “We will continue to leave Tobey Bog to its own processes and life cycles, preserving it as a rarity in Southern New England, but it is no longer a place on the margins of our choices.”
Many of our leaders and decision-makers could benefit from a trip to the bog. It captivates and enchants, and thus, perhaps may encourage the right choices. Gaige and Glogower reference a 1991 master’s thesis by Erica Hamlin in which she told the story of Tobey Bog’s ecology through creative scientific prose and charcoal drawings. “It is a good reminder that strange ecosystems like bogs have the power to inspire people across disciplines and cognitive frames,” they write.
Or, as Thoreau said: “Hope and the future for me are not in the lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.”
