by Rick Radis

I first saw bog asphodel late in the day on the Fourth of July, 1975, but it was some time before I knew what I’d seen.

I was driving home on the Garden State Parkway from an afternoon and early evening’s birding at Brigantine that had been cut short by a line of very heavy thunderstorms. The highway was a mess and looked to be an eighty-mile crawl to the north. So, just south of Stafford Forge, I got off the highway and took what I’d begun to call the Warren Grove Cutoff, Route 539, which runs diagonally southeast-northwest through the Pine Barrens, up through Whiting, Fort Dix, Allentown, and beyond; tortuous, perhaps, but blissfully free of paralyzed cars and overheating tempers. As I was passing through the pygmy forest of the Lower Plains the sun broke through to the west low on the horizon, its light bouncing off the still-dark clouds overhead and producing that rare, almost preternatural reflected light and color saturation that photographers will avidly die for. I pulled over at an open boggy area to admire the show—and found the yellowest flowers I’d ever seen.

A friend had recently given me a copy of Roger Tory Peterson and Margaret McKenny’s A Field Guide to the Wildflowers and I had taken to carrying it around with me when birding, behavior that many of my birder friends considered suspect, but opening up a totally new world for me. Grouped by color, flowers in the book were fairly easy for a neophyte to identify, and my copy was already muddy, waterstained, dog-eared, and heavily annotated with dates and sites where I’d first seen this or that orchid, cancer-root, milkweed, or spring ephemeral. But the guide failed me entirely that evening; the flower wasn’t in the book, nor were several other species that I found growing with it.

It wasn’t until late in the fall of that year that I bought a copy of M.L. Fernald’s eighth edition of Gray’s Manual of Botany and finally had an answer. After a few hours of fumbling through the dichotomous, bifurcating keys, tortured by obscure, unfamiliar, wonderful botanical terms—six-androus, perianth, adnate, 2-locular, introrse, spicate, sessile—I learned that the plant was bog asphodel (Narthecium americanum), and its confreres golden crest ((Lophiola aurea) and lance-leaved sabatia (Sabatia difformis).

Bog asphodel is that rarest of New Jersey plants, an endemic, a species that occurs nowhere else in the world but the heart of the Pine Barrens, in an area that measures roughly thirty miles long and twenty miles wide, in Atlantic, Burlington, and Ocean counties, with an old record from Gloucester County. It once was known from several mountain bogs in the Carolinas—at one, interestingly, in association with swamp pink (Helonias bullata)—but these stations have been destroyed. It was also reported from Lewes, Delaware in 1895, though this record is currently thought to be erroneous.

The name asphodel comes from the Greek asphodelos, an unknown yellow flower said in mythology to cover the Fields of Elysium, the home of the blessed after death. Fernald says the technical name comes from narthecion, a chest or box for holding ointments. Bog asphodel is in the lily family, the Liliaceae, with no close relatives in the East, though there are other, very similar-looking members of the genus in the West (N. californicum), Asia (N. asiaticum), and Europe (N. ossifragum). Some research has suggested that the four form one global species. Ours has basal leaves, is usually not more than a foot high, and its raceme of bright yellow flowers appears from late June through much of July. It grows in areas with peaty, mucky soil and slowly moving water, and will not flower unless it’s in full sun. I’ve been to old asphodel sites which have become partly or completely overgrown and found thousands of sterile plants forming a turfy cover on the ground, biding their time until a fire or blowdown clears off trees and brush and brings back the sun, a common strategy found in many Pine Barrens plants.

This is a highly river-associated plant; its favored habitats are the open boggy savannas along the Batsto, Mullica, Oswego, Wading, and other Pine Barrens rivers. Bog asphodel is the iconic species at all of the famous old botanical sites in the pines: Quaker Bridge, Batsto, Lower Forge, Big Doughnut, Hawkins Bridge, Martha, and when in full bloom and abundant it lights up the landscape. Bog candles.

The place where I first saw bog asphodel—and where it is still present—is called Webbs Mills, located on Route 539 in Greenwood State Forest (Ocean County), about five miles south of the intersection of Routes 70 and 539, or about 6.5 miles north of the intersection of Routes 72 and 539. There’s no road sign which identifies it as such, but it is marked on the Hagstrom Ocean County map and also appears on the southeast corner of the Whiting USGS quadrangle. Look on the eastern side of the road for an open area of white sand and muck traversed by a boardwalk. At speed it is easy to miss, so if you do see it as you flash by and have to turn around, just remember that the often soft shoulders of Pine Barrens roads just love to swallow wheels. Webbs Mills, which has given its name to a branch of Cedar Creek, has been used as a classroom for students and naturalists for decades, and is home to many representative Pine Barrens plants: pitcher plant, sundews, golden crest and golden club; foxtail, Carolina, and bog (Lycopodium appressum) clubmosses; curly grass fern, a number of bladderworts, turkey beard, grass pink and rose pogonia, milkworts, pipeworts, sandwort, St. Peter’s-wort, St. John’s-worts, pyxie, sand-myrtle, yellow-eyed grasses, cottongrass, beaked rushes, and true rushes (Juncus spp.). With luck, late in the evening or on still, gray, misty days, you might even get to hear the extraterrestrial quonking of Pine Barrens treefrogs. This is one Pine Barrens bog where you can see things without getting wet or mucky up to your waist, and with little or no impact on the habitat—just remember to stay on the boardwalk and that picking flowers or plants is illegal on state property. (In field botany—like embryonic birding seventy years ago—it’s no longer necessary to collect in order to identify.)

Along with many sedges and grasses, the oaks, certain milkweeds, American lotus, and hollies among others, I think bog asphodel in the late summer and fall is at least as striking when in seed as when in bloom. At this season it is easily the most interesting feature of the bogs and savannas, where flowering is largely over by late August. The scape and bracts are wheat-colored, and contrast with the chestnut seed capsules, which are pointed and nearly vertical. The seeds are long and narrow and tufted at one end, and although they are said to germinate easily, I’ve never found a seedling.

And going back to see it in September and early October has certain advantages over July. Most of the bugs are gone, the temperature and humidity are more reasonable, and the ambient light is kinder to photographers for more hours than in midsummer. It’s quieter too; gone is a common sound of high summer on the rivers: the bonging of the ubiquitous Grummann aluminum canoes as they collide and careen off others, often with the accompanying dunking and shouting of inexperienced canoeists. And, if you’re lucky, you might get to see that most beautiful of all late-blooming plants, pine barrens gentian (Gentiana autumnalis), sometimes found on damp shoulders of less-traveled area roads. Try it sometime.