The Healing Bog: "Bog Restoration", redefined, by Garth Thomson

Garth Thomson, from Kelowna  sends greetings and thoughts of just what kind of restoration is going on when we stand ankle deep in peat, pulling deer fern and salal. Read on...


Hello fellow Crazy Boggers,

I've been watching from a distance via email updates for the last 7 years (yikes time flies!) and visited the bog briefly on my only visit since 2003 to Vancouver last year. I was active in the bog from 2000-2003 and spent almost all my weekends during that time weeding, digging, and planting along with you.  My frog still watches me from behind my desk and my wooden badge is still in my box of "special things". 

The bog attracted me because it was such an interesting and beautiful place so close to where I lived at the time. I had spent many many years doing work related to the natural environment and had trained in forestry at UBC in 1985. In 2000 I had just finished the course work related to a diploma in Restoration of Natural Systems at UVic. I had also recently been diagnosed with Crohn's disease and was going through a major struggle to keep myself functioning at all. On the surface, it just looked like a quiet place to get away from the struggles but I think at a deeper level there was much more going on that wasn't said. I've really only been able to adequately put words on it very recently.

Camosun Bog featured on "Our Sustainable Region" and Parks Newsletter

camosun bog featured in Our Sustainable Region TV
see year 2010 episode 46, regional parks, "Camosun Bog".  And I recommend Laurence getting into the documentary film biz 'cause he's a natural.
Bog Buddy program , the photos,  and the bog children's stories also got featured on the Parks Newsletter too.  Cool.

Bog Preservation, literally

Denmark's Tollund Man, found in a bog with barley and flax in his stomach and a leather belt around his waist.

"We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on by body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books."

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Brothers Emil and Viggo discovered a body in their bog and called the police.  The police examined the clothing on the body and phoned the museum...
What is a bog and how is it able to preserve things for so long? Find out here
Nova's interactive on Tollund Man
The Crazy Boggers also found some artifacts, though no body has turned up...yet.

Storytelling and getting dirty

Biology students finished some amazing stories.  This is a sample and a fraction of what was produced for the Camosun Bog Buddy project.