Exploring the 90-year-old Bowman’s Hill sanctuary for native plants yields surprises beyond treasured blossoms. BY NICK NORLEN
Ask Maggie Strucker what her
favorite time of year is at Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve, and she’ll tell you: when there are no wildflowers. Strucker, an interpretive specialist at the preserve, doesn’t actually phrase it that way. But when I propose that we walk its grounds together to explore the facets of its least-appreciated season, her enthusiasm gives her away—before she admits it outright: “I’m a winter person anyway.” Part of Strucker’s job is managing
expectations. The preserve is not a botanical garden with “flowers all the time,” she says. You will not find manicured rows of blooms. What you will find are more than 700 of Pennsylvania’s 2,000 native plant species, all growing wild—including 60 classified as rare, threatened or endangered. This concentration would be impossible without careful stewardship, dogged eradication of invasives and a deer fence that encloses 100 of the preserve’s 134 acres.
“We’re not here just to be pretty; we have a mission,” Strucker says. “We want to enhance the public’s understanding of the beauty when it’s not flowers all the time.” We begin our flowerless hike on a trail just south of the visitor center, near one of the interpretive signs that help guide visitors—85 percent of whom are firsttimers, according to data collected by the preserve. This particular sign is titled “Every tree has a story”—and Strucker often stops to tell them.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY NICK NORLEN AND BOWMAN’S HILL WILDFLOWER PRESERVE
Winter at the Wildf lower Preserve
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12/17/24 6:44 PM