Bog Trotter

Readers may not open Swamplands expecting to learn much about art history, yet that is one of the many lessons Edward Struzik offers in his timely and enchanting disquisition on the many facets of peat. Before the Group of Seven set their brushes to capturing the boggy beauty of Georgian Bay in the 1920s, Struzik explains, Canadian landscapes looked suspiciously like the rolling hills and dales of the English countryside. Maple and oak dominated these paintings, rather than the brooding, windswept pines that greeted the likes of A. Y. Jackson, Lawren Harris, and Arthur Lismer, as well as Tom Thomson before them. The wilder parts of Ontario were an environment that at least one critic back in Toronto considered “a repulsive, forbidding thing.” Eventually, of course, the art world came to celebrate the “awful splendor” of the bay and the “slim, peat-filled frost fractures in the Canadian Shield.”

Struzik covers a lot of ground as he fills us in on the cultural...