Goat Island Flora

Goat Island’s plants thrive because constant atmospheric moisture protects them from late spring frosts and deep, rich soil allows greater root penetration and nutrition. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the lush beauty of Niagara Falls and its nearby islands drew botanists, including the Swedish botanist Peter Kalm, who came to the falls in 1750 and, although he did not collect specimens from Goat Island because no bridge reached it until 1817, observed and recorded its plants from the mainland. By 1877, Joseph Dalton Hooker and Asa Gray had visited Goat Island and found a greater variety of vegetation growing within a limited space than anywhere else in America east of the Sierras or in Europe, while also noting the rare beauty of the old forest and the rock foliage on the gorge wall below the island. By 1888, the local botanist David Day had collected specimens there, including Kalm’s lobelia and Kalm’s St. John’s wort, and in a catalogue prepared for the Niagara Reservation State Park commissioners he listed 758 native species and 151 foreign species of flora he identified. Day also found that 140 of the 175 species of trees and shrubs native to Western New York grew on Goat Island.

Niagara Falls, New York · United States