I found yellow poppies as much at home as in my own California!
Daisies, both white and yellow! There is a little blossom resembling in
form and grace the sweet pea, but it is a rich, deep indigo blue. I do
not know its name, or whether it has a name. The tiny blue
forget-me-nots, the beautiful gold-and-purple iris, dainty anemones,
and many others which I know not how to name. There is a starry white
flower like a cherry blossom, a yellow bloom resembling a cowslip.
There is the blue corn-flower, the wild heliotrope, immortelles, purple
asters, violets and, most interesting of all, a purple bleeding-heart!
Why purple, I wonder? In addition to these there are beautiful wild
grasses, exquisite mosses with wondrous weeping tendrils and star-like
blossoms. And there is a little crimson vine which grows like patches
of red velvet and clings very close to the green moss.
I grew to love the tundra, whatever the time or the season. From the
first warm days of the spring until the snow came swishing down and
wrapped it in its soft white blanket, I enjoyed its every mood. In
summer it is as beautiful as the seemingly more favored spots of the
earth. In winter----. There is always the great, white, silent expanse
which one grows to love also. For I find the feeling to be general
among those who live in the Northland that it is not in her milder
moods that Alaska calls to us loudest. One is most deeply conscious of
hidden and gigantic forces,--untrodden heights, to which one can never
attain, even in spirit! There may be those who hold that the tundra is
desolate, dreary. Not I!
The most striking of all the wild flowers that I have ever seen in
Alaska is a species of white _claytonia_. It grows in rings as large as
a dinner plate. These floral rings are dropped here and there upon the
green moss and in the center of the ring is a rosette of pointed green
leaves pressed close to the ground. Around this rosette grows the ring
of flowers made up of forty or fifty individual blossoms, all springing
from the same root, their faces turned _outward_ from the green
rosette. In certain places these circles grow so close together that
one can scarcely walk without stepping upon them.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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