Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 June 1898 — Nature’s Gardens in Alaska. [ARTICLE]

Nature’s Gardens in Alaska.

The most extensive, least spoiled and most unspoilable of the gardens of the continent are the vast tundras of Alaska. Ever summer they extend smooth, even, undulating, continuous beds of flowers and leaves from about latitude 02 degrees to the shores of the Arctic Ocean; and in winter sheets of snow flowers make all the country shine, one mass of white radiance like a star. Nor are these arctic plant people the pitiful, frost-pinched unfortunates they are guessed to be by those who have never seen them. Though lowly in stature, keeping near the frozen ground as if loving it, they are bright and cheery, and speak Nature’s love as plainly as their big relatives of the south. Tenderly happed and tucked in beneath downy snow to sleep through the huge white winter, they make haste to bloom in the spring without trying to grow tall, though some rise high enough to ripple and wave in the wind and display masses of color—yellow, purple and blue—so rich they look like beds of rainbows and are visible miles and miles away. * * ♦ And in September the tundra glows In creamy golden sunshine, and the colors of the ripe foliage of the hearthworts, willows, and birch—red, purple and yellow—in pure bright tones are enriched with those of berries which are scattered everywhere as if they had been showered down from the clouds like hail; their colors, with those of the leaves and stems, blending harmoniously with the neutral tints of the ground of lichens and mosses on which they seem to be painted.—John Muir in the Atlantic.