The
cranberry, the crowberry, the cloudberry, etc., produce fruit any
one of which might outweigh the herb itself.
Nowhere does one get the impression that these are weeds, as often
happens among the rank growths farther south. The flowers in the
wildest profusion are generally low, always delicate and mostly
in beds of a single species. The Lalique jewelry was the sensation
of the Paris Exposition of 1899. Yet here is Lalique renewed and
changed for every week in the season and lavished on every square
foot of a region that is a million square miles in extent.
Not a cranny in a rock but is seized on at once by the eager little
gardeners in charge and made a bed of bloom, as though every inch
of room were priceless. And yet Nature here exemplifies the law
that our human gardeners are only learning: "Mass your bloom, to
gain effect."
As I stood on that hill, the foreground was a broad stretch of old
gold - the shining sandy yellow of drying grass - but it was patched
with large scarlet mats of arctous that would put red maple to its
reddest blush. There was no Highland heather here, but there were
whole hillsides of purple red vaccinium, whose leaves were but a
shade less red than its luscious grape-hued fruit.
Here were white ledums in roods and acre beds; purple mairanias
by the hundred acres, and, framed in lilac rocks, were rich, rank
meadows of golden-green by the mile.
There were leagues and leagues of caribou moss, pale green or lilac,
and a hundred others in clumps, that, seeing here the glory of the
painted mosses, were simulating their ways, though they themselves
were the not truly mosses at all.
I never before saw such a realm of exquisite flowers so exquisitely
displayed, and the effect at every turn throughout the land was
colour, colour, colour, to as far outdo the finest autumn tints of
New England as the Colorado Canyon outdoes the Hoosac Gorge. What
Nature can do only in October, elsewhere, she does here all season
through, as though when she set out to paint the world she began
on the Barrens with a full palette and when she reached the Tropics
had nothing left but green.
Thus at every step one is wading through lush grass or crushing
prairie blossoms and fruits. It is so on and on; in every part of
the scene, there are but few square feet that do not bloom with
flowers and throb with life; yet this is the region called the
Barren Lands of the North.
