360 Morten P. Porsild 



yet the fjord is icebound. Many of the species which were flowering 

 when we left Godhavn were not to be found in flower here although 

 we searched for them. The ground was "so delightfully dry," said 

 our Greenlanders, meaning — to pitch the tent on or for long reindeer 

 hunts; but only a little distance below the surface it was more than 

 damp enough for the plants. 



The willow copse at Orpik grows around the mouth of a small 

 river which makes its way through the copse by means of several 

 outlets. This is undoubtedly the most northerly large copse in West 

 Greenland. The willows found in the district of Upernavik, to judge 

 from what an old Greenlander — a great traveller and reindeer- 

 hunter — told me, are only small, so that "one may tread on them 

 without noticing it." Here, the copse was in its more luxuriant parts 

 almost 2 metres in height. The ground outside the copse consisted 

 of stones and gravel which had been washed down by the river. 

 Under the willows this stony and gravelly bottom is covered by a 

 layer of leaf-mould and we could find something there reminiscent of 

 other regions, viz. rustling dead leaves. While the bottom of the most 

 luxuriant copses I know in Disco Fjord consists of black, damp humus 

 which is never warmed by a single ray of the sun because the 

 wallows stand very closely together, and which consequently never 

 bears any undergrowth whatever, here, there was surprisingly more 

 space between the stems. An undergrowth occurred everywhere con- 

 sisting of grasses such as Poa pratensis, Trisetum or Hierochloë, herbs 

 like Pirola grandiflora (see Fig. 4), Stellaria longipes, Saxifraga, Cam- 

 paniilœ and others, or in more shady places, true mosses of the 

 wood-floor such as Mnia, Brachythecia and Thijidia. All the herbs 

 are higher and more slender than those occurring on the heaths, but 

 there is light enough to permit the development of flowers and fruit, 

 for instance Pirola is, if possible, larger flowered in this copse than on 

 the heaths. In open places pure growths are met with, usually of high, 

 slender plants of Eqiiisetiim aruense (see Fig. 5), richly branching and as 

 green as the woodland forms of Europe; or there are small meadows 

 of Poa pratensis (see Fig. 3) ; and along the river there are enormous 

 colonies OÎ Chamaenerium latifolinm, or where a small stream branches 

 off from a bigger, pale-green patches of Mniobrijnm albicans together 

 with Marchantia polijmorpha. Down towards the sea the copse was 

 bounded by a strip of saltmarsh consisting of Carex glareosa, Glyceria 

 distans and G. vilfoidea. Right out at the coast-line old, rotten stumps 

 of willows where standing; somewhat farther into the country there 

 were entire willow-corpses, from which the twigs gradually fall to 

 the ground; and higher up, languishing willow-shrubs with leaves 

 which had ])rematurely turned yellow, everywhere surrounded by 



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