LANDSCAPE CHARACTERS 65 



in an unusual degree a sense of standing directly in the presence of the 

 great forces of the natural world. 



In many places man's activities will eventually mask the character 

 of the prairie. The flowers — the typical vegetation generally — can 

 and will be preserved.* Smaller stretches of open level turf will doubt- 

 less always remain, even in the midst of intensive cultivation and urban 

 development. But inevitably in many portions of the prairie man's 

 trees and houses will break the openness of the ground, and its essen- 

 tial character, its boundless extent, will be no longer apparent except 

 to those who in aeroplanes are above the minor interruptions of the 

 view. It is a question whether the owners of the soil will ever go so 

 far as to sacrifice many square miles of valuable prairie land merely for 

 the preservation of a landscape effect. One thing is certain, at any 

 rate, not by preserving its flora alone, but only by preserving its expanse 

 can the spirit of the prairie be preserved. 



There are examples of flat or rolling country where, with other skies The Barren 

 and other vegetation, the character is utterly different. Such a land- "^ Tundra 

 scape may be found in the occasional level stretches of the "Barrens" 

 of the interior of Newfoundland and of parts of Labrador. Similar 

 country is found in far northern Canada, north of "the land of little 

 sticks," and in the Tundra of Siberia. In summer it is a land of bog 

 and rock, largely treeless except where the depressions give shelter to 

 gnarled and dwarf black spruce and birch, covered in places with hun- 

 dreds of shallow little flashets of water, with curiously sharp and vertical 

 edges made apparently by the undisturbed growth through centuries 

 of the sedge and water-loving plants on their margins. On the some- 

 what drier knolls, there is a thick tufted carpet of leatherleaf, blue- 

 berries, sheep laurel, and mountain cranberrj', and in places very likely 

 a profusion of herbaceous flowers, whose cousins with us find their 

 time of bloom from May to October, but which there must bloom 

 almost together in the short season between snow and snow. It is a 

 country bright and cheerful enough in its occasional sunshine, but 

 usually even in summer desolate and wind-beaten, with driving fine 

 rain and trailing mist, and in winter snow-buried, blizzard-swept, or 



* Cf. Wilhelm Miller, The Prairie Spirit in Landscape Gardening, Circular 184 

 of the Illinois Agricultural Experiment Station, Nov. 1915. 



