80 THE MAGAZINE OF HORTICULTURE. 



and indicates the perfection of that union, which Art has 

 made with Nature. It was at Uppernavik. the most north- 

 ern of the Danish settlements, whose latitude is 72° 47', 

 three hundred and seventy miles within the Arctic Circle, 

 that there was found at the Governor's House " a little paling 

 white and garden-like, inclosing about ten feet of prepared 

 soil, covered with heavy glass frames ; under which, in spite 

 of the hoar frost that gathered on them, we could detect a 

 few bunches of Crucifers, green radishes and turnip tops. It 

 was the garden, the distinctive appendage of the Governor's 

 residence. "At last came the crowning act of hospitality, pale, 

 yet blushing at their tips, and crowned each with its little 

 verdant tuft, ten radishes ! Talk of the mango of Luzon 

 and the mangostine of Borneo, the cheremioya of Peru, the 

 pine of Sumatra, the Seckel pear of the Schuylkill meadows ; 

 but the palate must cease to have memory before I yield a 

 place to any of them along side the ten radishes of Upper- 

 navik." 



On a small and humid spot of a few yards extent, with the 

 mosses and sedges saturated with the water which slowly 

 trickles over the surface of the underlying rock, I have seen, 

 on some warm sunny day in our earliest April or in the latter 

 part of a precocious March, the representation of an Arctic 

 turf-flora in the cushioned and velvety sod of hundreds of 

 flowering plants of the Dra^ba verna. The pleasure, which 

 such a cospecies of a northern flora awakens within me on 

 each returning spring, as I make a pilgrimage, in the sacred 

 name of friendship to the memory of its discoverer, to this 

 fairy domain of our New England plants, is thus enhanced 

 by the thought that the flower and its influence over man 

 fraternize the human race ; and that, from tropic to pole, 

 the cultivated mind is alive to the same sensations and im- 

 pressed with the same emotions, called forth by these won- 

 ders of creative energy. Nor are there any such facts "as ab- 

 solute barrenness and sterility ; while equally in summer or in 

 winter, forms of vegetation, on rock and iceberg, on the lim- 

 its of perpetual snow and beneath the northern ocean, veg- 

 etation and vegetative life reign victorious and supreme. 



