December 1, 1886.] 



♦ KNOW^LEDGE ♦ 



25 



^ ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINE £ 

 &ENa.iITERATURE.& ART 



LONDON: DECEMBER 1, 1886. 



THE CLOUDBERRY. 



WONDER whether I need begin by telling 

 the Englis^h reader that Mount Washington 

 is the highest peak of the AVhite Mountain 

 range in New Hampshire, and practically the 

 most elevated summit along the entire Atlantic 

 -.lope of America, its only rival in this respect 

 being some remote and inland Carolinian 

 lills, unknown to fame and unvisited by the gregarious 

 Transatlantic tourist? We had a splendid day for our easy 

 ascent by the steep little railway on the Eigi pattern, with 

 middle cog-wheel and oblique engine, which pulls and toils 

 up (he abrupt gradients ; and when we reached the top, 

 though the clouds were swirling and wreathing around us, 

 the view was magnificent, and the morning clear as heart 

 could wish it. As soon as we had drunk our fill of the 

 jjrospect, however, we turned of course to our more proper 

 and professional task of botanising ; and the very first 

 plant that attracted my attention, wedged in among the 

 crannies of the huge boulders that strew the summit, as 

 chance would have it, was an overblown cloudberry. I 

 took it up and gazed at the northern herb with a certain 

 fond and reverent attention, for it was the fii-st cloudberry I 

 had ever seen in the living state, though I knew its form 

 and features well enough already from frequent illusti-a- 

 tions, and from herbarium specimens. Itut it was quite 

 another thing to pick that curious Arctic plant here among 

 its own chilly native surroundings, and to recognise in it a 

 last lingering relic of the glacial epoch on the top of Mount 

 Washington . 



Of course you remember the pictures of the cloudberry in 

 all the books of Arctic exploration. There is a very good 

 one in Nordenskiold's " Voyage of the Vega," for the cloud- 

 berry is the great stand-by of the Polar voyager as a fresh 

 fruit and preservative against scurvy. No other edible 

 berry grows so far north among the ice and snow ; no other 

 can so readily be obtained by northern sailors in their last 

 port as this dwarf representative of the bramble genus. 

 But besides its importance as an article of food in high 

 latitudes, the cloudberry has a deep scientific interest as 

 well as a typical specimen of the glacial flora which came in 

 with the approach of the Great Ice Age. No other herb 

 could moie admirably illustrate from a certain side the 

 striking traits of the Arctic vegetation, and the peculiar 

 way in which it has been modified in order to meet the 

 needs of a chilly climate. 



The cloudberry, indeed, is a true circumpolar type of 

 plant, found in turfy bogs, tundras, and peat mosses, all 

 round the Arctic circle, in Europe, Asia, and America 

 alike. In the extreme north — in Siberia, Finland, Norway, 

 and British North America — it is a lowland plant, inhabit- 

 ing the wide water-logged plains with which those sub- 



arctic lands are so thickly covered. But as it ranges 

 southward it clings rather to the upland bogs, the wet 

 places on the mountain sides, and the moist crannies of 

 the rocks and boulders that strew their summits. Gener- 

 ally a high northern herb, it descends towards the summer 

 sun in Europe along the Baltic shore into the heart of 

 Germany ; and it occurs abundantly among the combes and 

 hollows of the Scotch Highlands, as well as less frequently 

 in the wet moorlands of Yorkshire, Donegal, and even 

 North Wales. I might easily, therefore, have seen the 

 cloudberry on our own side of the Atlantic, had I been 

 there to look for it, without taking the trouble of going 

 to America to hunt it up ; but it takes a lifetime for a 

 man to make personal acquaintance with all the plants 

 even of our limited little British flora in their native 

 haunts; and, as a matter of fact, I had never before seen a 

 cloudberry " all a-growing and a-blowing," as the coster- 

 mongers say, till I picked it that day on the summit of 

 Mount Washington. And, indeed, I w-as not sorry that I 

 .should have caught my first glimpse of this Arctic strayling 

 in such a sublime and congenial situation. 



And now, at last, what is the cloudberry \ It is a little, 

 green, herbaceous bramble, with no woody stem, no trailing 

 blanches, no stout armour of defensive prickles — a mere 

 succulent herb, low and inconspicuous, seldom rising more 

 than three or four inches above the frostbound ground — 

 in short, a blackberry bush reduced by cold to the abject 

 condition of a wild strawberry vine. Like many other 

 Aictic and mountain plants, its rootstock creeps under 

 ground, so as to avoid being frozen during the chill wintei-s 

 of its chosen habitat ; and here and there it sends up short 

 herbaceous stems, wdiolly unarmed, and bearing at best only 

 two or three round or kidney-shaped leaves, somewhat 

 toothed at the edge, and often cut into from five to nine 

 broad lobes or divisions. The flowers are large and w-hite, 

 as so frequently happens with northern or upland plants, 

 and they are far prettier and more conspicuous than our 

 English raspberry or blackberry blossoms, so as to attract 

 the short-lived northern butterflies, by whose aid the 

 blu.ssoms are probably always fertilised. Self-fertili.sation, 

 indeed, is efficiently guarded against in this instance by the 

 flowers having become specialised each to a single sex. 

 One plant will bear, however, blossoms with stamens only, 

 and no pistil or fruit ; another will have fertile flowers 

 with pistds ouly, and no stamens to supply them with 

 pollen. In this way the benefits of cross fertilisation are 

 rendered obligatory, so that insect visits become a matter of 

 prime necessity to the existence of the plant. The fruit, 

 when ripe, is rather large, of the raspberry type, but con- 

 sisting of a few big grain,s onlj'. In fine, it is a delicate 

 amber colour, or sometimes almost orange-red ; and the 

 flavour, though agreeably acid, is pleasant and tasty. Alto- 

 gether, a distinct boon to the northern ti-aveller, this 

 inconspicuous reduced little bramble. 



In origin, the cloudberiy must be regarded as a Polar 

 plant of the period immediately preceding the Great Ice 

 Age ; and it owes its development to the immense though 

 gi-adual lowering of the Arctic temperature which preceded 

 that long, slow, secular cataclysm. The bramble genus, to 

 which the cloudberry belongs, falls naturally into two main 

 groups, the blackberries and the raspberries, as we call them 

 in the vernacular, from the two representatives best known 

 in actual practice to non-botanical British humanity. The 

 great distinguishing mai-k between them lies not in the 

 colour (for some American blackberries are bright red, if I 

 may be forgiven so obvious a bull. whUe the common black 

 raspberry of the Northern States looks a good deal blacker 

 than the' English blackberry itself), but in the way in which 

 the fruit behaves when separated from the " hull," " hank," 



