July, 1910 



THE G A R D E N M AGAZINE 



357 



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Twenty-five miles south of the Arctic Circle, at Circ 



this garden 



week in June, now two months old, six 

 inches in diameter, and of the very finest 

 quality. Radishes grew several "times their 

 normal size without losing quality. 



Cabbages and cauliflower must be 

 started indoors fairly early for the Northern 

 climate but they transplant readily with- 

 out setback and mature at a great rate, 

 very large and delicious heads, free from 

 scars; for slugs and cabbage butterflies 

 have not yet reached Alaska, nor has the 

 potato beetle. 



One of the surest and finest" of Alaskan 

 garden crops is green peas. They make an 

 enormous growth and go on blossoming (if 

 planted outdoors by the middle of May) 

 from the first of August till frost. Beans, 

 however, do not mature on the coast at all, 

 though they are brought to blossom. This 

 is one of the most puzzling things I have 

 found about Alaskan gardens, but every 

 coast report was the same. In the interior 

 they grow all right. 



It is customary for every Alaskan with a 

 garden to make an annual try with tomatoes; 

 but it is an event when they ripen on the 

 coast. Corn is impossible, but there are a 

 dozen other things that succeed — parsley, 

 the cresses, kohl-rabi, endive, spinach, rhu- 

 barb, onions, kale and lettuce. This last is 

 always a wonderful crop. I saw heads in 

 Valdez, the tender, solid hearts of which 

 were ten inches across and the full heads 

 twice that. Rhubarb, too, is a most prolific 

 grower. In all these cases there seemed 

 no unusual conditions to meet. Germina- 

 tion was not more uncertain than in New- 

 York, and, of course, there was never need of 

 water, while the morainal subsoil offered 

 good drainage everywhere. 



There seems an added intensity to the 

 colors of the garden flowers. This is true 

 also of the Alaskan wild flowers. One 

 finds great fields above the timber line 

 of the hills in which the lavish mixture of 

 color and forms, all furiously blooming at 

 once, could not have been increased by thor- 



le City. Over $4,000 worth of produce was sold from 

 in one season 



A Valdez front yard with California poppies as 

 substitute for a grass lawn 



oughly plowing and cultivating and broad- 

 casting with a careful mixture of flower 

 seeds. In whole acres there did not seem to 

 be a single plant without conspicuous bloom. 

 And the mixture of colors was not at all 

 according to modern standards of taste. 

 There was none of that ingenious massing 

 of shades that nature so frequently accom- 

 plishes further south and sometimes in Alaska. 

 In these fields there was no dominant 

 color, unless it were the scarlet haze of 

 the columbine that rose a foot above the 

 general level. Alaskan flowers are notable, 

 however, for the strength and variety of 

 their blues. The dominant color of the 

 territory is cool blue and its flowers for 

 some mysterious reason follow this note 

 with effective insistence. I have never 

 seen such intensely blue forget-me-nots 

 as grew abundantly over the mountain- 

 sides near Seward. 



Yet one does not see any attempt at a wild 

 garden anywhere in Alaska. These folks 

 from home seem to want reminders of other 

 lands than this, however much they like it, 

 and one sees more old-fashioned New Eng- 

 land gardens than Alaskan. 



One of the most effective instances of 

 massed color in nature that I have seen 

 occurs on some of the great gray glacial 

 moraines of Alaska. These moraines are 

 often miles in extent, flat, barren wildernesses 

 of whiteish boulders and gravel, scoured each 

 year by the overflows. Yet out on them one 

 sees islands of pure glowing scarlet. They 

 are patches of the familiar fire-weed, the only 

 plant that has the courage to grow in those 

 soilless wastes. Once in a while our human 

 gardeners do almost as well as this. One 

 woman of Valdez solves the problem of a 

 front lawn by broadcasting the orange- 

 yellow California poppy over every foot 

 of it. Her yard was one glow of sunlight 

 for three months. 



We think of Alaska as exclusively a man's 

 country, which it is no longer. It is, for the 

 most part, the women of Alaska who are 

 the garden makers, as they are the home- 

 makers. 



The front yards at Fairbanks are ablaze with color 



