It turned out to be a very nice evening out. Calm, and I love the light these days as we start to lose the sun. We took the opportunity to go for a drive, to go get some aira and, as my grandpa would say, get the smell blown off of us.
We went out to First Bridge and the Water Lake first. The River Beauty (Epilobium latifolium) was blooming, although it is still behind where it should be this time of year.
River Beauty is also called Dwarf Fireweed, and it is plain to see why if you are familiar with Fireweed. It is such a bold beautiful flower. It is an early colonizing plant, frequently found along the road, and on disturbed ground. I hope to collect some seed this fall and sow some on the shale fill at the house.
There wasn’t really any aira at the bridge to speak of so we kept going to the Water Lake. There was only a little aira there. I was struck though by the amount of Prickly Saxifrage (Saxifraga tricuspidata) that was growing there in places.
Although these pictures don’t show it, the white flowers have small orange spots on them. 
The other flower that I was surprised to see there though was Dandylions (Taraxacum sp) . I had seen Dandylions up here only once before, and that was on the trail to Kahula Lake, the other side of Nanisivik. So it was a real treat for me, as I got to watch Travis blow the seeds away from his first Dandylion seed head. 
How cool is that?
We decided to head off to Victor Bay, where we knew there was Aira. However on the way I stopped long enough to photograph a group of Cotton Grass (Eriophorum scheuchzeri) at a small pond. This is one of three types of Cotton Grass in the area, one
Eriophorum vaginatum grows in tussocks, and the other Eriophorum angustifolium has many heads. All are beautiful.
We finally got some Aira,
out by Victor Bay and plan on frying it up tonight. There were some white Arctic Poppies (Papaver radicatum)
and Nodding Bladder-campion (Melandrium apetalum) 
as a bonus.
And when we finally made it to Victor Bay, the sun was low in the sky, and sharpened edges and sculpted light and shadow, and transformed the scene into something worthy of song. And certainly something worthy of better photography skills than mine.
Comments
3 responses
Here’s something I’ve pondered, and perhaps you can one day address it (or my ignorance): why are so many Arctic flowers white, pink, or purple? Are there many reds, oranges, or blues?
Hmm.. The easy answer is that I really don’t know. The vast majority of flowers here are white and yellow, with purple making up the rest. I can’t think of any red, orange or blue flowers, although some, like a certain flower that grows in a swampy areas (bog saxifrage? I’m really not sure of the name and I haven’t seen any this year) are approaching orange. Sorry there is a red flower up here, the flowers of the Mountain Sorrel are red, and now that I think of it the Milkvetchs are blue and white.
Of course we look at flowers from a humancentric point of view, the pollinators see flowers in the ultraviolet spectrum and in some cases, completely different then we do.
I do know that in some cases the colouration is tied to light. The Arctic Poppy for instance is usually yellow in colour, however there is a white phase, which is more common in areas that do not get as much sunlight.
I suppose that like many things in nature the answer is a lot more complex then we’d like to think. In short… I just don’t know
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