In the village of Martock (pop. 4800) in Somerset, UK, is a garden that represents a marital meeting of the minds. Yews Farm, and its beautiful farmhouse…..
…. with its small, north-facing front garden of tidy lawn and narrow shady border….
…. featuring foliage plants in elegant combinations…
… and soft shield fern (Polystichum setiferum)….
… doesn’t really prepare you for what you are about to see when you turn the corner. Here, separated by a tall hedge from the back of the garden, is a gravel courtyard filled with a jungle of plants grown for their bold forms and interesting foliage. Giant fennel (Ferula communis) grows cheek-and-jowl beside …..
…. Chinese rice-paper plant (Tetrapanax papyrifer) ……
….. with little surprises such as dragon lily (Dracunculus vulgaris) peeking out along the path.
Walk through the opening in the hedge to the expansive garden at the rear and you’ve entered a lush, green topiary wonderland with spirals and jelly-moulds sculpted from boxwood (Buxus sempervirens).
Look up and there is a very perky topiary terrier named Toto leading a leafy parade atop a hedge.
And just by chance, at that very moment, crossing Yew Farm’s charming terrace with its attractive tables and chairs and potted pelargoniums is the family’s non-topiary doppelgänger, a perky terrier.
Yews Farm is a 27-year collaboration between Fergus and Louise Dowding. When they acquired the 1-acre property with its farm outbuildings in 1996, it was agreed that they’d each get half the garden in which to do what they loved. For Fergus, that meant food-growing. For Louise, who had trained in landscape design at college and worked two years with the famous garden writer/designer Penelope Hobhouse in her garden at Bettiscombe, it would be her own style of ornamental gardening. Not for her the wavy “hose-pipe” border surrounding a vast lawn favoured by the previous owner. She tore out everything except an old pear tree, divided the garden area into four equal spaces, claimed two for herself and gave two to Fergus. While he promptly began growing Savoy cabbages, broccoli, peas and heritage Martock beans, Louise went for structure. Her borders featured numerous tiny boxwood plants which ultimately became a kind of magical sculpture garden, the topiaries necessitating an intense shearing each June to maintain their shape.
Like an abstract geometric painting, the topiaries form the background to the terrace. This is where Louise’s pelargonium collection and other conservatory plants spend summer, this one on a pretty wirework table….
…. and the heritage variety ‘Appleblossom Rosebud’ on a table nearby.
Introduced in 1870, this beautiful double geranium was beloved by Queen Victoria – or so the story goes. And who could blame her?
Louise’s borders are generally quiet in colour so as not to compete with the topiaries — the blues and purples of cranesbills, clematis and alliums enlivened here by the brilliant bronze hues of autumn fern (Dryopteris erythrosora).
Linaria purpurea ‘Canon Went’ and opium poppies (Papaver somniferum) are allowed to self-seed.
For Fergus, vegetable gardening is the reason to garden yet his spaces are beautiful, too. Since our visit is in the first half of an extraordinarily cool June, the squash and artichokes are still filling out…..
….and peas are still finding their legs on the pretty pea sticks.
An espaliered fruit tree occupies a neighbouring wall, and it’s clear that Louise has sneaked some foxgloves and poppies into this productive space with its topiary snails in the background.
For a North American, “cleft chestnut fencing” sounds like a quaint way to separate the ornamental part of the garden with its peonies and irises from the legacy farmyard beyond it.
The view below is back into the ornamental garden. I love that Yews Farm remains so well-rounded with a thoughtful sense of place that melds the lush urban garden with the hard-working agricultural past.
There’s a wildish meadow in the farmyard with oxeye daisies, potentilla and other self-seeding native wildflowers.
Hens do their bit for ecology, eating the weeds while delivering a bounty of fresh eggs as well.
A pair of pigs makes short work of garden waste while creating raw material for the compost pile.
Fergus is an organic gardener, so the compost bins are well-tended.
The neighbour’s cows sidle up to the farmyard fence to check out the tour group.
Garlic is set out to dry in airy crates.
Circling back towards the ornamental garden, I walk beside more old farm buildings and a charming profusion of self-seeded flowers growing in gravelly soil, including white licorice root (Ligusticum lucidum), yellow wild parsnip (Pastinaca sativa) and blue love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena). Though this looks naturally carefree, Louise manages the mix rigorously.
The ligusticum is an Ammi majus look-alike, but perennial and much tougher.
As we take our leave of this delightful garden, the newly-acquired ducks work up enough courage to draw close. As Louise wrote in an Instagram post: “Bought three enchanting White Campbell ducks to feast on the slugs and snails. They’ve done more damage than a 1000 Gastropods with their huge feet and bellies as wide as boats but a 1000 times more amusing“.
But the ducks, pigs and hens all find a home here in this charming Somerset landscape along with their owners, who have created an inspirational garden that celebrates all the gifts that nature offers to nourish both body and soul.
On my recent trip to England with Carolyn Mullet’s Carex Tours, one of the most beautiful gardens we saw was Malverleys, a private home in East Woodhay, Hampshire featuring an 1870s house on a 60-acre estate, of which 10 acres are intensively gardened, and the rest parkland or sheep pasture. We strolled in past the Topiary Meadow, formal yew topiaries in an ebullient meadow of wildflowers and grasses, reminiscent of the meadow at Great Dixter that I’d seen just days earlier. That isn’t surprising, perhaps, since Malverleys’ grounds manager is…..
……Mat Reese, who after training in horticulture at college, worked at Wisley, then Kew, before working with the late Christopher Lloyd at Dixter. Mat has become well-known in English gardening circles for his regular features in Gardens Illustrated that explore design principles he’s used at Malverleys. He makes a few introductory remarks, then leads us on our tour.
We begin in the Cloister Garden with its long rill and arching fountains leading from a statue of Neptune under a double allée of Japanese cherries.
The walls of the Cloister Garden are layered Cotswold stone topped with curved York stone slabs and adorned here and there with red valerian (Centranthus ruber). On our visit, the beautiful climbing rose ‘Meg’ was in full bloom.
‘Meg’ is a repeat-flowering, fragrant climber introduced in 1954 and still winning plaudits.
One of the notable features at Malverleys is that the gardens almost always frame the view from one garden into another . Here we see the neighbouring Hot Garden from the Cloister….
…… and the perfect frame of the statuary in the Cloister looking back from the Hot Garden.
Note the view from the sunken Hot Garden to the ornate chicken house/dovecote across the way. Though this garden was going through what the English call “the June gap” between the bulbs and early perennials of spring and the fulsome bloom of midsummer, it features a host of vibrantly-coloured trees, shrubs and herbaceous plants. The shrub rose at left, below,
…. is a dark-eyed cultivar called ‘For Your Eyes Only’, part of a trend in rose hybridization to use Rosa persica, which was once classified as Hulthemia persica but has now joined the Rosa genus.
The Hot Garden features strong colours of red, orange, pink and yellow with foliage extending from purple to chartreuse-gold. Aquilegia ‘Yellow Star’, Cotinus coggygria ‘Royal Purple’ and a lupine I believe is ‘Beefeater’.
Special plants are used here and in all the gardens. Below is Toona sinensis ‘Flamingo’ with its pink spring foliage that turns yellow before becoming green in summer.
I’m a great fan of lime and chartreuse foliage to liven the garden, and Cornus controversa ‘Aurea’, below, with its layered branching is one of the finest large shrubs.
At a different scale, but also bearing delightful gold leaves is the golden ghost bramble, Rubus cockburnianus ‘Goldenvale’.
The view, below, at the entrance into the Pond Garden from the Hot Garden is one of my favourite images from my stay in England. The statue is framed by Magnolia ‘Susan’ and the cascading flowers of Wisteria x valderi ‘Burford’. To the right are the yellow umbel flowers of giant fennel, Ferula communis and at lower right, Phlomis fruticosa. The wisteria is a hybrid of W. brachybotrys x W. floribunda, by wisteria expert James Compton, formerly head gardener at Chelsea Physic Garden.
Though the pond is a formal rectangular shape, its plantings are naturalistic, evoking a pond in a wild setting. Once again, you also see the view right through to the chicken house.
Next up is the Cool Garden with its copper water basin and relaxed planting scheme of blues, lavenders, whites and mauves.
Here the formality of the statuary contrasts with the cottage garden ethos
There’s a meadow-like quality to combinations here, like the columbines, blue woodruff and pink chervil.
Annuals such as blue woodruff (Asperula orientalis), below, are used throughout Malverleys to lend colour thorughout the season.
I love the delicate pink flowers of hairy chervil (Chaerophyllum hirsutum ‘Roseum’), one of many perennial umbellifers used at Malverleys.
Another annual used extensively by Mat in several gardens is slender corn cockle, Agrostemma gracile ‘Pink’, native to Greece. Below we see it with creeping navelwort, Omphalodes verna.
The most intensively-gardened part of Malverleys is the area around the 1870s house – a parallel border along the terrace, the East Border separating it from the other gardens and the Wedding Ring Border leading from the entrance, where Mat Reese lost his ring many years ago. Here, a late lilac was in flower, Syringa x josiflexa ‘Bellicent’ bred in 1936 by the renowned Canadian hybridist Isabella Preston.
Colours in the house borders are rich and jewel-like, with lots of purple, blue, magenta and red.
The walls of the 1870 Victorian mansion are cloaked with climbers……
….including Rosa ‘Buff Beauty’ and the yellow form of Lady Banks’ rose, R. banksiae ‘Lutea’. Plants like santolina are allowed to spill across the paving.
In the Terrace Garden is a single hybrid tea whose interesting pedigree resonated with Mat Reese. For this particular rose, ‘Mrs. Oakley-Fisher’, from 1921, is a cutting that came from a rose at Great Dixter that was in turn grown as a cutting sent by Vita Sackville-West to Christopher Lloyd many decades ago.
Again, we see the beautiful Lupinus ‘Beefeater’ in the house border, paired with the lilac-purple Californian native lacy phacelia, Phacelia tanacetifolia.
The bright magenta Byzantine gladiolus, G. communis var. byzantinus, plays a starring role in the house border, along with various alliums, perennial geraniums, eryngium, honeywort (Cerinthe major ‘Purpurascens’) and tall mauve corn cockle (Agrostemma gracile ‘Pink’).
Here is a detail from this lovely purple-blue-magenta border: Eryngium x zabelii ‘Big Blue’ & Geranium ‘Dragon Heart’
And another pretty pairing with slender corn cockle, Agrostemma gracile ‘Pink’ and Geranium ‘Brookside’
Leaving the House Garden, we come to The Stumpery. Popular in the Victorian era, it is described on the Malverleys website as a “woodland folly constructed out of a collection of old tree stumps positioned at dramatic angles”. Irrigated via overhead misting, it creates moisture needed for tree ferns and other shade-lovers.
There is a slightly Jurassic Park feeling to this little garden.
Heading into the big Walled Garden, we come to a spectacular sight whose flowering was timed just perfectly for our visit: the magnificent laburnum arch (L. watereri var. vossii). I have visited the late Rosemary Verey’s famous laburnum arch at Barnsley House (and chatted with her in her dining room) and have strolled the lovely laburnum walk at Vancouver’s VanDusen Botanical Garden, but neither was as lusciously floriferous as Malverleys.
The Walled Garden is large and diverse. It features cutting gardens, a peony border, a tennis court (below)……
….. and ornate fruit cages.
I am delighted to see Malverleys’ fabulous specimen of the famous Rosa ‘Climbing Cecile Brunner’ at peak bloom. How lucky to be in England in a June when the roses here and in the Rose Garden at Kew, which I visited days earlier, are perfection. This rose was introduced in California in 1894 by the German-born breeder Franz B. Hosp, who noticed the long wands of flowers sporting on one of the Cecile Brunner polyantha sweetheart shrub roses he grew and selected it as a climber. Repeat-flowering, it will reach 6 m (20 ft) when happy.
The Kitchen Garden contains a profusion of leafy vegetables, many now destined to be featured in the brand-new…..
……Malverleys Farm & Dining shop which just by chance happens to have its grand opening on the day of our visit. According to a December article in the Sunday Times, Emily von Opel, who with her husband Georg owns Malverley and loves walking the paths of the garden to “escape from the hustle and bustle of life”, decided to open the space to serve dishes made from the produce of the kitchen garden, provide a workshop venue and offer British-made homewares and plants for sale.
Doesn’t this bouquet say “June”, with all its romantic profusion?
Plants are offered for sale as well.
Finally…. I’ve saved the best for last, because Malverleys has justifiably become famous for its luscious White Garden. And having visited Sissinghurst’s renowned version just the week before, I would have to say that Mat Reese scores the grand prize for his interpretation, which is clearly at its peak in early June. Though most of the plants feature white flowers, there are a few, like the strongly-perfumed hybrid musk Rosa ‘Penelope’ with its pale peach-pink blossoms, included.
Peonies, white foxgloves, Eremurus ‘Joanna’, Lupinus ‘Noble Maiden’ and wisteria surround one of four formal raised pools in the White Garden.
And a final image from the White Garden of Papaver orientale ‘Royal Wedding’ and Lupinus ‘Polar Princess’. Thanks to Malverleys, for its horticultural excellence, beautiful design and generosity to the community.
It is somewhat daunting to write about a garden whose owners are a world-renowned designer with a lyrical, thoughtful writing style and a photographer-writer who chronicles their garden’s finest moments (and his own delicious recipes) in mouth-watering images for their beautiful online magazine Dig Delve. But to visit Hillside is to be enchanted – by its story, its scope, its exquisite melding of the garden to the land, and the land to the garden, and what came long before. So I will attempt to capture a little of the great joy of my short time there in early June.
We start in the outdoor kitchen where our gracious and hospitable hosts, Dan Pearson, left, and Huw Morgan, right, serve us a refreshing elderflower concoction in pretty pottery cups. Here we hear a little history before wandering the 20-acre smallholding near Bath, which they purchased in 2010 from the estate of the previous owner, Raymond Lewis, an elderly farmer born on the property who had grazed his cattle to the very edges of the rolling limestone pastures and milked the cows in an old tin barn. Upon his death, friends living across the stream at the bottom of the valley below told Dan and Huw that the property was available. After walking the fields with the farmer’s brother, visiting the old orchard and inspecting the house that had last been decorated when the brothers’ mother was alive, Dan wrote later in The Guardian: “There were no ifs, buts or maybes. No doubt. It was where we wanted to be.” It would take three trips from London eight months later, the car boot jammed with favourite plants from their long, narrow Peckham garden, to begin to put their minds to this vast empty canvas.
They went slowly, doing little for the first years. As Dan wrote in Dig Delve, “It took that long to know what to do with the place and what has felt right here.” In autumn 2012, they installed a pair of 18th century granite troughs used originally for tanning leather, now intended to gather rainwater. Once the steep land grade was levelled on this upper spine, the troughs would connect the house with the barns and form the gateway to what would become the new kitchen garden beyond.
The horizontal line of the troughs, in the background below, also echoes the horizontal line of 52 ancient beech trees on Freezing Hill in the far distance, which occupies a Bronze Age landform between Somerset and the Cotswolds.
In gravelly rubble between the house and the troughs, Dan grows favourite clumping plants such as eryngium and calamint along with a host of self-seeders: cephalaria, corn cockle, silvery ballota, poppies, blue flax and a white California poppy (Eschscholzia californica ‘Ivory Castle’).
To understand the initial challenges posed by the steep lie of the land, it’s helpful to read Dan’s essay The Kitchen Garden tracking the 4-year progress from the trough installation to the first harvest. As he wrote, “When we arrived here the flat ground was literally no more than a strip in front of the outbuildings. We perched a table and chairs there to make the most of not being on the angle”. Gardening on the steep hillside was a challenge: “Sowing, thinning, weeding and harvesting on a slope were all that much harder with one leg shorter than the other and tools and buckets balanced.” In time the ground near the barns was leveled and a breeze-block wall built to hold back the sloping fields above, to reflect heat and the fragrance of perfumed plants……
…. and to give fruits such as cordon-espaliered pears, below, a warm surface on which to ripen. A fig in this area is a cutting of ‘White Marseilles’ from Dan’s project at Lambeth Palace, the parent plant “brought from Rome by the last Roman Catholic Archbishop of Canterbury, Cardinal Reginald Pole, in 1556.”
In the early years, trees were planted: several in a new orchard; some in a ‘blossom wood’ of native species; hazels and alders down by the stream; memorial trees to honour missed friends; and a katsura grove in the valley with its exquisite autumn perfume to evoke Dan’s long project at Tokachi Forest in Hokkaido, Japan. Trial beds held David Austin roses for cutting, 56 varieties of dahlia and a rainbow of tulips. Signature plants appeared, including different species of towering giant fennel (Ferula spp.), a Mediterranean plant I saw first in the ruins of Troy many years ago, so it always makes me think of Homer to see it now. Dan has used Ferula communis subsp. glauca in his design for the Delos Garden at Sissinghurst. (More on that later.)
Rusticity and a sense of place is preserved in the tin walls of the barn, a backdrop to feverfew, bronze fennel and the unusual lilac-purple valerian, Centranthus lecoqii.
English gardeners seem to grow more umbellifers than I’ve counted anywhere in my North American travels, and I had to ask Dan twice the name of the lovely one below. It’s Athamanta turbith, a cold-hardy native of the Balkans.
Another plant used by Dan in Delos at Sissinghurst also appears in this upper garden: tall pink Dianthus carthusianorum, shown here (in terrible sunlight, sorry) with Achillea ‘Moonlight’.
Constructed in spring 2014, the kitchen garden comprises a double row of steel-edged, rectangular beds with a broad walk in-between.
The soil where the vegetables grow is rich and productive. According to an elderly neighbour, in the 1960s the former owner’s parents grew vegetables in a market garden on the slopes, and berried boughs from holly trees still standing were harvested for Christmas wreaths for the market.
Creative trellising allows vertical growing of cucumbers and summer squash. Other crops include courgettes, French and runner beans, peppers, salad greens, carrots, turnips, beets, sweet corn and tomatoes (in a poly house).
Berries and currants are grown in beds with frames that can be netted later against birds.
Time is fleeting and Dan leads us down a path through the meadows towards the brook. When I look up the hill through a bouquet of massive Gunnera manicata leaves….
….. that I literally held above my head as I passed under them a moment earlier, illustrating the deceptive scale, I see the cluster of buildings at the top. Closest is the milking barn, now the studio office where Dan and Huw carry out their design work. To its right is the main ornamental garden, which we’ll visit in a few minutes.
On the way to the pond, Dan pauses in the meadow surrounded by oxeye daisies (Leucanthemum vulgare), buttercups (Ranunculus acris) and black knapweed (Centaurea nigra). He is in the process of overseeding the meadows with yellow rattle and native orchids, including gift seeds harvested by Fergus Garrett at Great Dixter, to improve the biodiversity here.
The pond is just two years old, the marginal plants still finding their feet. But water has always been important to Dan in a garden – and this pond might host two-legged swimmers, as well as aquatic flora.
I am fond of meadows, having grown one or two myself, so I take note of the red campion (Silene dioica)……
….. and blue-flowered Caucasian comfrey (Symphytum caucasicum).
Water runs in a ditch through parts of the low meadows and after planting the banks with marsh marigolds and snowdrops, Dan sought to add small bridges. Apart from a pair made of stone, he riffed on Japanese landscape design with his own timber zig-zag bridge.
In the damp ground alongside the bridge grows Iris x robusta ‘Dark Aura’.
Despite watching my legs and hands as I navigate the paths, the stinging nettles (Urtica dioica) seem to recognize a feckless Canadian and soon I am rubbing my wrist with a dock leaf (Rumex obtusifolius) proffered by Dan. (It helps with the sting but I have impressive raised welts the next day that cause me to reflect on the traditional medicinal value of this common European plant which, I suppose, would cause you to forget about your chronic arthritis while your skin deals with the acute inflammation.)
Back at the top, we are now let loose in Hillside’s ornamental garden, which occupies several large, irregularly-shaped beds on the upper slope. Planted in Spring 2017 and finished in Autumn 2017, it was the result of five years of waiting and planning. There is so much to see here, but not nearly enough time to study it carefully.
Burgundy Knautia macedonica is stealing the show, with yellow Euphorbia wallichii in the rear. The profusion of summer perennials and ornamental grasses is still to come, which we can glimpse thanks to Dig Delve’s back issues.
A dark opium poppy (Papaver somniferum) is the progeny of gifted seed from plants Dan saw when cycling to work in his early 20s. It is the only variety he grows, careful not to let it hybridize with the mauve and pink ones his neighbours grow.
The ornamental garden is a keen plantsman’s lair and it is such fun for us to learn the names of new plants. This is Nepeta ‘Blue Dragon’ a large-flowered hybrid of N. yunnanensis and N. nervosa.
Greek native yellow-banded iris (Iris orientalis) partners with a caramel-colored baptisia in one place…
…. while perfumed sweet peas twine pea sticks in another.
Sulfur clover (Trifolium ocroleuchon) has many of us clicking shutters.
Though it would be lovely to stay another week, there’s just enough time to see the latest chapter at Hillside. This spring, after contemplating the site for a few years and planting it first with a green manure, then a pastel mix of Nigel Dunnett’s ‘Pictorial Meadows’ seeds, a new garden has taken shape. It’s a Mediterranean garden inspired partly by Dan’s work recreating the Delos Garden at Sissinghurst, where he’s been a consultant for almost a decade.
The new garden features a 6-inch mulch of sharp sand, following principles established by Swedish designer Peter Korn. It features drought-tolerant plants such as lilac Phlomis italica, below, verbascums and N. American desert perennials like Sphaeralcea ambigua.
I was fortunate to have visited Sissinghurst the previous weekend and saw the Delos Garden….
….. richly planted with asphodelines and sages, among other Mediterranean plants.
Its stone altars were brought in the 1820s from the Greek island by Vita Sackville-West’s husband Harold Nicholson’s seafaring great grandfather and acquired at auction by Harold when the family house in Ireland was sold in 1936. I have a special fondness for the sacred island of Delos….
…. having visited myself in autumn more than a decade ago when the grasses and wildflowers had gone to seed and were blowing in the hot wind, below. It was my fervent desire to return one day in spring when the flowers are in bloom, but seeing Dan’s garden at Sissinghurst in early June might be the closest I come.
As we head back to the open kitchen, I pass a handsome shrub that Dan tells me is his friend Dan Hinkley’s introduction Hydrangea serrata ‘Plum Passion’.
And in a sheltered spot near the house are pots of perfumed dianthus and society garlic (Tulbaghia ‘Moshoeshoe’).
As our visit is coming to an end, we are invited to sit and enjoy the lovely English garden tour custom of “tea and cake”. Huw Morgan has worked his magic on blackcurrants, garnished lavishly with rose petals…..
….. and quite possibly the best lemon pound cake I’ve ever tasted, garnished with tiny elderflowers and lemon slices.
And after the last crumb is finished and it’s time to head into Bath nearby, Dan and Huw insist on posing with us for a group photo – the perfect hosts with the perfect garden at the end of a perfect visit in Somerset.
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If you like naturalistic meadow gardening, you might wish to read my blog on Piet Oudolf’s entry border at the Toronto Botanical Garden, published as:
We could have hung out by the hotel pool sipping a cool drink and reading our mystery books. After all, a salt-rimmed margarita in the hot sun when it’s snowing hard at home is always a welcome respite in winter. But you don’t get to experience real Mexico by doing that. If, like me, you’re interested in nature and getting out of the tourist enclaves, if you want to see desert or jungle or mountains untouched by development, you have to have a plan. My plan while visiting the little town of Zihuatanejo on the Pacific coast north of Acapulco involved researching what was available nearby. This was our fourth visit to Villa Carolina, below, a small palapa hotel on Playa la Ropa in this former fishing village, a hippie town in the 1960s (seriously, Timothy Leary tried to create an LSD-fuelled communal living project here in 1963, but got shut down by Mexican authorities) that has become a favourite beach getaway not just for Americans and Canadians, but for Mexicans with vacation homes.
But the difference between our last visit in 2006 and winter 2023 is that a new ecological park had been developed not too many miles away and I was determined to pay a visit to El Refugio de Potosi. Which is how we ended up in the back seat of our guide Javier Pérez Sosa’s car at 8 am heading southeast through little towns on the highway.
I had told Javier in advance that I was interested in native flora and hummingbirds, so we parked beside the road in the countryside where I was surprised to see a wetland covered with water lettuce (Pistia striatotes). Though listed as an invasive most everywhere, no one really knows where it originated; various experts believe it to have been native to both Africa and South America, thus it is called “pantropical”.
What was most interesting was these native Mexican birds called northern jacanas (Jacana spinosa) that were wandering on top of the water lettuce, as you can see with the black adult and grey juvenile below. They’re perfectly adapted as waders with big feet to walk on floating plants, including water lilies, feeding on insects on the leaves or small fish below the surface.
We walked up a dusty driveway to an abandoned farm hut as Javier pointed out various birds in the trees around us. But he wanted to show me the green fruit of the cirian tree (Crescentia alata), also called the Mexican calabash, cannonball tree, jicaro, morrito or morro.
The hard fruit, once hollowed out, is sometimes used to make maracas or food and drink containers. It is believed that at one time megafauna were responsible for dispersal of the seeds; today the fruit is often broken open by horses which use their hooves to crush them in order to eat the seeds.
Back in the car and headed towards El Refugio, Javier slowed briefly and opened the back window so I could photograph a native roadside flower whose nickname, he said, means “hairbrush”. It is one of the Combretum genus endemic to Mexico, likely C. farinosum.
It wasn’t long before we arrived at the stone walls of the 7-hectare El Refugio de Potosi. Outside was a wonderful piece of art, a “Fish of Found Objects” made entirely of trash: beer cans, plastic plates, bleach bottles, toilet floats, compact disks, old toys, etc. As founder Laurel Patrick would tell me later about the fish, a community effort sponsored and financed by El Refugio: “We collected items from the road and the beach and others brought stuff they found or no longer use to create the sculpture. Obviously most of the donated items came from foreigners as the average local Mexican family does not have a surplus of unused or unneeded items. The goal is to use the Fish to start conversations about trash and littering. For many it was their very first opportunity to participate in such a project or to exercise even the most basic of design/art options.” (You can read here a 2013 story that relates how Laurel Patrick was inspired to create the refuge.)
Just inside the parking area, there were zebra longwing butterflies (Heliconius charithonia) nectaring on Ixora coccinea.
Nearby a geiger tree (Cordia sebestena) was in flower. Though most of the flora here is native, there are many beautiful tropical plants to catch the eye.
I also noted the first of many infographics we would see here. Understanding local ecology is one thing; grasping it in the context of deep time on the planet is what inspires visitors and reminds them that this is more than a wildlife refuge.
Then came the Ciclo de las Rocas. The rock cycle is not something every school student focuses on, but is the essence of geologic cycling on earth (and a natural component of climate change). Magma forms from earth’s molten crust and mantle; sometimes magma is extruded through volcanic openings and fissures (left) as lava that cools as extrusive igneous rock. Beneath the earth’s surface, metamorphic rock also melts as magma, later cooling and crystallizing as igneous rock. Tectonics slowly, over millions of years, thrusts the rock to the surface in the form of mountains. Weathering and erosion bring the rock and eventually entire mountain ranges back down as sediments (sand, mud, pebbles, etc.) which are carried into low basins and rivers, then into oceans. The sediments compact and cement together to become various layers or strata of sedimentary rock. Tectonics, i.e. subduction of one plate under another along coasts, eventually brings them underground where extreme heat and pressure change them once again into metamorphic rock which melts and is uplifted as part of mountain-building. This cycle has occurred everywhere on the planet over its 4.5 billion years.
Along the path, we came to a new little museum, the finishing touches still being applied.
Birds are shown….
….. along with their eggs, biggest to smallest.
Javier spent time stressing Mexico’s great biodiversity. The country, which occupies only 1.5% of earth’s surface, punches far above its weight in biodiversity, hosting 10% of the planet’s known species. It is in 3rd place globally in mammal diversity, 2nd place in reptiles, with insects representing the biggest share of Mexican fauna, almost 48,000 recorded species. When El Refugio’s owner Laurel Patrick first came to the region in the 1980s on winter vacation from Hood River, Oregon, where she owned a tree nursery, she became fascinated by the flora and fauna of the region but found few people who could talk to her about it. Conservation was virtually non-existent in the area. Eventually, she built a beach house near the small town of Barra de Potosi while partnering with biologist Pablo Mendizabal to create a non-profit center highlighting the wildlife and flora of the region. Finally, she made the decision to sell both her tree nursery and her beach house in order to fund and devote herself fully to El Refugio de Potosi. Construction began in 2008 and doors opened to the public in 2009. Three years later, she was named Conservationist of the Year by the National Commission of Natural Protected Areas.
We passed a boulder-edged pond filled with aquatic plants where the resident neotropical river otter (Lontra longicaudis) was swimming. He climbed up the rocky bank, gave my sneakers a quick sniff, then wandered off. El Refugio is both a wildlife refuge and research centre, so animals living here have either been rescued as rejected pets or as injured or orphaned animals. We would meet many others, like the otter, on our tour.
Orange-fronted parakeets (Aratinga canicularis) peered out at us from their cage. These birds, though not endangered, are often captured by illegal traders for the pet industry.
A beautiful, mosaic-tiled concrete armchair marked the hummingbird feeding station where dozens of feisty birds of a number of species were vying for a taste. Laurel Patrick made this under the tutelage of mosaic artist Sherri Warner Hunter.
Black-chinned hummingbirds perched daintily…..
…. while cinnamon hummingbirds flew between the feeders and nearby shrubs This is a male, indicated by the rufous feathers and the black tip on its red bill. I’ve included a video a little later in this blog showing the frenzy at the feeders.
The biome here is Coastal Tropical Dry Forest. The rainy season in the Zihuatanejo area is mostly June-October and the temperature is fairly consistent with daytime highs around 30-32C and night temperatures around 20-24C.
Infographics near the animal cages give a summary of their diet, habitat, litter size, diurnal/nocturnal nature and species stability.
We were able to meet the Mexican dwarf hairy porcupine (Coendu mexicanus) whose daytime nap we briefly interrupted.
A little further down the path were a coatimundi (Nasua narica) and collared peccary (Dicotyles tajacu), aka javelina, who live together peaceably.
Most impressive of all the habitats at El Refugio is the large military macaw enclosure.
Outside was another interesting infographic, this one on the evolutionary status of flightless birds.
Nearest the door in the enclosure was a military macaw (Ara militaris mexicanus) on a termite nest. In the wild, macaws are known to make their own nests on these structures.
Says Laurel Patrick: “The military macaws are certainly endangered in the wild and once populated this area. The 14 macaws that reside here were either rescues or the result of a breeding pair that have sanctuary here. My dream is to train a group of the macaws to free fly towards scattered feeding stations during the day and return to a safety cage at night. Because they are birds that have been in captivity throughout life, they cannot just be released as they have zero survival skills. The project will require participation from the local communities as these birds are frequentlypoached and can be sold for a significant amount. There is still a strong market for wild birds to cage, even though it is strictly prohibited in Mexico.”
I was fascinated by the rock-gathering being done by the macaws. One seemed to be chewing on a fairly large stone, similar to my childhood budgie working on the cuttlebone in his cage.
Here’s that little video I promised earlier:
The iguana enclosure contained several large green iguanas (Iguana iguana) hiding in the striped leaves of a screw pine (Pandanus spp.) or noshing on chopped-up cabbage, but we were also treated to the sight of the less well-known spiny-tailed iguana (Ctenosaura pectinata), native to western Mexico.
The biggest exhibit here is the 60-foot-long sperm whale skeleton (Physeter macrocephalus). The whale was found in 2009,washed up and decomposing on a beach nearby. Many local people helped to bring it to El Refugio where it was assembled and mounted. Sperm whales are the largest toothed predators in the world, but they are smaller than blue whales which can grow to more than 100 feet in length.
The finger-like bones in its flippers (toothed whales or odontocetes have five bones, untoothed whales or mysticetes like the blue whale, Baleena azul, have four) provide an excellent illustration of homologous limb structures, now adapted for different functions, but indicating that humans, whales and bats share a common ancestor.
Nearby, artist Daniel Brito was beginning work on a mural that would show the human evolutionary path out of water.
As Laurel explained, apart from the ancient horsetails (Equisetum), it will also include the ginkgo tree (G. biloba), with its deep evolutionary lineage.
This area featured another ancient plant, a cycad – sago palm (Cycas revoluta) – to help tell the evolutionary story, along with large native ferns.
More interpretive signage stressed the role of insects on earth, whose known species currently tally more than a million species – and likely a multiple of that number of insects not yet found or categorized.
I stopped to admire more tropical garden flowers, including hibiscus….
….. and golden dewdrops (Duranta erecta).
Javier pointed out the yellow flowers of nanche (Brysonima crassifolia), a native shrub whose small fruit is popular as a dessert and a liqueur.
We finished our visit with a climb to the top of the 60-foot-tall (18 m) observation tower. For Laurel, it was important to have a feature that gave people from the area, who perhaps have never travelled by plane or even been in a skyscraper, the opportunity to look over the landscape all the way to the horizon.
From the top, we could gaze over the rooftops of El Refugio’s buildings and nearby coconut plantations to the Pacific Ocean and the rocky, white islands called Los Morros de Potosi.
In the other direction, we could see the Sierra Madres and the nearby Laguna Carrizo. On its far shore, I saw a line of white which, when I changed to my little telephoto camera…
…. became hundreds of American white pelicans (Pelecanus erythrorhynchos) along the shore, fishing in their Mexican winter home. The largest migratory bird, its breeding ground is in Canada and the northern U.S.
Our visit was over but it was lunchtime! We travelled to nearby Laguna de Potosi where open-sided beachfront cafes with covered roofs called “enramadas” were serving food. We let Javier pick his favourite.
I seldom order beer, but after several hours of touring in the heat, I was happy to sample Mexican Victoria beer….
…. followed by tasty fish tacos.
If my knees weren’t so tetchy, we might have taken a kayak out for a spin on the laguna! There is so much to see. Next time.
We took the coast road home to Zihuatanejo where the day ended with yet another beautiful Mexican sunset from Playa la Ropa.
Apart from public open hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings, there are three approved guides on this page who can visit by appointment at other times. I highly recommend Javier Pérez of Explora Ixtapa who can be reached via Whatsapp at 52-755-104-7392. (He also does bicycle tours.)
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Do you love Mexico, too? You might enjoy reading my musical love letter to Mexico, part of a blog series I did a few years ago.
The final morning on our Adventure Canada Eastern Arctic expedition saw us sailing up the 190 km-long (120-mile) Kangerlussuaq Fjord. Unlike some of the turquoise blue water we had seen in Greenland, this one was decidedly murky, the product of all the silt that flows into it from the ice sheet. In fact there are actually silt quicksand patches up to a kilometre in size in the area, and tourists are cautioned about going near them. Kangerlussuaq is the Greenlandic word for “Big Fjord”, thus the reason why people might be confused to find there’s a second, non-related Kangerlussuaq Fjord on Greenland’s east coast. Although the fjord crosses the Arctic Circle, the effect of ocean currents is that it does not freeze. Thus, historically, it’s been a centre for fishing and whaling. We left the ship for a short bus tour of the region.
Its relatively mild weather was instrumental in Kangerlussuaq being established as the military base “Bluie West 8” (with Bluie the Allied code word for Greenland) by the Americans during World War II, when it was used as a refuelling and staging ground for flights onward to Europe. After the war, it became part of the American Cold War push to monitor Russia, in conjuction with Thule Air Base in north Greenland. It is now the country’s main air transport hub, and the site of its biggest commercial airport. On our tour, we paid a visit to the town museum, which is a rather weird hybrid of displays honouring the U.S. Air Force and SAS Airlines, which was once based here.
Muskox roam these parts and we would see some in the distance later in our tour, but this one stood still for a photo.
I loved this simple bouquet of native cotton grass (Eriophorum spp.) on the windowsill.
We headed over the nearby bridge towards the hills nearby. Qinnguata Kuussua is a river that drains the nearby Russell Glacier and feeds into the fjord. In the old days, it was called the Watson River. When I snapped this photo on August 6th showing the might of the rushing glacial meltwater…..
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….taking a tractor and operator with it. He survived!
Later today, our flight home would leave from the runway in front of the white and red buildings, which we spied from a rocky hilltop above town.
I used my zoom lens to get a better look at the airport area. Although some of the buildings looked like the paintbox-coloured prefabs from Denmark that we’d seen in other Greenland towns, the flat-roofed hostel on the right, called “Old Camp”, is a former U.S. Air Force barracks.
As we walked about up there in the hills, I found Arctic blueberry (Vaccinium uliginosum) and sampled a few out of the hand. The verdict: very similar in taste to the lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium angustifolium) that grow around our cottage on Lake Muskoka, in central Ontario.
I did spot a muskox, which I had to take on faith from our guide – because it looked like a slow-moving black rock from where we sat.
And then, for my first time in Greenland, I looked across the valley and spied the ice sheet, just visible over the rocky mountains, with the Russell Glacier in front, below. What a thrill that was! Tourists can take bus tours up onto the ice sheet. “What do they do?” I ask our tour guide. “They throw snowballs and take photos and get back on the bus”, he said. “Oh,” I answered. But how I would love to have gone up that road to stare off at the endless frozen white plain!
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I’ve been thinking about Greenland’s ice sheet over the past two months, as I’ve published these ten blogs about our trip with Adventure Canada to Nunavut and Greenland. As is always the case with my travels, I tend to discover more about the natural and cultural history of the places I’ve visited after I return home. That’s when I go through my photos and use the internet to help me understand what I saw. In the case of Greenland, it’s what I only caught a glimpse of that I longed to know more about, which led me to buy this book by Jon Gertner, ‘The Ice at the End of the World‘, which I mentioned in my blog on Ilulissat.
I finished it just a few weeks ago, full of astonishment at the stories of the explorers, military types and scientists who travelled to the ice sheet and took on the challenge of its extreme conditions. Some wanted simply to cross it, because that had never been done, even by the Inuit who inhabited its more temperate, rocky shores. Ice covers almost 80% of Greenland, as you can see in the Google map below. At more than 2,670 km ( mi) long and 1,050 kim (650 mi) wide from east to west at its widest point, it encompasses 972,000 sq km (375,000 sq mi). Look how many United Kingdoms would fit into Greenland!
On the Greenland side, our ports of call had been in the narrow, populated region along Greenland’s southwest from Uummannaq in the north to Kangerlussuaq. Much of the rest of Greenland’s coasts are as unapproachable now as they were when the first explorers visited in the late 19th century.
Having read Gertsen’s book from beginning to end, his chapters on the first man to cross Greenland, Norway’s Fridtjof Nansen (1861-1930), were my favourite. Much has been written about Nansen, who was something of an athletic legend in Norway, having won several consecutive national cross-country skiing championships as a youth. Born in what is now Oslo to a well-to-do family who encouraged hard work and public service, his passion for the Arctic took hold at the age of 20. Newly graduated from university in zoology, he travelled to the Arctic on the sealing vessel ‘Viking’, making observations on animal life, sea ice and ocean movement. He also began to write copious journals that have enriched the history of exploration. When he caught sight of the mostly uninhabited east coast of Greenland, he was entranced, for no European had been up on the ice. After returning to Norway, he spent 6 years as Curator of Natural History at the Bergen Museum, in the process earning his PhD.
He was 27 when he launched his bid to make the first documented crossing of the Greenland ice sheet, spending six months raising money and hiring five fellow adventurers who were skilled skiers. After journeying from Norway via Denmark, Scotland and the Faroe Islands, his team set sail from northwest Iceland on the sealing ship ‘Jason’ on June 22, 1888, heading roughly towards Cape Dan on Greenland’s east coast. Nansen’s rationale was simple: going east to west across the ice sheet would be a one-way trip, since no ship would chance a pickup of the explorers on the wild east coast, whereas the west coast was navigable in season. Thus his motto: “West coast or death.”
But thick pack ice kept the Jason far from the eastern shore. On July 17th, once their destination was sighted within 10 miles, Nansen and his men took their supplies in two small boats over the side of the ship onto the ice floes. Their adventure almost ended there, for they spent 10 days off the coast in the freezing North Atlantic, rowing when they could, or camping on the floes when the sea ice thickened, all the while being driven south with the ice. Ice floes cracked beneath them and they rocked on the waves which crashed around them and carried them far out to sea. Finally, the ocean currents worked to their favour; eleven days after they launched they were able to make it to shore, but about 120 miles south of where they intended to begin. After rejoicing in the grasses and heather and having a picnic with hot chocolate, they began the trek north, alternately rowing the boats or hauling them on shore, greeting a few Inuit men in passing kayaks or in their encampments as they travelled. Given the lateness of the season, Nansen elected a more southerly route towards Godthaab (present-day Nuuk) that would cut significant mileage off their trip.
On August 11th, they began their ascent towards the ice sheet, encountering the treacherous crevasse zone at its edge. As Gertner writes: “What proved to be especially treacherous about the crevasse zone, Nansen would learn, wasn’t the largest cracks but the smallest. Many were snow-shrouded and undetectable, so much so that he might be moving along a seemingly smooth surface and plunge down suddenly into a fissure in the ice, saved only by a reflexive urge to outstretch his arms. The fall would leave him up to his armpits in snow, his legs dangling over nothingness.” (In August 2020, as I wrote in my blog on Ilulissat and the Jakobshavn Icefjord, those treacherous crevasses or moulins would claim the life of a modern-day scientist, Konrad Steffen, who ventured out alone from his Swiss Camp near Ilulissat, only to lose his life, likely because of a failed snow bridge.) Nansen’s team’s heavy sledges were made of ash and steel; their skis of oak and birch. But their skis were still packed away, in favour of boots with crampons for the steep angle in the crevasse zone.
By September 2nd, the ice sheet levelled out to a gradual uphill slope and the team switched to their skis. On some days, the walls of their tents, which at night had often been rimed with frost as the temperature sank to more than -40C/-40F, served as sails for ski-sailing across the flatter parts of the ice.
On September 12th, after reaching the summit of the ice sheet at around 8,000 feet, the ground sloped away and they realized they were on the downward slope. Five days later, two months after leaving the Jason, they heard the song of the snow bunting and knew they were near the west coast. On September 17th, they sighted land, but they were now at the crevasse zone of the west coast of Greenland. It would be another week of advancing, retreating, moving diagonally and sideways, as if on a chessboard, before descending on September 24th from a steep slope onto a bed of gravel. Even though they were 90 miles from their destination at Gothaab, they were now at sea level. They had done it! They would only need to build a boat from willow branches and the canvas from their tents! Nansen christened it the “tortoise shell” but it was not their magic carpet, for the fjord where they landed was too shallow, so they had to drag their boat along the shore in sections of their journey. Finally, on October 3rd, they paddled into the harbour of Godthaab, to be greeted by a Danish official. “All along the western coast of Greenland, they had been waiting for Nansen’s arrival.” The last boat for Europe had departed two months earlier, so the team had to spend winter in Greenland, finally arriving home in May 1889.
In 1893, just four years after arriving home and writing two books on the trek across Greenland (1890) and Eskimo Life (1891), Nansen returned to Greenland with a specially-constructed ship called Fram, below, whose three-layered hull had been designed to his specifications to withstand freezing in the pack ice. It would survive its three-year stay in the ice-filled waters off Greenland and return to Norway like the maritime hero that it was – eventually, the only wooden ship to have reached both the furthest north (with Nansen) and south latitudes (later to Antarctica with Roald Amundsen). As for Nansen, he would go on to a storied career, as a professor at the University of Oslo and Norway’s Ambassador to London. In 1922, following the First World War, he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his humanitarian work, especially for the identification card called the “Nansen passport”, issued by the League of Nations as a travel document to stateless refugees. It enabled the release and repatriation of more than 450,000 prisoners-of-war. He was also the international mediator in the Greek-Turkey conflict and the war between Armenia and Turkey.
Gertner’s book goes on to describe in vivid detail the exploration stories of Robert Peary (1856-1920), one of the more colourful and fame-absorbed American figures, who in spring 1892 left his American wife Josephine on the west coast of Greenland and charted a northern route across 600 miles of the ice sheet with his assistant Matthew Henson to land at a remote, unexplored part of the island’s north coast.
On a later expedition, with his wife back home in the States, he not only left behind the American flag on a small, snowy hillock at what he judged to be the North Pole, a “first in history” that was later determined to be off the mark by several miles, but also two sons, born in 1900 and 1906 to his teenaged Inuit mistress Aleqasina or “Ally”. His Greenlandic great-grandson, Hivshu, or Robert Peary II, has a fascinating website in which he explores the relationship of his American great-grandfather (the father of his grandfather Kale), to the Inuit people he lived with in Greenland, including six he took back to the Natural History Museum in New York, with tragic consequences.
Knud Rasmussen (1879-1933), the Greenland-born explorer whose museum home we had visited in Ilulissat days before, made several trips throughout the Arctic. In 1912, he and his Danish friend Peter Freuchen, right below, undertook the First Thule Expedition, a 1000 km (620 mile) gruelling voyage across the ice sheet with four sleighs and 53 dogs. In three weeks, they reached Peary Land near the north coast, named for Robert Peary and his expedition 20 years earlier. In fact, Freuchen found Peary’s time capsule buried in a rock cairn: a brandy bottle with a note inside. As was the custom, Freuchen removed Peary’s note (to be returned to the sender) and left his own note within.
Rasmussen’s Second Thule Expedition in 1917 across the ice sheet to the northern fjords aimed to learn about the area’s geology and map its glaciers. Tragically, a lack of food and hunting opportunities resulted in the starvation death of a Danish botanist and the disappearance and presumed death of an Inuit team member. But Rasmussen is most famous for his Fifth Thule Expedition, begun in 1921, lasting until 1924, and stretching by dogsled right across Northern North America to Siberia. This 20,000 mile expedition was ethnographic in nature, with Rasmussen conducting interviews with the northern peoples and collecting songs. At the end, he wrote a popular book called Across Arctic America, below. As the modern ethnographer Wade Davis says of Rasmussen, “In character, heart, motivation and vision, Rasmussen was everything that Peary was not. What he achieved in a life cut short — he would die at 54, having eaten an Inuk delicacy tainted with salmonella — a man of Peary’s ilk could neither appreciate nor understand. An enamelled faith in the superiority of his own culture left Peary half-blind, even as he stumbled north to the pole.”
Many of us know the German explorer Alfred Wegener (1880-1930), who was also a geophysicist and meteorologist, for his famous contribution to our understanding of plate tectonics. Having observed that the shapes of adjacent continents seemed to fit together across oceans like a jigsaw puzzle, he coined the phrase “continental drift” in 1915 in his book The Origins of Continents and Oceans. The mechanism he proposed was wrong, but it was the first time a scientist had theorized that earth’s land masses might have broken apart and separated from a larger land mass (later called Pangaea). But Wegener had another passion in life: the exploration of the Arctic born from, as Jon Gertner writes, “a recurrent craving for intense physical experiences“.
Archives of the Alfred Wegener Institute.
As a 25-year-old in 1906, Wegener was chief scientist of the 28-member Denmark Expedition to chart remote and unexplored areas of Greenland’s north coast. His diaries from that trip (which also included a young Peter Freuchen) featured measurements still important in modern historical records, of air pressure, temperature and wind. But the expedition was gruelling, and also resulted in the loss of its three Danish leaders to starvation and exhaustion on the ice sheet.
It would not daunt Wegener. In 1912, he joined a colleague from the Denmark expedition, J.P. Koch, along with Vigfus Sigurdsson from Iceland and Lars Larsen from Denmark to depart Danmark Harbour on the east coast and overwinter on Greenland’s ice sheet — the first time any expedition had attempted to do so. It would be called The Danish North Greenland Expedition. Instead of sled dogs, they used 13 Icelandic horses, believing them to be superior for hauling supplies up the steep promontories leading to the ice. During the journey, they would be forced to slaughter some horses to feed other horses, with the remainder put down as they weakened and became sick; a calving glacier would destroy half their supplies and break many of their sleds; Wegener would break a rib falling on glacier ice; Koch would drop 40 feet into a crevasse and break his leg, confining him to bed for 3 months, while the temperature outside their camp fell to -58F (-50C). As they conducted their research, observing the northern lights, digging a pit 23 feet deep to measure the snow temperature while noting the layering of the ice sheet, they struggled across 700 miles of ice sheet, starved and exhausted. On July 15, 1913, a year after they began and very close to their destination, they sat down to eat their final meal — a stew made from their little companion Icelandic dog Gloë — when Wegener spotted a sailboat in the fog off the coast. It would be their rescue.
In 1930, Wegener made his final assault on Greenland’s ice sheet, along with three German scientists, Johannes Georgi, Ernst Sorge and Fritz Loewe. But the ice break-up on the west coast was very late, and they were forced to remain on the ship through May until mid-June, five weeks later than planned. They hired Greenlanders to haul the 240,000 pounds of supplies up the steep, crevasse-filled ice of the Kamarujuk Glacier to their initial camp, but warm summer weather and mosquitoes made it slow going. Georgi and some Greenlanders went ahead to set up their camp “Eismitte” or “middle ice”, 250 miles away. He was joined later by Sorge — the plan was that this pair would spend winter at the camp alone, detonating explosives to measure the thickness of the ice sheet via seismic readings and doing meteorological research. They made underground caves in the ice which were much warmer than their above-ground tents, in time making their bunks right on the older “firn” snow. But they knew they would not survive winter without fuel, so sent a note back to Wegener saying if supplies hadn’t arrived by October 20th, they would return to the west coast camp on foot. Back at the first camp, Wegener had planned to use two propeller-driven sleds, below, to bring the rest of the supplies and men to Eismitte, but they did not operate well on the slopes and in the deep snow and the idea was abandoned.
It was the first day of autumn, September 21, 1930 and dangerously late in the season when Wegener finally left his west coast station for Eismitte along with 130 dogs pulling fifteen loaded sleds. He received the note from Georgi and Sorge en route. More than 5 weeks later, as Gertner writes, Sorge and Georgi “were in their ice cave on the afternoon of October 30, on their bunks and ensconced in reindeer fur, when Sorge hear the rasp of dogsleds and some muffled voices on the surface of the ice above. It was -60 degrees Fahrenheit outside. ‘They’re coming!’ he shouted.” Wegener’s journey from the west coast camp had taken 40 days, and though he had started with Loewe and 13 Greenlanders, they were now only three, the two German scientists and Rasmus Villumsen, the dogsled driver. The other men, convinced they were on a death trek, turned around and returned to the coast. Now the five men were together in the ice cavern, with Loewe suffering frostbite to his feet that would require the pocket-knife amputation of eight of his toes 10 days later. Wegener celebrated his 50th birthday on November 1st and posed with Villumsen for the photo below before beginning the treacherous journey back to the coastal camp. It was the last time they were seen alive.
In an era when polar explorers were a little like astronauts, their exploits were followed by newspapers and radio announcers everywhere, but particularly in Germany. With no radio at Eismitte and no word from Wegener and Villumsen that winter either, the world was left to ponder the ominous silence from Greenland. In April 1931, a team with 7 sleds and 81 dogs departed the west coast and found the abandoned motorized sleds on their route, which they used to travel to Eismitte. When they arrived, the truth became clear: the great explorer was gone, along with the sled driver. They would later find Wegener’s skis positioned upright in the snow at Mile 118 halfway to the coast, his body buried in sewn sleeping bags; the supposition was that he had died of heart failure in his tent in the tremendous effort to ski alongside the sled in winter conditions. Villumsen’s body was never found, nor were Wegener’s journals. His widow asked that he be left buried there and a 20-foot high iron cross was erected in the snow nearby, below, where he remains today beneath 90 annual layers of snow, firn and ice on the ice sheet. As Gertner writes: “Ultimately the scientist would be subsumed into the subject of his studies“.
Research work continued that summer at Eismitte. A final dynamite blast recorded seismic “reflected wave” readings that indicated bedrock lay between 8,200 and 8,850 feet (2,500 – 2,700 m) below the snow. The weight of the snow evidently meant that Greenland was lower in its centre than at its mountainous coasts.
Gertner’s book, which I heartily recommend, goes on to describe the post-war, scientific exploits of France’s Paul-Émile Victor (1907-1995). An ethnologist and wartime U.S. Air Force pilot (he was outside France when Germany occupied it and chose to enlist in the U.S.), he had lived amongst the Greenland Inuit in 1936, learning their language and writing a book called My Eskimo Life. In 1947, he formed Expeditions Polaires Francaises (EPF) to do research at earth’s polar regions. And on July 17, 1949 he reached the 9,900-foot elevation at the centre of the Greenland ice sheet in a convoy of U.S. military surplus, Studebaker-made “Weasel” tracked vehicles he’d found post-war in Fontainebleau outside Paris. By then the old German camp Eismitte was buried under 40 feet of snow and firn. Victor, who was greatly assisted by the fact that airplanes could now do supply drops on the ice sheet, would go on to do scientific research in Antarctica as well.
But it was the outcome of the second world war and a U.S. treaty with Denmark that ushered in the American military presence in Greenland. In fact, in 1946 the U.S. had proposed buying Greenland, offering $100-million to Denmark, an offer that was not accepted. (Does that sound familiar? Trump floated the idea in 2019, with the same result.) After Russia detonated its first atomic bomb in 1949, the Cold War began in earnest. Greenland was given the code name “Bluie” and the Americans constructed the Thule Air Base in 1951-52. their principal base in the country, along with several satellite bases such as Kangerlussuaq or “Bluie West 8”, the site of our last day on this Adventure Canada expedition. A few years later, Thule became the supply point for an even more ambitious U.S. military endeavour: the creation of a massive, nuclear-powered, under-ice base called Camp Century. What was it? Well, no one can tell the story better than the authors. Here is the U.S. Army’s propaganda film on Camp Century.
This is what it looked like from the air in 1959, below. Even television news anchor Walter Cronkite came to visit. The network of tunnels had to withstand the massive overburden of the ice sheet’s snow and required regular shaving of firn from their walls “as much as 40 tons a week“. Though the camp would be ultimately doomed by its physical environment, it was felt to be a vital asset in protecting North America from Soviet aggression.
But something else was happening as the U.S. established its military presence in Greenland: scientists tagged along via the budgetary largesse, learning as much as they could about the secrets of the ice via the newly-created US Army Corps SIPRE (“Snow, Ice and Permafrost Research Establishment”). Its chief scientist, Swiss-born glaciologist and former Rutgers professor Henri Bader (1907-1998), aka “the iceman”, hired young researchers like Carl Benson, Chester Langway, Lyle Hansen and Herb Ueda to discover all they could about Greenland’s ice in Camp Century’s Trench #12. Even as the military was dreaming up plans to store nuclear-powered Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles under a vastly extended Camp Century — a theoretical strategy called “Operation Iceworm” — the ice scientists were using a massive oil rig found lying around in Oklahoma in 1964, below, to drill down to retrieve ice cores that had formed from snow that fell tens of thousands of years earlier. As Henri Bader said of the ice bubbles formed in the ice and the information that could be gleaned from them: “Snowflakes fall and leave a message.” Appropriately, it was July 4, 1966 when they hit bedrock, having cored Greenland’s deep ice to a depth of 4,450 feet (1,356 m). All the ice cores were stored by their age, so the researchers could analyze historic changes in weather and atmospheric particulates over thousands of years.
U.S. Army photo
Even as the military was winding down its operation in Greenland, the ice core research at Camp Century dovetailed with an emerging focus worldwide on the environment. The late 1960s saw heightened attention being paid to air quality and the role of increasing levels of Carbon dioxide from fossil fuel emissions and other greenhouse gases in earth’s atmosphere. Ice cores were catalogued, not just from Greenland, but from Antarctica, Alaska and many other cold regions in the world, for ice held the story of earth’s climate, reaching back thousands of years before the first steam engine sent pollutants skyward. The photo below is inside the freezer at the National Ice Core Lab in Denver, Colorado.
United States Geological Survey
Greenland figures in climate change studies in another way, too. In summers like 2012 and 2018, when massive parts of the ice sheet surface melted in record warm temperatures, the albedo effect — the measure of reflectivity of a surface, in earth’s case from the sun’s rays — creates a positive feedback loop with the atmosphere. In other words, white ice reflects the sun’s ray’s away from earth, maintaining a cooler surface; dark puddles of meltwater absorb solar rays, increasing ambient temperatures over a large part of earth’s polar surfaces. On this Adventure Canada expedition, we learned about albedo from Jim Halfpenny, one of the on-board resource naturalists, below. Though annual melting of Greenland and Antarctica’s ice sheets have not yet contributed significantly to earth’s sea level rise, since winter temperatures and annual snowfall tend to keep conditions in relative equilibrium, the great fear is that continued global warming beyond certain threshold levels will cause a cascade effect that sees rapid melting of the ice. When that happens (and at currently rising global temperatures, it’s a matter of “when”, not “if”), the rise in global mean sea levels is forecast to inundate low-lying islands, land masses and coasts.
Jon Gertner’s book goes on to talk about modern research on the ice sheet, parts of which I included in my blog on our visit to the Jakobshavn glacier at Ilulissat days earlier. His story in the New York Times of flying in an IceBridge data-gathering plane over the ice sheet on one of his four trips to Greenland is compelling. Here’s a NASA photo from a September 2019 IceBridge flight over the west coast of Greenland by Matt Linkswiler.
NASA Photo by Matt Linkswiler
But I was especially intrigued by Gertner’s description of the work of leading ice sheet researchers, the husband-and-wife team David and Denise Holland of NYU’s Environmental Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and The Center for Sea Level Change at Abu Dhabi NYU . As Dr. David Holland’s professional page states, their research “focuses on the computer modeling of the interaction of the Earth’s ice sheets with ocean waters, and the acquisition and implementation of observational data for model improvements.” What I loved is that the Hollands and Dr. Aqqalu Asvid-Rosing of Greenland’s Department of Natural Resources have figured out a way to measure the deep ocean temperature right at the calving mouth of Jakobshavn’s glacier, in a section known in glaciology as the “mélange“, the slush that clogs the glacier’s outlet, and also at Cape Farewell, a headland at the southern tip of Greenland. How? They have affixed temperature sensors to local seals, which swim to a depth of 1,200 feet, and to halibut, which inhabit the depths to 3,000 feet. Have a look at this film.
Below is a bearded seal with a freshly-affixed sensor, about to be released back into the ocean.
Photo Courtesy of Dr. Aqqalu Asvid-Rosing – Greenland Department of Natural Resources
Clearly, as I reach the end of this blog series on our Adventure Canada expedition through the waters off Nunavut and Greenland, it might have been preferable (and less like a small book) to have done an entirely new blog on the ice sheet, but that last-day glimpse of the great white expanse from the hillside in Kangerlussuaq inspired me to learn its history. Fittingly, the little hamlet with the international airport is at the apex of research, on climate change as well as the history of its people and wildlife. As Jon Gertner writes: “In the local cafes, you could meet glaciologists, hydrologists, anthropologists, geomorphologists, and sedimentologists“, not to mention archaeologists and marine biologists.
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After our tour of the area around Kangerlussuaq, it was time to head to the airport, the duty-free shop, and onto the CanJet charter back to Toronto.
We flew off southwest over the tundra bound for Toronto and just like that, our lovely Arctic Explorer journey came to an end.
It was the voyage of a lifetime, and I feel I now know so much more about this little planet of ours: its northern people; wild animals; magnificent, green-in-summer tundra; unique flora; and its storied, precarious ice sheet.
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This is the 10th and final blog in my series on the Eastern Arctic. Here are the 9 previous blogs :
