Abstract
In an Arctic world dominated by ice and enlivened by the dynamic movements of animals, plants are easily overlooked, yet their colorful presence has attracted and arrested the movements of a wide range of travelers. This essay redirects attention to Arctic plants and their unique temporal and spatial scales, communities, and adaptations, which give them surprising roles in shaping Arctic places and human experiences. Looking at the works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century voyagers, writers, artists, and botanists from Norway, Britain, and the United States, the article shows how flowering plants in particular shaped the travels and imaginations of outsiders who may have been drawn by sublime icescapes or the myths of European exploration but were transformed by the arresting powers of minute plants. While these travelers often came to the Arctic as part of larger colonial efforts, their encounters with Arctic plants rarely reinscribed mastery. Instead Arctic plants often inspired euphoria, excess, and a confusion of categories, challenging self-possession and mastery while initiating understanding into Indigenous knowledge of these plants as part of Arctic communities. The article concludes by connecting these earlier plant investigations with the recently established Greenland Arboretum in Narsarsuaq and the Kujataa UNESCO World Heritage Site nearby commemorating Greenland’s (relatively) short-lived agricultural history. The creation of these sites devoted to the “assisted migration” of particular plants into the South Greenland landscape evokes the earlier fascination with the agency of Arctic plants in new ways and reveals the complex cultural politics of current “Arctic greening.”
“It is not easy to associate . . . the thought of wildflowers or agriculture [with] the great island-continent of Greenland,” wrote Isobel Wylie Hutchison in 1930.1 A Scottish botanist, Hutchison was right that the Arctic often appears to southern imaginations as a world of white ice. In fact “ice covers a minor part of the Arctic,” so we should envision a colorful world—multiyear blue ice in green seas, luminescent displays of aurora borealis, and vast throngs of birds and mammals moving across varied landscapes and icescapes.2 Although the region’s three-thousand-plus species of vegetal beings do not feature prominently in this imagined Arctic, their colorful presence drives the movements of Arctic life.3
Hutchison followed a long line of botanical travelers, mostly men, on the trail of Arctic plants since the early nineteenth century, moving through networks of colonial, commercial, missionary, and scientific institutions and Indigenous communities. Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen was another early twentieth-century female botanist whose understudied work reveals how plants transformed Arctic lands into “places of plant life,” inspiring scientific and aesthetic innovation in word and image.4 This article follows such overlooked travelers who sought out Arctic plants using technologies (cameras, taxonomies, collections, narratives) in ways that exceeded their instrumental functions of describing or categorizing and revealed unique affective ecologies in the process.5
Shifting our attention to the scale of such minor figures in the landscape of Arctic botany helps us appreciate the underestimated significance of often minute Arctic floras. In a landscape often imagined through vast scales, monochromatic lenses, and master narratives, the comings and goings of minor figures and minute plants reward our careful observation with unique insights: that visions of a green Arctic are long-lived, polyvalent, and continue to resonate in our present climate crisis. As we shall see in the final section, the aesthetic, emotive, and colonial values attached to Arctic plants continue to influence conservation and heritage policy in Greenland today and thus need to be acknowledged in our conversations about “Arctic greening.”6
Arctic Plants and Arctic Places
The struggle against plant blindness and backgrounding was well underway when Catherine Sarah Spooner published her lithograph “A Group of Thirteen of the Flowers most commonly found around Assistance Bay” in a 1852 British exploration narrative.7 Spooner directs our gaze to the scale of flowering plants a few centimeters above the ground in the foreground (fig. 1). In the background, in Assistance Bay along the Northwest Passage, we can make out the sketchy outlines of British ships and three tiny marks indicating the signal cairns erected by their crews. Ships, cairns, and men are dwarfed by the gathering of flowers that demand our attention, from the tallest at twenty-five centimeters (Polygonum viviparum/alpine bistort/Sapangaralaannguat Tuqtaillu) to the tiny Saxifragia oppositifolia (purple mountain saxifrage/Aupilattunnguat) at five centimeters high. Spooner illustrated one of the official publications generated by the search for the John Franklin expedition, which vanished with all hands searching for the Northwest Passage in 1845. One of many volumes published by captains, officers, and naturalists, Peter Sutherland’s Journal of a Voyage in Baffin’s Bay included a reproduction of Spooner’s flowers alongside a discussion of how the British, unskilled in living on animal food like the Inuit, were dependent on finding scurvy grass (Cochlearia/Tipitsiarktut nunarait) and other antiscorbutics. Sutherland, a doctor, noted the medicinal value of these plants: “Although a basket full could not be obtained in one or even two hours by one person, handfuls could, and this operation extended over several hours, by an increased number of men, would go far to appease the insatiable craving of scurvy for vegetable food.”8 Gathering tiny flowers and leaves for hours by hand is not the kind of manly labor featured in the images of Victorian Arctic exploration, which proliferated instead a generic visual language of massive ships and suffering crews at war with hostile ice, wielding pickaxes and ice saws. Isobel Hutchison signaled a similar resistance to this masculine trope of icy conquest when she wrote that she arrived in Greenland with two instruments—an ice axe and a vasculum (botanical collecting box): “The ice-axe—though imparting such a fine smack of adventure to my outfit that it was mentioned in a newspaper article by a Norse poet on board our vessel—returned to Scotland with its wrappers still unopened.”9
Sutherland’s narrative required stooping and kneeling, gestures of humility rewarded by “flowers, whose beauty increased with their minute size, and whose fragrance was reserved for those whose hearts responded to their hidden beauty, and who willingly stooped to admire the delicate tints with which Nature unobtrusively adorned the bleak world within fifteen degrees of the Pole.”10 Evoking Linnaeus’s legendary example of falling upon his knees in a rapture when first seeing a flowering gorse, seeing Arctic flora in this way developed what Barry Lopez called a “technique of awareness.”11 While the British Admiralty and Lady Franklin, in sending out their unsuitably massive ships, did not possess such a technique of awareness, it is important to recognize that many of the men aboard these ships, like Sutherland, did.
Flowering plants and mosses, because they stood out so starkly from the land and ice and appeared suddenly in the brief Arctic summer, attracted the attention of British voyagers and transformed distant lands into meeting places. Overlooking Assistance Bay near present-day Resolute, Griffith Island’s unique geography of plants made it an especially important place for those seeking both medicinal and aesthetic relief. In his watercolor of the flowering grave of George Malcolm, the captain of the hold of the Resolute, the surgeon Charles Ede described “the ice bound and desolate shores of Griffiths Id.” for “future voyagers” who might visit (fig. 2), sending his illustration to his friend, Scottish naturalist Adam White, along with numerous plant specimens.12 White then assembled a botanical scrapbook organized around Spooner’s lithograph, which he included at the start, along with specimens of all the pictured plants, sent by Sutherland and Ede. A long inscription about the purple mountain saxifrage that grew abundantly on Malcolm’s grave, a circumpolar plant found across northern Scotland (Malcolm’s home), connected the young man’s remains to his distant family through the vitality of plants.
Sutherland had shown how death was at home in the web of life created by the Assistance Bay flowers. Insects
were most frequently found in tufts of grasses and carices [sedges], if there was the accumulation of dung of hares, foxes, ptarmigans, and owls, latter including entire skulls and skeletons of lemming in great abundance. The connection between the spiders and the flies was not more remarkable than that between the creatures which visited those luxuriant patches of vegetation, to feed upon the grasses and their seeds, and to drop their dung to stimulate vegetation, to feed a colony of flies, which in turn are attacked by spiders.13
Numbering among “the creatures which visited those luxuriant patches of vegetation,” deceased mariners like the young George Malcolm took their humble place among the flora and fauna of the Arctic in such quiet moments of observation, an unusual feature in a narrative format designed to commemorate heroic human agency.
Graves were well-suited places for such reflection, and the British in particular used flowering plants and gardens in an effort to extend British territories (not settlements) into the Arctic.14 The small garden found by Franklin searchers near three expedition graves on Beechey Island inspired much sentimental verse and speculation about the last days of the expedition. For Sherard Osborn, the “remnant of a garden . . . told an interesting tale: its neatly-shaped oval outline, the border carefully formed of moss, lichen, poppies, and anemones, transplanted from some more genial part of this dreary region, contrived still to show symptoms of vitality.”15 Elisha Kane, a commercially successful American Franklin searcher, observed an “Arctic garden-spot” of “indescribable richness” in northern Greenland, shaped by naturally occurring polygon tundra formations and characterized by a concentration of plant diversity, where “many families were crowded together in a rich flower-bed” of dozens of species, including a tiny forest of Arctic willows a few inches high.16 Kane measured the moss beds near the flowers at five to seven feet deep, indicating immense age. Eager to measure up to the greatest scientific explorer of that time, Alexander von Humboldt, Kane represented the Arctic’s flora as uniquely diverse: “The arctic turf is unequaled: nothing in the tropics approaches it for specific variety” in such concentrated and minute spaces.17 Robin Wall Kimmerer confirms that moss forests share with tropical forests, despite the “vast difference in scale,” vertical stratification, numerous epiphytes and microclimates, camouflage and mimicry, the accumulation of decaying debris, amounting overall to an “astounding quantity of life in a handful of moss.”18
Humboldt, the leading figure in the global geography of plants, had been at home in tropical plantscapes and was neither knowledgeable about nor impressed by polar floras. For him, the polar regions established the limit of planetary life, tantamount to a blankness on the “face of nature” he had imagined through sixteen distinct global plant forms and their associated aesthetics. “The northern peoples are denied . . . many plant forms,” concluded Humboldt: “indeed, the most beautiful . . . remain forever unknown to them.”19 Addressing this perceived simplicity of Arctic ecosystems, Lopez notes,
The overall impression, coming from the South, would be of movement from a very complex world to a quite simplified one. . . . but this sensation of simplicity would be something of an illusion . . . Arctic ecosystems have the same elegant and Byzantine complexities, the same wild grace, as tropical ecosystems; there are simply fewer moving parts. . . . with an intricacy of rhythmic response to extreme ranges of light and temperature.20
Arctic ecosystems are indeed species-poor (except at the microbial scale) but individual-rich compared to the tropics, and as all those who kneel can observe, their connections are immensely complex.21
Arctic ecosystems are also the youngest on the planet, coeval with the current Quaternary Period (roughly 1.8 million years, comprising the ice ages, Holocene, and Anthropocene), and sharing with humans a biological modernity.22 Arctic plants have shown some evolutionary but few morphological changes throughout this dramatic period of extreme climate changes, demonstrating their incredible resilience.23 But they have shown great changes in geographical distribution, meaning that they were highly successful in moving back and forth relative to the shifting ice sheets.24 While slow to diverge, then, Arctic plants have been quick to move.
Plant mobility may seem an oxymoron, given that the etymology of plant, from the Latin plantare—to drive into, or chain to, the earth—signifies the immobility we associate with vegetal life.25 But scholars of philosophy, anthropology, geography, archaeology, and the environmental humanities increasingly reject binary notions of place as local, bounded, authentic, and formed by human social relations, versus space as abstract, global, universal, and understood through Western physical sciences.26 Increasingly scholars speak of place as a temporally dynamic “meeting place of trajectories” and as “the event of place”27 or as a pathway for travel: as Tim Ingold writes, “Lives are led not inside places but through, around, to and from them, from and to places elsewhere.”28 And place-making is a multispecies affair, with plant sociality, mobility, and networks being often the most powerful, if unacknowledged, forces at work in human/vegetal geographies and ethnographies.29 Michael Marder thus urges us to realign the relationship of plants to place by acknowledging the dynamic nature of both: “The places occupied by plants are not objectively fixed,” Marder argues, “they are inhabited, differentiated, and constructed in the course of vegetable life and development.”30 These places of plant life, as we saw in the examples of the Assistance Bay flowers, provide not only food and shelter but arrest the attention and direct the travels of people and other animals, shaping human histories in ongoing ways.
Poised at the edge of the ice, Arctic plants inspired scientists to reconfigure theories of evolution in light of the rise of glacial science, which by the mid-nineteenth century had revealed dramatic geological changes in northern landscapes as vast ice sheets moved across them. How could plants disappear and reemerge from recurring ice ages so relatively quickly while lacking powers of locomotion? To answer these questions early evolutionary and geological sciences became entwined with plant geography, and the puzzle of plant migration became a key to understanding how all species formed and diverged across deep geological time.31 While traditional histories of Arctic exploration emphasize the centrality of physical sciences to exploration goals, as Trevor Levere argues, it was actually these investigations into circumpolar “flora, even more than magnetic work that had provided so powerful a motive for ever-extended arctic exploration,” ultimately enabling botanical explorers to develop models of integrated circumpolar sciences.32
Plants’ place-making roles include those of ecosystem engineers, transforming environments to better suit their needs. Sphagnum offers a well-known example, a genus of moss that engineers vast tracts of tundra into acidic, anoxic peat bogs, driving other plants out, frustrating human travels, and sequestering a third of the entire planet’s soil carbon.33 The circumpolar flower Dryas octopetala, or mountain avens, provides a beautiful example of multispecies place-making with cross-cultural significance. A pioneer plant that colonizes the moraines recently uncovered by retreating glaciers throughout serial glaciations, mountain avens help stabilize the ground for other plants to move in.34 Named Dryas by Linnaeus after the wood nymphs (dryads), it is known as malikkaat to Inuit, meaning “the follower,” because its heliotropic and hygroscopic (reacting to moisture) abilities are important to Inuit for knowing the time, the season, changes in weather, and even as “indicators of direction,” as it tracks the sun even in fog.35 “Because malikkaat are so helpful,” says elder Aalasie Joamie, “people are told not to step on them or destroy them on purpose.”36
The mountain avens is one of the hardiest plants on earth, adapted to live in July temperatures of below 4ºC on Svalbard, a type of “highly mobile Arctic flora” that has acquired the ability to disperse seed using wind and ice across great distances.37 The paraboloid shape of its corolla concentrates the sun’s heat (as much as 4ºC warmer than the air), creating a warm place for insects to boost body temperature: nearly two hundred insect species have been confirmed to visit Dryas blooms in Northeast Greenland, lingering far longer than the time required for drinking the nectar.38 This “flower power, generated by the combined effects of heliotropism and radiant heat focusing,” creates lively places during the brief growing season across the Arctic world.39
Dryas are both long-lived as individuals (perhaps one hundred years) and a botanical key to understanding climate change in deep time. Scientists have turned their attention anew to a little-understood climate event known as the Younger Dryas, named after the mountain avens, in which the warming that had begun to usher in the Holocene at approximately 12,000 BCE ended abruptly with sudden cooling for 1,300 years, followed by sudden warming, with Greenland’s temperature increasing 15ºF in less than a decade.40 Palynological (pollen) research revealed that mountain avens had migrated rapidly as the ice alternatively retreated and expanded.41 Today the Younger Dryas is the subject of intense attention because it is the closest such rapid climate shift to our own Anthropocene. The movements of the tiny Dryas plant, the hardiest traveler to range north with the ice, serves as a new kind of sentinel of planetary climate change today, as it has helped Inuit in wayfinding and weather prediction for centuries.
Seeing the Arctic through Vegetal Scales
Arctic travelers were astonished by the unfamiliar scales of life, space, and time in the region, and it is important to note that both extremes, immensity and minuteness, are distinctive Arctic properties. The vast dimensions of icescapes and icebergs, amplified by the ability of sound and light to carry across extreme distances and distort the apparent size of phenomena, often evoked the sublime in visitors’ accounts. The Enlightenment aesthetic tradition of the sublime was heterogeneous, included political critiques and versions by women writers who challenged the masculinization of the sublime in Burke and Kant, and featured sublimes initiated by the infinitesimal.42 The “wonders of minuteness,” as Edmund Burke argued, can invite the sublime: “when we push our discoveries yet downward, and consider those creatures so many degrees yet smaller, and the still diminishing scale of existence, in tracing which the imagination is lost as well as the sense; we become amazed and confounded at the wonders of minuteness; nor can we distinguish in its effects this extreme of littleness from the vast itself.”43 Thus, at the other scalar extreme, the miniaturization of Arctic plant life could be just as striking as the presence of icebergs, with entire forests now found underfoot or under ice.
Linnaeus, whose global taxonomic system exemplified Enlightenment imperial science, met his match when he saw tiny Arctic floras for the first time on his voyage into Sápmi in 1732: “All the rare plants that I had previously met with and which had from time to time afforded me so much pleasure, were here as in miniature, and new ones in such profusion, that I was overcome with astonishment, thinking I had found more than I should know what to do with.”44
Enlightenment universal taxonomies like Linnaeus’s are traditionally presented as rationalist technologies of control (biological, colonial, epistemological) in environmental humanities, but Linnaeus’s astonishment reminds us of the excess and disorder such systems of knowledge were drawn to and often overwhelmed by.45 Children and women were encouraged to study Linnaean botany at home as an exercise in appreciating God’s intelligent design down to the humblest of his creations, but as voluminous scholarship on women and botany reveals, women’s exploration of botany proved controversial and disruptive.46 Experiencing the infinitesimal sublime in the presence of miniature flora could have as disorienting or intoxicating an effect as encountering the vastness of its icescapes.
The miniature scale of Arctic plants inspired such interpretations of a “natural” social order, but more interestingly, also of an unruly “delirium of description” as intense as the excess of attention devoted to majestic icebergs or mass migrations.47 For example, the poet Louis Legrand Noble, accompanying the painter Frederic Church on a voyage to paint icebergs in 1859, lingered over the sensual delights of the tiniest visible life that overwhelmed them on their northern voyage: “Green and yellow mosses, ankle deep and spotted with blood red stains, carpet the crags and little vales and cradle-like hollows. Wonderful to behold! Flowers pink and white, yellow, red and blue, or countless as dew drops, and breathe out upon the pure air that odor, so spirit like. Such surely was the perfume of Eden around the footsteps of the Lord.”48 The pursuit of an Arctic Eden (though not a bloodstained one) is a commonplace of Arctic voyages, as Michael Bravo has shown.49 For Noble, the language of Eden is a means to a thoroughly disordered end:
The painter [Church], passionately in love with the flowers of the tropics, laid down and rolled upon the soft, sweet beds of beauty with delight. Little gorges and chasms, overhung with miniature precipices, wind gracefully from the summits down to meet the waves, and our field, where the sun can warm them, with all bloom and sweetness, a kind of wild greenhouse. We run up them, and we run down them, fall upon the cushion stones, tumble upon the banks of softness as children tumble upon deep feather-beds, and dive into the yielding cradles embroidered with silken blossoms.50
Noble began his account with an extended mock-heroic metaphor that he and Church were manly hunters after mountainous “game, . . . the wandering alp of the waves” (that is, icebergs). Church produced his grand icescape on this voyage, The Icebergs, but Noble shows us the painter besotted with the sensual delights of tiny trees and flowers, a Keatsian, feminized account of floral intoxication in which “The soul is lost in pleasant smotherings.”51 The delirium of description that the miniature world of Arctic floras invited remains an important counterdiscourse both to the “botanic eye” reinforcing social order at minute scale and the “imperial landscapes” of the icy sublime that have long dominated exploration culture and much of its scholarship.52
As with painting, early Arctic photography, beginning in the 1850s, privileged the vast scale of icescapes along with ethnographic portraits and the labors of all-male crews, with scholarly studies focused solely through this master tradition of male photographers and their subjects.53 A lesser-known photographic tradition also explores the Lilliputian scale of Arctic floras, and through them the aesthetic, expressive possibilities of this new technology. Hanna Resvoll-Holmsen was a pioneer of Arctic botanical exploration and also of early Arctic photography, and she served as botanist aboard the 1907 and 1908 Spitsbergen expeditions funded by oceanographer Prince Albert I of Monaco. Alongside her sponsor Adolf Hoël, the geologist and founder of Norwegian polar sciences (and later a disgraced Nazi), Resvoll-Holmsen published the definitive study of Svalbard botany in 1927 and was Norway’s first female polar scientist.54 Resvoll-Holmsen’s photographs from the first decade of the twentieth century document the puzzling features distinctive to permafrost environments (such as the polygonal tundra patterns that were the subject of great curiosity) and the sublime grandeur of Svalbard—examples of the traditionally descriptive uses of early photography in scientific exploration.55
More interesting is the expressive possibility explored in her botanical photographs, playing with scale and color to produce occasionally odd effects akin to aerial prospects of vast fields of plants or stars. For example, her photograph of Cassiope tetragonna (Arctic bell heather) documents a Svalbard plant community in 1907, but the absence of any human scale simultaneously elevates the photograph to a level of abstraction, so that the miniature oscillates with the macroscopic (fig. 3). The decentralized composition is dominated by an expanse of plants without beginning or end, top or bottom, akin to the nonrepresentational effects of early photographs by William Henry Fox Talbot.56 Are we looking at the sky at night or an abstract pattern of lights and shapes? The same effect appears in “[Saxifraga]” (1908) and is comparable to that of Anna Atkins’s innovative botanical cyanotypes that evoked simultaneously individual aquatic vegetation and vast celestial bodies in an “oceanic jouissance.”57
In “[Gentiana tenella, Sagina nodosa],” an early color autochrome taken in northern Norway in 1911, Resvoll-Holmsen creates a dreamlike constellation of star-shaped flowers that takes advantage of the autochrome’s impressionistic “shimmering world of suggestions, of haze and nuance.”58 She allows the image to move beyond the medium’s recording function and toward its potential as a newly democratic and even avant-garde art medium. Autochrome photography is “the rarest, the most fragile” photographic process, with each image made of 140 million points of color suspended between two thin sheets of glass.59 As perhaps the earliest color photographer (and female scientist) to work in the Arctic (the earliest Arctic color photographs were previously dated to 1925), Resvoll-Holmsen opened up a new dimension of the Arctic by making visible the overlooked scale and composition of its luminous vegetal world.60 As a pioneer Arctic photographer, Arctic botanist, and female polar scientist, Resvoll-Holmsen shows us how travelers moving within the imperial, nationalist, and masculine exploration networks of their day—here with Hoël’s nationalist (soon to be Nazi) vision of securing for Norway a new northern empire—created a range of Arctic visions, not all of them instrumental for these intentions.61 Sharing a dreamy aesthetic with a short-lived photographic avant-garde, Resvoll-Holmsen’s studies of northern flora made visible a tranquil Arctic dreamscape at odds with the terrifying icescapes and icebound tall ships favored by male European photographers and artists.
Like Nobel, who described how he and Church luxuriated in the miniature botanical landscapes of the North, the early photographs of Resvoll-Holmsen revealed to outsiders an unseen Arctic sensual world. Isobel Hutchison, whose words opened this article, sought out this little-known world a decade later, traveling alone to Greenland in the 1920s while working as a plant collector for the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew and the British Museum. These leading institutions of colonial botany made her travels financially and logistically possible, but it was the plants that called her to Greenland.62 “It is the flowers that have opened the way for me,” she wrote, “and I go as a botanist.”63 The Danish colonial government restricted outside contact with Greenlanders, and Hutchison was allowed entrance on botanical grounds. Hutchison’s account of her travels, On Greenland’s Closed Shore: The Fairyland of the Arctic (1930), recounts her encounters with Greenlandic plants and people through an extended metaphor of Greenland as the Green Isle, the “last stronghold” of the Celtic fairy folk: the home “of merry little men who are always smiling” on a “‘closed shore’ to ordinary mortals.”64 This alien and infantilizing projection has racist roots in a Victorian ethnological and folklorist tradition in imagining “fairies as examples of primitive culture.”65 Hutchison’s vision of Greenland as the Green Land of the Fae is nonetheless atypical because, for her, botanical forms of life play leading roles both in the lives of Greenlanders and in her own life.
To Hutchison’s phytocentric eye everything appears to be in flower and on the scale of flowers, even icebergs: “Icebergs wander out and in like flowers dropped from paradise, in the drift of the polar current.”66 Her first impressions of Greenland emphasize the surprising “pageant of flowers and sunshine” and the icescape “suffused with delicate shades of sea-green, lavender, saffron.”67 Hutchison also made several early short films of her Arctic travels, and whether the focus was the voyage of the ship or the prowess of hunters in their kayaks (two conventional subjects), her camera’s attention drifts toward the flowers and often the women among them. In Cruise of the USS Chelan in the Alaskan Arctic, her attention descends from the ship to the floral scale, focusing on a person’s hands as they carefully pry a flower from the ground.68 In Kayak Rolling, an early experimental color film, her floral sensibility transmutes a scene of “Greenland’s Gold” from the extractive prospect of mineral riches into that of a laughing woman and child gathering golden flowers.69 She was always eager to collect Indigenous knowledge along with plants, an action at once acquisitive and receptive. Hutchison acknowledged how learning from Greenlanders about the taste and medicinal value of plants opened up a sensual world beyond that of botanical science throughout her writings: “Greenlanders eat everything edible, and Kruse showed me how sweet and refreshing were the little pink hoods of the mountain bl[u]eberry (Vaccinium uglinosum).”70
Hutchison’s first priority in Greenland was to launch a mock-heroic botanical “Scottish Expedition” to examine a fabled Mountain Birch (Betula pubescens) forest near Nanortalik on the Tasermiut fjord, near the ruins believed to be Eric the Red’s first settlement. This remarkable region in South Greenland is today the center of official efforts toward the afforestation and commemoration of a green Greenland, an ongoing process in which Hutchison played an unacknowledged role. Hutchison set off on her “fairy journey in search of the birchen trees of Greenland,” aboard an umiak (usually protected by an amulet and incantation) adorned with rowan branches (a sacred plant thought to ward off evil in Gaelic myth)—a culturally hybrid vessel she depicted in her book with a photograph. The Greenlanders avoid parts of this fjord, she writes, believing its abandoned settlements haunted by ghosts: one of her Greenlander companions, Filippus, an orphan with the “sixth sense,” can “see traces of unknown visitors”71 among them, and she also meets a second-sighted elder, Regina, who recalled how as a girl she met a band of “long-limbed Viking rovers” on the fjord.72
Plants make Tasermiut fjord a significant place of affective encounter: between the living and the dead, between Inuit, Norse, and Gaelic cosmologies, and the human and the more-than-human. During her first night there, Hutchison experienced a familiar epiphany upon first seeing the aurora, though through her distinctly vegetal vision: “Coils and spirals of golden-green light,” she writes, “hang long phosphorescent streamers, like the tendrils of tropical flowers.”73 Her superimposition of tropical forms on Arctic life is a gesture of exoticism, a familiar type of imperial vision. But it is more than that, because Hutchison throughout her Greenland account is careful to describe her customs, folklore, and “national pride” in distinctively Scottish and often Gaelic identities, not British (which had colonized both). Though from a prosperous Protestant family from the Edinburgh area, Hutchison was deeply immersed in Gaelic folklore and language, making her stylized Greenland voyage as a mythical journey to Fairyland more than “a celebration of coloniality and gendered complicity,” as some have argued.74 Greenlandic cosmology shared with Hutchison’s brand of devout Christianity fused with Gaelic pagan folklore a powerful sense of the presence of other worlds overlapping with the human world, including both sinister and benevolent forces that certain persons could occasionally contact in special places such as this singular Greenland forest. This unique refugium of plants (in part a relic of Norse cultivation) and the Greenlanders traveling with her allowed Hutchison to trace crossings between Inuit, Norse, Celtic, and Christian cultures across gulfs of time.
On one level Hutchison’s imagining of Greenland as Fairyland is a colonial trope that, coupled with what Mary Louise Pratt calls the myth of scientific “anti-conquest” (as when Hutchison rejects the axe for the vasculum), gives the botanical traveler the privilege of exoticizing Native people for her own purposes, even when these purposes are in part intended as an escape from the restrictions of her own culture. As Heidi Hansson has argued, women who traveled to the North often did so to escape, but not defy, the gendered restrictions of their homeland.75 Indeed Hutchison, who in her journal had described feeling like she “belonged to neither sex,” enjoyed in her extensive solo travels a range of liberties unthinkable in Scotland.76 It does not appear that sexual liberties were among these, but flowers seemed to awaken new affective possibilities: she commemorated sleeping outdoors on Eggers Island (Itilleq), Greenland’s southernmost point, “amid the roseroot, carex, and waving calamagrostis,” by gathering a number of these and labeling them “flowers that shared the night with me,” later arranged on a herbarium sheet (fig. 4). Hutchison, like Adam White, shows us that botanical collection includes possibilities exceeding mastery and taxonomy. Seen not as an ordered mass of inert objects but, in Nicholas Thomas’s words, as “a technology that enables the creation of new things,”77 collecting remains “open to the unexpected,” including intimate affective connections.78
Greening the Arctic: Past, Present, Future
Plants opened the way into the Arctic and also into its vast pluritemporal dimensions. Hutchison, homesick for Scottish forests, remembered “that sweet smell of decaying foliage Greenland too must have known in ages long past, for the slate and sandstone beds of the Nugssuak Peninsula across the fjord contain fossils of conifers, the poplar, the fig, the magnolia, and many other trees which once flourished at 71ºN Latitude.”79 Beginning in 1820, collections of fossil plants in Nunavut, Spitsbergen, and Greenland placed paleobotany and phytogeography in the center of debates about evolution, climate history, and geology.80 Paleobotanists struggled to convey to lay readers the biodiverse richness of ancient Greenland: “This picture is not a dream of the imagination,” insisted Oswald Heer: these “plants and animals have all passed under my eyes” in the extraordinary fossil record.81 Albert Seward likewise tried to persuade audiences that while “In Greenland to-day the vegetation lives precariously,” “these glimpses of the past” in fossil plants “and their disharmony with the present impart to the reality of geological history a sense of unreality.”82 We know now that during “the early Eocene, (56 to 49 Mya) . . . the Arctic Ocean was ice free . . . and fringed by a mosaic of mixed deciduous . . . , evergreen . . . , and swamp . . . forests,” with “estimated canopy heights of between 25 and 40m” at 79ºN.83 Evidence of Greenland’s deep time floras was so abundant as to create a profound sense of heterochrony (temporal “disharmony”), presenting a limit case in an age increasingly accepting of extinction and radically different paleoclimates across the earth but unable to conceive of how arborescent subtropical plants thrived in months of polar darkness, rooted to the ground. The earth sciences, Heer concluded, would never solve this problem, and he looked instead to astronomy and its theories of “polar wandering.”84 Only when the radical solution of plate tectonics became widely accepted in the twentieth century did the problem of Arctic floras find an earthly solution, and indeed it was paleofloras (and ice plasticity) that provided Alfred Wegener with decisive evidence for his revolutionary theory of continental displacement.85
Nineteenth-century paleobotanical discoveries of Greenland’s lost forests fit well with much older dreams of polar Edens, traced back to early modern and ancient beliefs that the North Pole contained a lost paradise.86 The alluring power of a green Arctic also persists in modern policy decisions, sometimes with disastrous results. In the 1950s, the Canadian government’s forced relocation of Inuit families to the High Arctic in order to secure Canadian sovereignty of the archipelago was described by one of the scheme’s architects as a return of Inuit to “their Garden of Eden.”87 One survivor of this ordeal testified decades later that upon arriving in Resolute Bay (a few miles from Assistance Bay and its flowers), she believed “God has placed us here, and we were imagining a place where there’s plenty of vegetation.”88 Described as an elaborate “experiment” by the Canadian government, the exile of unsupported Inuit families to Resolute and two other uninhabited locations from wildly different homelands in the southern Arctic was deeply traumatic, rippling through Canadian society to this day. In the case of Resolute, nearly two centuries of British imperial strategic presence, Canadian science, and popular curiosity had accreted around that area, ever since the Assistance Bay search ships inscribed the bay in European geography and imagination as a place recognizable for its vegetal presence. According to Alan Marcus in Relocating Eden, the brutal forced migration was an attempt to impose “ideal Inuit settlements in the High Arctic” that violated human rights while also ignoring the specificity of Arctic places by assuming their interchangeability across time and space.89 Chief among these alien environmental visions was the imposition of the agrarian dream of an Arctic garden, so ill fitting in a hunting world, as Hugh Brody has argued in The Other Side of Eden.90
Dreams of a green Arctic, whether pastoral or primordial or colonial, have brought travelers north for centuries, most famously perhaps in Erik the Red’s deliberate misnaming of Greenland as an incentive for Norse farmers to follow him. Eighteenth-century missionaries cultivated gardens in Greenland as material technologies for the “improvement” of nature and of Native peoples, and like the abandoned farms of the vanished Norse, these relict traces of cultivated plants continue to accrue cultural value for reimagining the greening of Greenland today.91 The “greening of the Arctic” observed in recent decades as part of the climate crisis in fact is part of a disturbing “browning of the Arctic,” with tundra plants drying out, freezing, or burning in response to climate disturbances and vast stretches of boreal forests being defoliated by southern insects.92
In Greenland, however, greening (as opposed to browning) is indeed on the rise, and, in the botanically remarkable South Greenland region that fascinated Hutchison, two recently established biocultural heritage sites are devoted to places defined by plant/human interactions. The Arboretum Greenlandicum inaugurated in 2004 in Narsarsuaq and the Kujataa UNESCO World Heritage Site incorporating the former site of Erik the Red’s settlement are unusual because they are designed to draw visitors to Arctic places largely defined by cultivated plants. Greenland’s Arboretum, across the fjord from Erik’s settlement (Brattahlíð/Qassiarsuk), is the result of decades of transplantation of over one hundred new tree species (mostly conifers from the forests of Switzerland, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, the United States, and Canada) to this island with only five currently native tree species.93 Led by Nordic and Greenlandic foresters, the afforestation effort is “expected to induce a sense of wonder and beauty in both local and foreign visitors” and is held out as a model of the refugia imagined to have protected Arctic plants during the last Ice Age, positioning this European flora to “adapt better to climate change than the local flora.”94 As we saw, a few million years ago “Greenland was at times almost ice-free and boreal forests expanded across large areas.”95 But the recent deliberate greening of Greenland by growing a forest is not an attempt to restore a prehuman Miocene landscape. For James Andrew Billingsley, in one of the only academic discussions of the Arboretum, it establishes an “invasive ecosystem on Greenlandic territory,” an example of a “colonial reaction to an ‘empty’ indigenous landscape.”96
I traveled to the Arboretum and other Greenlandic sites of tree plantings, farms, and gardens in the summer of 2024, and found the situation to be more complex than a case of a colonial imposition onto Indigenous landscapes. In Greenland I learned that the tree planting efforts since the 1970s were led largely by three men—two Danish foresters and the current Greenlandic Head of Representation to the United States—and now involve a rare earths mining company, Amaroq Minerals, which is funding tree planting in anticipation of a carbon offset.97 But these elite and external efforts are entangled with intense local enthusiasm among many Greenlanders for what has now become an internal tourism site.98
More interestingly, there is a flourishing local gardening scene in South Greenland that is connected to the tree plantings. I asked one Greenlandic gardener why he was passionate about importing exotic flowers and trees, including Greenland’s only maple. He replied, “We always wanted to live in a forest.”99 I suggested to him that many of my fellow academics would say bringing foreign plants into Greenland reflects a colonial, not a Greenlandic, attitude to nature. He asked, “Why shouldn’t we change the land like we want?” Another Greenlander I spoke with, who started a gardening club in the 1980s so his community could import plants from Iceland, told me their intention was “to make the city green.”100
When Greenlanders assert such desires to shape their lands—to diversify the plants in their daily lives—it runs counter to outsider ideals of what Greenland, or the Arctic more broadly, should be. Listening to Greenlanders’ views on plants challenged my expectations of what resistance to colonialism looks like. Transforming your lands and plants as you wish can be a powerful form of exercising independence. And the power of plants is such that they can capture the attention of people in any culture.
As with gardens and forests, Greenland’s three dozen farms inspire debate about their cultural and economic politics given agriculture’s roots in the lost Norse colonies and its reintroduction once Denmark colonized Greenland in 1721. Debate continues whether Norse maladaptation to Greenland’s environment was the leading cause of the colonies’ disappearance, but consensus shows that their transplantation of an “agricultural niche” from Scandinavia, complete with poorly suited plants and grazing animals, was a central feature of Norse cultural understandings of what life in Greenland should be like.101 With Arctic warming and greening on the rise, however, farming is now a feature of Greenlandic innovation and anticipation, not Norse maladaptation.102
The UNESCO World Heritage site at Kujataa in South Greenland attempts to commemorate a particular way of shared belonging in this pluritemporal landscape, incorporating key sites of Norse settlements later taken over by farming families of mixed Inuit/Nordic descent (as the vast majority of Greenland’s population are). But this memorialization also reactivates an eighteenth-century missionary vision of how to simultaneously “improve” both land and Indigenous people through cultivation. “Greenlanders’ own adoption of farming is reflective of a successful adaptation by a hunting society to modern industrialised and capitalistic modes of being,” according to UNESCO, “a story of cultural adaptation, of how hunters can become farmers.”103 Early twentieth-century experiments in turning Arctic tundra into pastoral landscapes with imported herbivores elsewhere (reindeer in North America, musk ox in Scandinavia) had similarly “called ecology into being as a form of colonial authority,”104 as Andrew Stuhl has argued, by also turning “nonarable hinterlands into productive grazing lands and primitive Inuit hunters into sophisticated animal ranchers.”105 Yet Greenlanders today are exploring new agricultural possibilities of their choosing, driven by climate greening but also by a desire for independence and food security.106 Shaped by centuries of entangled histories, colonial conflict, and ecological innovations, perhaps all these Arctic vegetal transformations are typical of the new “messy, emergent ‘middle landscape’” of the Anthropocene.107
The Greenland Arboretum attempts to replace cold-loving local plants with new species better acclimatized to a warming Greenland by accelerating plant migration. Although the warming climate can support boreal trees in many places now, their relatively heavy seeds travel slowly across the seas and into Greenland’s deep fjords, and scientists have estimated “future migration lags of several millennia.”108 In “assisting” the immigration of boreal trees into Greenland, the Arboretum planters are both future-looking and nostalgic—an example of “acting in the present to bring the past into the future,” as Dolly Jørgensen puts it.109 Ecological projects like these are often driven by deep emotional ties to landscapes—examples of affective ecologies that redraw the boundaries of belonging in time and space according to wished-for, imagined, or lost connections.
Such attempts to direct the movements of plants through the Arctic remain entangled with the restless movements of Europeans and their preferred biota across the planet, and the anticipatory agency of Arctic peoples. And if we take up a longue durée understanding of human-generated environmental change already growing in “scalar leaps” millennia before the Industrial Revolution and the Columbian exchange, then we can see the “fierce restlessness” of agriculturalist cultures also at work in the Arctic today.110 The agriculturalist world of farms, towns, and cities, writes Hugh Brody, is driven by a “need to find and have and hold an Eden, alongside a preparedness to go out and roam the world,” desires that share responsibility for today’s climate crisis and the (re)greening of the Arctic.111 The botanists, artists, scientists, foresters, and voyagers discussed here are the outliers and avant-garde of this agriculturalist world, travelers drawn to the possibilities embodied in the flowering green lands of the Arctic.
Acknowledgments
For help securing images, I am grateful to Deb Metsger and Nicola Woods. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Critical Arctic Studies Conference (Rovaniemi, Finland) in 2023.
Notes
Peterson, “Plants in Arctic Environments,” 369. There are approximately 2,000 vascular and 1,300 nonvascular Arctic plant species, plus lichen. Lee, Arctic Plants of Svalbard, 9–25.
For major examples of how emotion affects connections to and perceptions of environments, see Mosser, Affective Ecologies; Singh, “Affective Ecologies”; Jørgensen, Recovering Lost Species.
Arctic greening has been observed for decades and refers to the rapid range shift of plants and pests northward and the “shrubification” of tundra, which together with “Arctic browning” (plant death) amplify global heating by decreasing surface albedo, and increasing permafrost thaw and fires. Snyder, “Arctic Greening.”
Ede, in Adam White, Scrapbook, Royal Ontario Museum, Green Plant Herbarium, op. f.30.
On “extroverted” approaches to place, see Cresswell, Place, 88–114.
Multispecies ethnographies of human/plant cocreation of place include Kohn, How Forests Think; Miller, Plant Kin; “Ethnography of Plants.” For good overviews of vegetal geographies, see Head and Atchison, “Cultural Ecology”; Lawrence, “Listening to Plants.”
Ziegler, Joamie, and Hainnu, Edible and Medicinal Arctic Plants, 96. On the roles of plants in strengthening Inuit culture, see Cuerrier et al., “Our Plants, Our Land.”
Kevan, “Sun-Tracking Solar Furnaces,” 726; Alley, Two-Mile Time Machine, 114. “Younger Dryas” refers both to a period of time and to a climate event; see Mangerud, “Discovery of the Younger Dryas”; Fiedel, “Mysterious Onset.”
For a critique of this often ahistorical oversimplification of Enlightenment botany as a rationalist form of mastery, see Craciun, “Vegetal Return.”
Page and Smith, Women, Literature, and the Domesticated Landscape, 50–78; Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science.
Fuglei and Goldman, “Hanna Marie Resvoll-Holmsen.” See nv11543439C77Resvoll-Holmsen, Observations botaniques; Resvoll-Holmsen, Svalbards Flora.
See Resvoll-Holmsen’s album at the National Library of Norway, https://www.flickr.com/photos/national_library_of_norway/14717529278/in/album-72157645567686547/.
Wood, Art of the Autochrome, 5. On the expressive versus descriptive uses of autochrome, see Hammond, “Impressionist Theory and the Autochrome,” 343.
Miller and Reill, eds., Visions of Empire; Schiebinger and Swan, Colonial Botany; Drayton, Nature’s Government.
Isobel Hutchison, dir., Cruise of the U.S.S. Chelan, 16mm film, National Library of Scotland, REF 3013.
Isobel Hutchison, dir., Kayak Rolling, 16mm film, National Library of Scotland, REF 3012.
Hutchison, On Greenland’s Closed Shore, 104. On these Greenlandic beliefs see Sonne, World Views of the Greenlanders, 159.
Hutchison, quoted in Hoyle, Flowers in the Snow, 28. Hutchison had a lifelong intimate friendship with Medina Lewis.
Parry provided the first specimens of subtropical Arctic plants in 1820. Konig, “Rock Specimens”; Andrews, Fossil Hunters; Browne, Secular Ark; Niemi, “How Fossils Gave the First Hint.”
Corporal Glenn Larsen, quoted in Marcus, Relocating Eden, 102.
Minnie Allakariallak, quoted in Marcus, Relocating Eden, 102.
Stefansson was a passionate advocate for pastoral transformations of tundra: see “Fruitful Arctic” in Stefansson, Northward Course of Empire.
The trees presently native (not introduced by humans) to Greenland are Sorbus groenlandica (Greenland mountain ash), Alnus viridis ssp. crispa (alder), Betula pubescens (mountain birch), Salix glauca (grayleaf willow) and Juniperus communis, the only conifer.
Leverenz and Christensen, “Inauguration of Arboretum Groenlandicum.” The arboretum grew from the research of Danish forester Søren Ødum and is largely due to the efforts of Kenneth Høegh, agronomist and currently Greenlandic head representative to the United States; see Ødum, “Afforestation Experiments.”
Billingsley, “Arboretum at the End.” In 2019, a private international nonprofit called Greenland Trees began planting thousands of trees in southern Greenland; they accept donations to grant carbon offsets to foreign companies. Their online videos claim inaccurately that “all planted tree species are native to Greenland,” described as “tree species impoverished.” Larch were first introduced to Greenland in the 1950s as an ecological experiment in the area at Qanasiassat (near Narsarsuaq) where four introduced Scots pines (Pinus sylvestris) were transplanted by the botanist Rosenvinge in 1892. See Greenland Trees, https://greenlandtrees.org (accessed December 11, 2024); Greenland Trees, Greenland Trees Report.
Craciun, “Greening Greenland.”
Hayashi concludes that “the idea of making plantations in Greenland was developed by Danish scientists, as outsiders, independently of local community requests” (Hayashi, Cultivating Place, 248).
Alibak, quoted in Craciun, “Greening Greenland.”
Quoted in Craciun, “Greening Greenland.”
