Flower meadow bordering a river, Port Houghton inlet on the mainland, Southeast Alaska, USA.
Flower meadow bordering a river, Port Houghton inlet on the mainland, Southeast Alaska, USA.
As a keen gardener and amateur botanist Port Houghton was my Shangri-la. It is a very deep inlet and it ends with a salt chuck surrounded by high mountains. On one side there is a river that goes directly into the tidal inlet, as can be seen in this photo. Between the river and the salt chuck there are beautiful, colourful, flower meadows and closer to the forest there are extensive patches of richly vegetated “muskeg”, sphagnum bogs, dotted with dwarf trees heavily festooned with moss and lichens. It was like a botanical garden that had beautiful features of all facets of the rich vegetation of Southeast Alaska. Because the rainfall there was so high and the conditions usually overcast, the colours always seemed to be particularly saturated and resplendent so that the red of the Indian paint brushes literally seemed like wet paint that had just been applied to them.
