I read Jared Diamond’s Collapse
– How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. There is a section on Greenland
in which the Old Norse society collapsed after 500 years of colonizing the icy
sheet land in the North Atlantic Ocean. Diamond says he saw only three colours
in Greenland – white, blue and black, with white dominating everywhere. Of
course, the white is of the snow, blue of the ocean or occasionally the sky and
black is the isolated rocks of sufficient height as to rise above the ice
sheets. Green is visible only in very few patches of land. On one such stretch,
he simply lay down and had a good sleep among "thick moss and dotted with
abundant yellow buttercups, yellow dandelions, blue bluebells, white asters and
pink willow herbs". A riot of colours amidst a sea of white, a point of hope
among the barren vastness, a touch of comfort amid the sharp needles of immense
coldness.
So many flowers out there, that I
decided to see how they look like, just out of curiosity. The results are shown
below.
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| Asters |
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| Bluebells |
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| Buttercups |
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| Dandelions |
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| Willow-herbs |
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