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Travels in Alaska by John Muir
page 9 of 270 (03%)
cottage homes found here, embowered in the freshest and floweriest
climbing roses and honeysuckles conceivable. Californians may well
be proud of their home roses loading sunny verandas, climbing to
the tops of the roofs and falling over the gables in white and red
cascades. But here, with so much bland fog and dew and gentle laving
rain, a still finer development of some of the commonest garden
plants is reached. English honeysuckle seems to have found here
a most congenial home. Still more beautiful were the wild roses,
blooming in wonderful luxuriance along the woodland paths, with
corollas two and three inches wide. This rose and three species of
spiraea fairly filled the air with fragrance after showers; and how
brightly then did the red dogwood berries shine amid the green leaves
beneath trees two hundred and fifty feet high.

Strange to say, all of this exuberant forest and flower vegetation
was growing upon fresh moraine material scarcely at all moved or in
any way modified by post-glacial agents. In the town gardens and
orchards, peaches and apples fell upon glacier-polished rocks, and
the streets were graded in moraine gravel; and I observed scratched
and grooved rock bosses as unweathered and telling as those of
the High Sierra of California eight thousand feet or more above
sea-level. The Victoria Harbor is plainly glacial in origin, eroded
from the solid; and the rock islets that rise here and there in it
are unchanged to any appreciable extent by all the waves that have
broken over them since first they came to light toward the close of
the glacial period. The shores also of the harbor are strikingly
grooved and scratched and in every way as glacial in all their
characteristics as those of new-born glacial lakes. That the domain
of the sea is being slowly extended over the land by incessant
wave-action is well known; but in this freshly glaciated region the
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