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In spite of a century of films and 50 years of television that have depicted North America more than any other land, first- time British visitors are conventionally surprised by the size of that continent and by its diversity. In the north, Canada is itself one of the biggest countries in the world with a 3,000- mile- long (4,825 km) southern boundary that follows the 49th parallel from the West until it meets Lake Superior halfway across. Then, taking the center of each of the Great lakes as the divide, it dips southward until, below where Lake Erie drains into lake Ontario at Niagara Falls, it is on a line, if one follows on due east, not far short of New York and Madrid.
Canada’s northern boundary is neither political nor clearly discernible but dissolves into a maze of islands divided by the fabled Northwest Passage from the erratic Arctic ice mass. The North Pole is not far off. Not surprisingly, therefore, the concentration of population, where gardening exists as a landscape- affecting activity, is mainly in a variously narrow band along that southern boundary where climate conditions are as kind as the latitude- affected in turn by longitude and altitude- permits.
This, of course, is where the United States of America begins. This border, considered by Canadians to be relatively benign and climatically as good as it gets, is to their neighbors the clear manifestation of ultimate north. That innocent British traveler watching an American television weather forecast is bemused to be shown maps of the continent which stop short at that line as if nothing further exists. They are like Ptolemaic maps making the known world; beyond there be dragons and Boreas blows out his cheeks. The hoary jokes about Americans arriving in Vancouver in August with skis at the ready are not entirely unfounded, at least attitudinal.
Then, within those 48 states (most of which are bigger than the British Isles, with a couple the size of the whole of Continental Europe ) are variations and extremes of climate and topography that from the point of view of growing plants vary from the arid to the subtropical.
Early travelers were impressed, even appalled, by the immensity of North America. It was not until 1853 that Lewis and Clark made the first crossing of the continent. The rail journey takes three days coast to coast but it is from the air, even at 500 miles an hour, that, clouds permitting, an overview of terrain and flora becomes possible. It is also possible to appreciate early European traveler’s surprise and indeed despair with the new land they had laboriously sailed across the vastness of the Atlantic Ocean to inhabit. The chronometer and the ship’s log told them they were far south as well as west of home, but if it were any month from October to April, they might as well have sailed eastward to the Baltic and beyond for similar cold.
Today’s Easter holiday traveler from London to Toronto, for instance, will leave an England awash with daffodils and spring blossom to meet the New World landfall covered with ice and snow. It takes an hour for thin forests to begin to appear below and yet another before landing in a southern Ontario still sere and brown from a wicked winter. Stay the night, and then the next day cross the continent to Vancouver. As you look below, there passes an hour of farmland and woodlots, the remnants of indigenous forest, three hours of prairie with poplars in the frozen river valleys, still a couple of months from leaf- out, and then, after a Rocky Mountain alpine experience, a wholly green scene again: the great evergreen forests of British Columbia. Going south, further transects might be made ever y couple of hundred miles or so. From Boston, Massachusetts, perhaps, Washington, D.C., or Savannah, Georgia, and in each case, the first sight would be of majestic forests rolling on into the far distance, hinting at the incredibly rich native flora, woody and herbaceous, that is still present- such is the extent of the land- after centuries of exploitation. Here are the plants painted by Cates by and collected by Bartram that so excited 18th- Century gardeners in Britain- the American oaks and maples and pines, the tulip tree and swamp cypress and liquid ambar.
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