When Isobel Wylie Hutchison arrived on Kodiak Island in the summer of 1936, she was carrying her botanical collecting-cases and a long list of the plants she hoped to see. Disembarking from the SS Curaçao, a passenger vessel operated by the Alaska Steamship Company, she checked into the Sunbeam Hotel and immediately set about exploring the island’s wild and mountainous landscape.

 

Main Street, St Paul, Kodiak, in 1936.  Photograph by Isobel Wylie Hutchison

This wasn’t Isobel’s first visit to Alaska, but she’d not set foot on Kodiak before and she found it drowsing under a spell of warm, dry weather. The other guests at the hotel enquired about her plans with polite interest, and predicted that she’d get sunburnt. The proprietor, meanwhile, warned her about grizzly bears. Isobel cared little for sunburn, and had been told elsewhere that the bears were timid. So, putting a brave face on it, she ordered bacon and eggs in the aptly-named Bear Coffee House and then shouldered her collecting-case for her first day in the field.

‘My journey was slow,’ she wrote, ‘for wild flowers ran riot.’ Thickets of alder, willow and wild rose grew by the roadside, keeping company with wild lupins, salmon-berry and wild geraniums. Golden mimulus flourished beside fast-flowing mountain streams, and lakes were sprinkled with the yellow cups of waterlilies. 

 

Kodiak c.1912, showing ash deposits.  Photograph by John E Thwaites

From talking to people she met along the way, Isobel heard accounts of the devastating eruption of Mount Katmai on the Kenai Peninsula, which had occurred in 1912.  Although it was nearly a hundred miles away, the island of Kodiak had been covered in ash to a depth of several feet.   ‘It was dark for three days with falling ash,’ recalled a local shoemaker.  ‘You can still see it on the trees under the moss.’  But by the time of Isobel’s visit, most of the vegetation had miraculously recovered, and some inhabitants even claimed that the grass in the meadows was more luxuriant than it had been before. 

Isobel got out her watercolours and painted a field of irises, no doubt keeping a wary eye open for bears, timid or otherwise.  At times she pushed through patches of waist-high willowherb, and at others she was picking her way carefully through bogs rich in sundew, plantains and sphagnum moss. 

 

‘Blue Iris at Kodiak’.  Watercolour sketch by Isobel Wylie Hutchison

But it was in the dappled shade of a pine forest that Isobel made one of her most memorable discoveries.  One-flowered wintergreen, she wrote, was surely ‘the most exquisite little flower in all the world.’  Tiny but breathtakingly perfect, these pure white flowers rise only a couple of inches above the mossy woodland floor, and they angle their heads downwards, making them a challenge to examine at close range.  Isobel was obviously no stranger to lying flat on the ground, and she even managed to get close enough to sniff them.  In fact, such was her delight that she wrote a poem in honour of this little plant.

Song for Pyrola uniflora

I came upon her lonely in the wood,

With downbent head she gazed upon the moss

Green-carpeting the forest where she stood

Under the pine tree’s boss.

Waxen her cheek as some pale-lidded shell

Returning tides have stranded unaware

Her breath as faintly fragrant as the spell

A passing angel left upon the air.

Strange destiny!  Fair treasure-trove unsought,

Undreamed-of at the breaking of the day,

How rich this hour that has so quietly brought

Such masterpiece my way.

From Stepping Stones from Alaska to Asia (1937)

 

One-flowered wintergreen

 

One-flowered wintergreen, whose traditional names include Wood Nymph, St Olaf’s Candlestick and Frog’s Reading Lamp, can be found right around the northern hemisphere.  It prefers the shade of damp, mossy conifer forests such as those on Kodiak island.   Although it was familiar to Isobel as Pyrola uniflora, it is now classified as Moneses uniflora.  The genus Moneses takes its name from the Greek words meaning ‘solitary’ and ‘delight’, which perfectly encapsulate Isobel’s experience.

During her two blissful weeks botanising on Kodiak Island, Isobel collected well over a hundred specimens.  To her relief she encountered no bears, although she certainly investigated a good deal of their territory;  her scariest half-hour came when she accepted a lift from a local road-maker, and was treated to a bone-shaking ride along a precipitous mountain track that was in danger of crumbling into the sea far below.

Bidding farewell to new-found friends, Isobel boarded the first of three vessels that would take her on island-hopping voyages around the Aleutians and the Pribilof Islands.  More discoveries lay in wait.  She wrote:  ‘Is there any thrill to equal that which stirs the heart of the botanist when he first sets eyes upon a new flower?’

 

St Paul, Kodiak.   Watercolour sketch by Isobel Wylie Hutchison

 

Images:

Watercolour paintings and photograph by Isobel Wylie Hutchison, from Stepping Stones from Alaska to Asia (1937)

Photograph of Kodiak, c.1912, by John E Thwaites (public domain)

Photograph of one-flowered wintergreen by Colin Woolf