COLD COUNTRIES

Waipa Post, Volume 32, Issue 1788, 29 July 1926, Page 6

COLD COUNTRIES

SNOWFLAKES AS BIG AS FOOTBALLS. In the cold countries of the North snow is usually powdery stuff that falls in a sort of streaky mist, with freakish arabesques of denser white where 'the varying currents of air play pranks with it (whtes “Traveller” in the Daily Mail). Snow usually stays where it falls, but up in Canada, Lap. land and Russia, with the temperature far below zero, snow roams about like the sands of the desert, resting, when the wind drops, in waves similar to those you see in the Sahara. Do not scoff when a man tells you an improbable story about the size of some snowflakes he has seen. Now and then flakes of “quite impossible” dimensions descend from aloft and are duly recorded by thoroughly creditable witnesses. Snowflakes bigger than footballs fell near Fort Keogh, Montana, in 1887. Flakes as big as tennis halls fell at Richmond; Maine, on March 25, 1900; in Berlin on March 25, 1915; and at Chepstow, in January, 1887. The Berlin flakes were disc-shaped, rocking from side to side as they fell; the Chepstow flakes were ball-shaped lumps. On the mountains behind Oslo (Christiania) I have caught flakes bigger than a matchbox; one was more than three inches long. Oslo’s proximity to the sea and nothern latitude give it bigger snowflakes than almost any place I know; and„ in consequence extraordinarily picturesque effects are produced in the mountainside forests, where snow lies nine inches and a foot deep on the spreading branches of the'great firs.. Do not shovel the snow off your garden beds. Up in Sweden I found that the surest way of protecting plants for spring flowering was to keep them well covered with snow. The slight but perceptible heat of the plant melts a light space around every leaf, bud, and stem. There it is, snugly protected from blighting zero winds. I shall never forget the marvel of a morning of hot April sunshine that melted a mound of snow which had been there all winter, and revealed clump after clump of pansies with uncurling buds that opened into full bloom in half an hour! This is hew in the North, each spring, yesterday’s snowfield is today’s field of flowers.