A blooming shame

By NUNATSIAQ NEWS

Dr. Andrus Voitk is surgeon-in-chief at the Salvation Army Scarborough Grace Hospital in Scarborough, Ont., and, evidently, a photographer with a special interest in the flora and fauna of the North. We recently found the following letter, along with these pictures in our electronic mailbox. Thanks for setting us straight, Doc.

I Am an occasional and very privileged visitor to the Iqaluit area, and have grown to love it. I like the people, the landscape and your newspaper. So I was disappointed to see the front page of your June 20 issue with a wonderful picture of lapland rosebay, identified as purple saxiphrage.

Both flowers are purplish, are found in this area and appear and disappear at about the same time of the year. However, that is where the similarity ends. (I just read the laudatory letters page on your web site; the first one is from a botanist. How disappointed he, too, would be if he saw the June 20 cover!)

The mistake is forgivable for a southerner, but surely not for a resident of the North. I hope the pictures I have enclosed of saxiphrage and rosebay will help clear up the confusion.

By the way, I’ve just put up aweb pageon the Nunanet server in Iqaluithttp://www. nunanet.com/~minaise/

In addition to some tundra lore, very soon this page will carry pictures and names of all the wildflowers I can find and photograph around Iqaluit. It should be up in about two weeks. In the future, please refer to this site before publishing flower names.

Dr. Andrus Voitk
Scarborough, Ont.

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