Tidal Granite Flats (oil on canvas 5 x 7 in) Sold

2 September finds us in the village of Prospect Bay, having been graciously allowed to camp beside Our Lady of Mount Carmel church. My artist's eye is totally delighted by the striking contrast of blue water, yellow rockweed, and white granite.

We step onto the alga-stained pavement of granite bedrock among swirling mops of rockweeds - rich tawny, float-bladdered Fucus, and more elongate, thin golden Ascophylum exposed by the low tide - and in the pools, brighter yellow Ascophylum of a finer texture. Looking closely at the edges of the saltmarsh turfs, we find their grasses growing up through mats of fine, mossy Ascophylum, rubbery textured and upright, rather than sprawling like its larger relatives, and amazingly in miniature - a salt water "moss"!

There is a sprinkling of white barnacles on the flanks of the tide-stained boulders, and here and there on the flat pavement, and in the pools, Periwinkle snails creep and graze.
We had walked down behind the church past a patch of Pink Jewelweed to a low granite ledge with a single Barberry bush on it and delicious ripe Blackberries along the sides, then on down a slope of white Aster and yellow Goldenrod, into the rough grass and carex of a tidal meadow flanked by low brush-covered white granite knolls.  I found a grass with dangly white flowers to photograph, and also Sea Lavender in bloom.

Fred wrote about the vegetation on the knolls: "Most of the cover is Myrica, but without longer to stay here it's hard to tell the Bayberry fom the Sweetgale, and there's a huge variety of shrubs, as well as the salt-whipped Osmunda (which one sees all along the shore here) mixed in. These include Aroinia and Rubus canadensis (Canada Blackberry) in sparse fruit, mats of \, ragged stand-up Amelanchier, Ledum and \ and \ right down at the foot of the rock, just above tide level, scrawnyJuniperus communis (Common Juniper) bushes intertwined among the others, and a hedging of the heavy-leaved coastal Solidago(Goldenrod). A person could spend a week just enumerationg the plants here, and their dispostion in relation to the others, and to the tides."

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