Juniper Berry and Crowberry

Of the more than 400 species of plants that make up the wild flowers of the Faroe Islands, only a few woody plants occur. Two of these ligneous plants are the juniper berry and crowberry.

Common juniper (Juniperus communis subsp. alpina)

Today, several species of conifer and shrub grow in the Faroe Islands. Most of these have been imported and planted here. The only indigenous plant species in the same family as conifers is the juniper. In some areas, the names “juniper” and “juniper berry” are used indiscriminately to describe these plants.

The juniper is a low-growing, evergreen shrub. Its needles measure approximately 1 cm and have a light, grey-green colour. Juniper is normally a dioecious species, which means that it has separate male and female plants. The male flower is yellow and oblong with an abundance of stamens. The female flower is greenish in colour, making it difficult to see. The fruit consists of so-called berry cones that take two to three years to mature. The berry cones are green in the first year, and mature in the second and third year to a deep blue colour.

During the period after the last Ice Age, juniper was relatively widespread throughout the Faroe Islands. As the climate became wetter, the juniper bushes gradually disappeared. Some 5,000 years ago, however, another change in the climate occurred and the growing conditions for juniper improved. In many areas, juniper stumps can be found in strata from this period. Around 600 BC, however, the climate became wetter again and juniper dispersal came to a complete halt. This decline continued when the islands became inhabited by people and, today, juniper can only be found on the island of Svínoy and a small number of other locations in the Faroes.

Juniper trees are low growing and, therefore, cannot be used as timber. Nevertheless, they have a number of other useful purposes. In the Faroe Islands, juniper was used for smoking meat and, a type of rope made of twisted juniper stems was found in the Viking excavation in Kvívík.

The berries, which are not actually berries but seed cones, are also used as a spice and medication. For example, gin derives its distinctive flavour from immature juniper berries.

Crowberry (Empetrum nigrum)

Crowberry is a genus of dwarf shrub that is commonly found in the Faroe Islands. It grows particularly well on dry heathland and is also among the most common plants on moorland. As with the juniper bush, the crowberry is an evergreen which means that the leaves remain on the plant throughout the winter.

Two subspecies of crowberry grow in the Faroe Islands: common crowberry (Empetrum nigrum subs. nigrum) and mountain crowberry (Empetrum nigrum subs. hermaphroditum). Mountain crowberry is found on all the islands, while the common crowberry only grows on the island of Streymoy and the southern islands. In Scandinavia, common crowberry only grows in Finland, Denmark and Southern Sweden, while mountain crowberry grows in Finland and the greater part of Sweden and Norway.

Common crowberry and mountain crowberry are very similar to each other but the crucial difference is that the common crowberry is a dioecious species, like the common juniper. Mountain crowberry, on the other hand, has hermaphrodite flowers.

The stems of the common crowberry are low and trailing. On the lower part of the bush the stems are mat-forming, making the common crowberry closer to the ground than the mountain crowberry which has more upright stems.

The first pink flowers begin to develop around April and May, while the familiar glossy black crowberries mature in July and August. Consumption of the ripe berries by people as well as animals plays an important part in the distribution of the seeds. When eaten by birds, it takes some time for the seeds to pass through the bird’s digestive system. During this period, it is likely that the bird will have moved some distance away from the original crowberry plant, thus ensuring its seeds are dispersed over a wide area.

In the Faroe Islands, crowberries are picked and eaten raw, cooked in porridge or used to make jam.

Jana Mikkelsen

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Date of issue: 1-IX-2011

Author: Edward Fuglø

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Art: Frida Zachariassen

Frida Zachariassen – a distinctive painter from Klaksvík

Frida Zachariassen was one of the most distinctive artists in the Faeroe Islands during the 1950s. She developed her own personal style, characterised by geometric figures in compositions portraying landscapes, towns, villages and people. Sometimes the colours in Frida Zachariassen’s paintings are clear and strong, but they also often feature blurred and thin colour tones; in some of the paintings, earth tones dominate. In the 1930s and 1940s, her painting style focused on content and emotions leaning towards the romantic, with replication of the grandeur of nature, the sublime and the eternal. Around 1950, Frida Zachariassen began painting more abstractly. Landscapes and people were dissolved and reconstructed with squares, stripes and triangles. The main works are constructions made of lines and figures in colours such as saturated green and cool blue and grey, sometimes accompanied by black lines. Despite this abstraction and organisation, Frida Zachariassen’s paintings were never non-figurative. Her paintings always depict something recognisable.

In Frida Zachariassen’s landscape paintings, the relationship between the land and people is clear and meaningful. People populate her landscapes and they are often embedded in the landscape. The people in her paintings are active; they work as fishermen, prepare their boats to set sail, unload, walk on fell paths, go to the market, butcher pilot whales, harvest straw and herd sheep.

Frida Zachariassen was from Klaksvík and lived there for the majority of her life. She was born in 1912 and died in 1992. Her mother was Magdalena Jacobsen, who was from Klaksvík’s Uppsalar neighbourhood, and her father was Jógvan Rasmussen, who was called by the place he came from, Jógvan í Grótinum, located by Skálafjørður on Eysturoy. Frida Zachariassen grew up in a busy home with nine siblings and a father who was the leading figure in Klaksvík at the start of the twentieth century.

In 1927, Frida Zachariassen completed her middle school examination with good marks and in 1937 she graduated from the Merchants’ School in Copenhagen. She also wanted an education in art. She wrote about this in the book Strev í málrøkt (Efforts in tending language):
“As a youth, I was most interested in working with paintings and getting an education in Copenhagen. But it quickly became clear that one could not live from making “art”.  Despite the fact that Faroese could easily gain admission to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts at that time, there were so few that four years there seemed to be of no use and far too expensive. Therefore, I chose a business school education and then began working at an office.”

In other words, it was impossible for her to go into a field that could not provide an income. Instead, she found a means of survival and made art in her free time.

During the war, she worked at the offices of the merchant and shipping company, J. F. Kjølbro in her home town. In May of 1944, she married Guttormur Zachariassen, but their marriage was short-lived. He died in a wreck in February 1945. After the war, she returned to Copenhagen, where she worked at an office until 1949. Of the drawings held at Norðoya Listafelag (the Northern Islands Art Association), many are from this period. They indicate that she went to the Danish Museum of Art to draw. When she returned to Klaksvík, she oversaw the region’s health insurance for more than twenty years.

Frida Zachariassen’s production of paintings was greatest in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1970s, her eyesight diminished, so she began writing instead of painting.

Many of her paintings are from Klaksvík and the surrounding region; these include landscapes, portraits and images of working life. The colours often contrast: red and green, blue and green, red and blue, giving her paintings a sense of both coldness and warmth. It was also during the 1950s that she developed her special cubist style. Meanwhile, she began to travel extensively to develop her art.

The rhythmic patterns and light colours that mark the paintings “Kona” (“Woman”) and “Urtagarður” (“The Garden”) show the splendour of Frida Zachariassen’s unique style. She created art featuring cubist forms that concentrate her expression while giving it form and depth.

Malan Marnersdóttir

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Date of issue: 26-IV-2011

Author: Frida Zachariassen

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Art: Bergithe Johannessen

Bergithe Johannessen – watercolour painter from Vestmanna

Bergithe Christine Johannessen (1905-95) was the first Faroese to be admitted to the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Born in Vestmanna, she was the daughter of Madgalene and Niels Skaale Johannessen, merchant and grocer. Bergithe Johannessen was 18 years old when she travelled to London to study painting. She went to the Sidscup School of Art from 1923 until 1925 and specialised in watercolour painting. She then moved to Copenhagen, where she attended the School of Painting at Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts from 1925 until 1931. After completing her studies, she continued living in Copenhagen, where she worked as a porcelain painter at the Royal Danish Porcelain Factory. In 1939, she married semi-skilled worker Arnold Rönnow Torp – Bergithe Johannessen was her artist name.

She travelled frequently to the Faroe Islands to paint and she participated in many Olaj Exhibitions from 1956 until 1980. She was also represented at the major exhibitions organised by the Faroe Islands Art Association in the 1950s: Faroese Art at the Free Exhibition Building in Copenhagen in 1995; Faroese Art at Iceland’s Museum of Art, Listasavn Íslands in 1961 and Faroese Art at the Bergen Art Association in 1970. The Faroe Islands Museum of Art has ten of her watercolours in its collection.

Bergithe Johannessen primarily painted landscapes; colourist watercolours featuring land, sea and skies. Sometimes the paintings have houses and sheep, but never people.

“Skærfyldt strand” (“Glowing beach”) is a watercolour painted in 1964. A green summer landscape unfolds in the foreground. In the middle of the picture is a fence and a sheep standing close to the edge of the rocks. The fence draws the eye towards the middle distance, from the edge of the beach, light, and rocks into the inlet, which takes over. On the other side of the inlet, another rocky landscape can be seen off in the distance, with thick green foliage under a heavy fog that hangs in the background.

“From Nolsø” is also a watercolour from 1964. Here, the foreground is split. On the right is an open view to the water in the middle distance; on the left, rocks rise up and block the view. Some of the forms in the foreground are similar to the other watercolour, but here the middle distance is painted more intricately. A stone dyke runs from the rocks to a field of grass. What appears to be driftwood along the dyke creates depth in the picture. A blue-grey cape spreads across nearly the entire middle distance, separating it from the background, which is a distant landscape on the other side of a strait. The sky is a heavy, light grey plane with scattered indications of clouds, emphasising the enclosed look. The inlet in the foreground is separated from the strait in the middle distance, which ends at the heavily clouded sky. Against the grey and white, the green colours in the grass and blue water create suspense in the painting.

Bergithe Johannessen also painted oil paintings. The Faroe Islands Museum of Art has one of these paintings from 1932. The main scene is a stream winding through a green landscape with grass hanging over the stream banks. A brown fell rises up fills the entire middle distance. In the background, a thin veil of fog covers the top and opens occasionally to reveal a light sky.

In the catalogue from the 1955 exhibition in Copenhagen, the author William Heinesen wrote that Bergithe Johannessen made “the fine, gentle watercolour her speciality”. In the Weilbach encyclopaedia of artists, the artist Bárður Jákupsson writes that she mastered the technique of watercolours in a brilliant and artistic way and that she portrayed atmospheres in the Faroese landscape, with a particular focus on villages and coasts.

Bergithe Johannessen watercolours and oil paintings are fine representatives of Faroese art from the mid-twentieth century. Her paintings portray landscapes, villages and the sea with empathy and a precise sense of colour and form.

Malan Marnersdóttir

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Date of issue: 26-IV-2011

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Welcome the 7000th Visitors

Aqui ficam as melhores saudações Filatélicas, para os visitantes de todo o mundo, que diariamente visitam o meu blog.

(English version)

Here are the best Philatelic greetings to visitors from all over the world who daily visit my blog.

Mountain flowers

Red campion, Silene dioica

The plant is widely known as red campion, while its botanical name is Silene dioica. Red campion is a member of the carnation family, of the genus Silene. In addition to the red campion, its relative the moss campion (Silene acaulis) grows on the Faeroe Islands. The Faroese name bjargablóma (mountain flower) is given to the flower because it is a mountain-dwelling wild flower that grows in attractive dense cushions with pink and occasionally white flowers. Only in the Faeroe Islands is the word ‘mountain’ linked to the plant’s name, so the Faroese name is accepted as being original. Red campion grows in steep rocky slopes and in inaccessible lower-mountain areas. Red campion is a rare plant. It is not found on any of the smaller islands or on Sandoy or Eysturoy. It is considered to be an indigenous Faroese plant, i.e. it was brought to the islands by the wind, ocean currents or birds and not by human activity. Red campion is an herbaceous perennial and can grow to just over a metre in height. It flowers in July. The vertical stalks grow from a slender, creeping stock. The plant has two kinds of hairy leaves. The upper leaves are pointed and without stalks while the lower leaves have long, winged stalks and are oval-shaped. The red and occasionally white petals are large and the flower has a central ring of flaps. Red campion is a dioecious species, with separate male and female plants. The male plant has a 10-veined calyx and the female plant has a 20-veined calyx. The fruit is an ovoid capsule that opens up at the apex with ten teeth, which curve back.

Wood Cranesbill, Geranium sylvaticum

The plant is widely known as Wood Cranesbill, its Faroese name “litingarsortugræs” (colour black grass) and its botanical name is Geranium sylvaticum. It is the only species of Cransebill found on the Faeroe Islands. Its Faroese name refers to the fact that the plant is used to make natural black dye. The Icelandic name also refers to the plant’s natural black dye. The name of the plant in other countries derives from the special five-sectioned stalk, which looks like the head and beak of a crane when the petals have fallen off. Hence its common Danish name “Storknæb” (storksbill). Similar plants in the same genus are commonly called cranesbills and heron’s bill. Storksbill grows on the Faroe Islands. It is considered to be an indigenous Faroese plant, i.e. it was brought to the islands by the wind, ocean currents or birds and not by human activity. It is not found on the smallest islands and is rarely found on Suðuroy or Sandoy but is common on Streymoy and Eysturoy. It grows on low-lying land and is never found growing on heights greater than 300 metres. It is a perennial plant that flowers in June and July. It can grow up to 50 cm in height and has a vertical stalk with long hairs at the top and short hairs at the bottom. The leaves are very large and divided into fine leaflets. The flowers are typically blue and sometimes red. Fully-grown, the flowers are 10–18 mm in diameter and grow in pairs. In general, the plant is dioecious. It has five blue or red petals, and the centre of the flower is light, almost white. The flower and seed pod is divided into five single fruits.

Anna Maria Fosaa

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Date of issue: 26-IV-2011

Author: Astrid Andreasen

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