One of the channels on my hotel TV in Fairbanks was essentially a continuous commercial for places to visit in that part of Alaska. All kinds of tourist activities or things to buy to remind you of your visit.

Here’s a thought for the Great Alaskan Bowl Co. of Fairbanks: noting that your product was featured in the 2017 “Made in America Week” event at the White House, however much of an honor that might seem to be, and however excellent your paper-birch wood bowls might be, could be a way to alienate as many potential buyers as it impresses. Just a thought.

The only TV recommendation I took to heart was a suggestion to visit the Georgeson Botanical Garden on the campus of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

At the end of July, the eight-acre garden is a lush place, flush with flowers and varieties of vegetables I wouldn’t have associated with Alaska. But I am horticulturally ignorant. The growing season is short in the subarctic, but there is a growing season.

Flowers.

Vegetables.

Including the largest cabbages I’ve ever seen.

“The Georgeson Botanical Garden began in 1989 as a research, educational, and public outreach program,” the garden web site says. “However, its roots lie much deeper. In 1898, 31 years after the US purchased Alaska, the Secretary of Agriculture of the USDA sent [a] special agent of agriculture, Charles Christian Georgeson, to Alaska to explore the agricultural potential of the state.”

Georgeson established seven agriculture stations in the territory, two of which still exist, one in Fairbanks and one in Matanuska.

“The Fairbanks experiment station was established in 1906 and in 1931 the farm was incorporated into the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines (renamed the University of Alaska Fairbanks in 1935). [By the 1980s]… UAF proposed turning the muddy paths and straight rows of trial plants into a space that is more accessible and welcoming to the public.”

Why do cabbages (and cantaloupes and broccoli and others) grow so large in Alaska? It might be counterintuitive, but NPR offers an explanation.

“It’s Alaska’s summer sun that gives growers an edge, says Steve Brown, an agricultural agent at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Basking in as much as 20 hours of sunshine per day, Alaskan crops get a photosynthesis bonus, allowing them to produce more plant material and grow larger. Brassicas like cabbage do especially well, says Brown.”

Elsewhere I saw plenty of other intriguing flora, including the main kinds of trees in the state, such as spruces, black cottonwood, paper birch, quaking aspen, alder and balsam poplar.

Fireweed. Late summer is its time, and I saw it everywhere.

“The fireweed we know in Alaska — Chamerion angustifolium — proliferates during summer, aggressively erupting in open spaces before cottoning in the turn toward fall,” the Anchorage Daily News says.

“Fireweed is common throughout much of the northern hemisphere. In Canada, it is the willowherb. In the United Kingdom, it is rosebay willowherb….

“The ‘fire’ in the name derives not just from the vivid color of the flower itself but from its tendency to grow in areas cleared by fire. As fireweed favors open, cleared and dry land, it was among the first plants to grow in the wake of the 1980 Mount St. Helens volcanic eruption in Washington state.”