New worlds grow meadows where the ground holds water: valley floors beside creeks, rivers and lakes, glacial trough floors, cold hollows and seeps. They have a sharp forest edge and no trees standing in them, and they cover about 5 to 9 percent of the conifer belt, the biggest 25 to 40 ha on trough floors. The sward is wet, moist or dry by how high the water table sits, sedge, corn lily and wildflowers grow in it, and young lodgepoles creep out onto cold ones. High meadows are meant to cure to late-summer straw; until November 6 they stayed July green in late August, and they are still greener than photographs.
Far tiles beyond about 2 km now draw meadow where there is one. The high country has almost no flat ground for them.
