Although Greenland is the size of Europe, it has only nine conifer forests like Mr Bjerge's, all of them cultivated. It has only 51 farms. (They are all sheep farms, although one man is trying to raise cattle. He has 22 cows.) Except for potatoes, the only vegetables most Greenlanders ever eat - to the extent that they eat vegetables at all - are imported, mostly from Denmark. But now that the climate is warming, it is not just old trees that are growing. A supermarket is stocking locally grown cauliflower, broccoli and cabbage this year for the first time. Kenneth Hoeg, the region's chief agriculture adviser, says he does not see why southern Greenland cannot eventually be full of vegetable farms and viable forests.

Farther north, Greenland's great ice sheet, a vast white landscape of 1.8 million square kilometres covering 80 per cent of the island's land mass, is melting rapidly, alarmingly, with repercussions not only for the traditional way of life on an island of 56,000 people, but also for the rest of the world. The more the ice melts, the higher sea levels will eventually rise. But in the subarctic south - a land of icy water, forbidding mountains, rocky hills, shallow soil, sudden winds and isolated communities slipped in, almost apologetically, along a network of glacier-studded fiords, the changes are more subtle and carry more promise. "The limiting factor for human survival here is temperature, and there's a lot of benefits with a warmer climate," Mr Hoeg said. "We are on the frontier of agriculture, and even a few degrees can make a difference."

Climate is a delicate matter in a place like this. A degree more of warmth here, 25 millimetres less of rain there; these can have serious repercussions for a farmer scraping a living raising sheep on the harsh terrain. But while temperatures in the south dipped in the 1980s, they have risen steadily since. Winter is coming later and leaving earlier. That means there is more time to leave sheep in the mountains, more time to grow crops, more time to work outdoors, and more opportunity to travel by boat, since the fiords freeze later and less frequently.

As if visiting the zoo, people come from all over to gape at the varieties of grass in the fields and to see what is growing. Hans Gronborg, a Danish horticulturist, plucked a head of cauliflower from its nest of leaves. It had a rich, almost sweet flavour - the result, he explained, of slow growth, long summer days of 20 hours of light, and wide swings in temperature from day to night. "It's small, but it means you get all that flavour concentrated in one-third the size of a regular cauliflower," he said.

"Greenlanders are hunters, and it takes time to change their way of living and being. But I am confident that things can grow in south Greenland." The New York Times