150 Rhodora : [SEPTEMBER 
add the city’s claim as a desirable field of botanical observation, and 
to call attention in this article to some of the plants collected in Boston 
during recent years which have been of interest to me. The localities 
mentioned are not those of suburban districts but are in close proximity 
to busy streets or residential avenues of the city proper. 
The first time I ever found Ranunculus sceleratus L. was in the 
ditches along the old Providence Railway, near Newton Street. It 
grew there abundantly along with Lemna minor L. until the draining 
of the ditches exterminated it and I have seldom met with it since in 
more extended explorations. Му first collection of Setaria verti- 
cillata Beauv. was in a front yard on Mount Vernon Street, and this 
also has been infrequently met with. Chenopodium glaucum L. I 
collected for the first time in the crevices of the brick sidewalk on the 
edge of the Public Garden, and in the last few years Galinsoga parvi- 
flora Cav.-var. hispida DC! has been growing freely at the base of the 
granite wall at the Church Street entrance to the Subway. 
But it is the vacant lots and dumping grounds of the city that furnish 
the city botanist with an almost inexhaustible supply of material. 
On every visit something new and strange will be seen, perhaps dis- 
appearing in a few days, to be replaced by other surprises. 
There are two localities in Boston which have proved sources of 
continual botanical interest for a number of years. One of these, 
the South Boston flats, now mostly occupied as a railway terminal, 
has furnished many interesting species, the enumeration of which 
would require another article and may be left for future presentation. 
The other locality is the Back Bay lands and a list of some of the 
more noteworthy plants collected here at various times in recent years 
is the principal object of this sketch. 
This region, formerly a salt marsh, has been filled in with gravel 
brought from the neighboring town of Needham. ‘The streets are 
filled up to city grade, leaving many vacant lots, in some of which the 
original solid marsh still remains. 
For a few years, while the filling was in progress, many native 
plants and shrubs, brought in with the gravel, maintained their exis- 
tence, but, at length, most of them succumbed; apparently unable to 
meet the competition of the hosts of cosmopolitan weeds which soon 
overran the entire region and now flourish in the greatest luxuriance, 
forming jungles of vegetation in many of the lots. 
The establishment and planting of the Back Bay Fens in later years 
