IRbofcora 



JOURNAL OF 



THE NEW ENGLAND BOTANICAL CLUB 

 Vol. 18. September, 1916. No. 213. 



THE OLD STUMPS AT BLANC 1 SABLON. 1 

 Charles W. Townsend, M.D. 



Professor M. L. Fernald, who, in 1910, made at this point [Blanc 

 Sablon] a brief incursion into Labrador has most interestingly de- 

 scribed the region in the pages of Rhodora. 2 " Here" he says "was 

 an ideal place to study the vegetation of a highly calcareous region 

 side by side with the plants of a silicious and gneissoid area, and if 

 anyone doubts the dissimilarities of these floras he can find no better 

 spot in which to undeceive himself than at Blanc Sablon." 



Like him I was struck by the flat grassy plains on the tops of the 

 terraces, so different from the rounded and irregular surfaces of the 

 granitic rocks with their wealth of mosses and lichens and their com- 

 parative paucity of grasses. Prof. Fernald says "The commonest 

 flower of the Laurentian plains is Carex rariflora, though with singu- 

 lar regard for its specific name it is by all means the rarest of its genus 

 in New England." But the most surprising feature which is de- 

 scribed and figured by Prof. Fernald is the presence of stumps of 

 forest trees, and with them a forest vegetation still lingering in the 

 plains now fully exposed to the sun. Dwarf Cornell, snow berry, 

 Linnaea, star flower, clintonia, one-flowered pyrola and dwarf solomon 

 seal were most in evidence, and Professor Fernald mentions also such 

 typical forest species as red baneberry, Dewey's sedge, great-spurred 

 violet, miterwort and sweet-scented bedstraw. 



I measured several of the stumps that were a foot or two high with 



1 Read by invitation at a meeting of the New England Botanical Club, May 5, 1916. Extract 

 from Chapter XI[ of "In Audubon's Labrador." 



2 "A Botanical Kxpedition to Newfoundland and Southern Labrador." M. L. Fernald, 

 Rhodora, xiii, 109-102 (1911). 



