IRbofcora 



JOURNAL OF 



THE NEW ENGLAND BOTANICAL CLUB 



Vol. 18. December, 1916. No. 216. 



PINUS BANKSIANA ON NANTUCKET. 

 Eugene P. Bicknell. 



In the interest of geographic botany a further word should be 

 said in the matter of Finns Banksiana on Nantucket as reported by 

 Professor Harshberger in Rhodora, 16: 184. The identity of the 

 trees is not at all in question. The record rests on unquestioned 

 authority, and I myself, a number of years ago, observed their 

 little group in thriving growth at the locality described by Professor 

 Harshberger. What has been their history there? For two reasons 

 it would be a very notable thing were the Labrador pine by native 

 right a member of the Nantucket flora. It would be very notable 

 because of the wide severance from its present well defined natural 

 range by which a remote northern tree had a place in the vegetation 

 of Massachusetts and of southern New England; and it would be 

 scarcely less a matter of botanical interest in its contradiction of a 

 pronouncement of local history that Nantucket was originally a 

 pineless island — originally, for it has never been questioned that the 

 pitch pines, now so conspicuous a feature of the island's vegetation 

 are not of native Nantucket ancestry. Mrs,. Owen, writing in 1888, 

 does not hesitate to say "The pines are all from seed planted by 

 Joseph Sturgis and others in 1847 and following years." 



The Labrador pines grow in a part of the island long ago explored 

 by botanists, and close to the old Wauwinet road. It would be 

 against the presumption that they had always grown there that so 

 conspicuous a tree as a conifer, and so remarkable a thing as a colony 

 of pine trees on Nantucket in the days before any pines were known 

 to grow there, had failed of discovery by those earlier investigators. 



