204 Rhodora [DECEMBER 
EXOTIC PLANTS ESTABLISHED IN MIDDLESEX 
COUNTY, MASSACHUSETTS. 
WILLIAM BREWSTER. 
Two sisters, Miss Mary S. and Miss Harriet L. Eaton, living not 
far from the village centre of Concord, Massachusetts, at the rear 
of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, are interested in birds and wild flowers 
and have long been familiarly acquainted with most of those occurring 
regularly in that neighborhood. Behind their house and cultivated 
grounds lies a neglected, grassy field, crowning a wind-swept hill-top. 
Here, some six or seven years ago, they found a yellow-flowered Vetch, 
growing in arid, rather sandy soil. Then represented by only a few 
plants it has since so increased and spread that it now covers a space 
ten or fifteen feet across with a tangled mat of semiprostrate stems 
- and foliage, to the almost complete exclusion of all other vegetation. 
When first shown to me on June 27 of the present. year, by Miss 
Mary Eaton, it was apparently passing out of bloom and already 
bearing pea-like pods in various stages of development although 
still adorned with many bright yellow flowers. Specimens of it 
taken then and there with Miss Eaton’s kind permission have since 
been deposited in the Gray Herbarium where it has been identified 
as Lathyrus pratensis. According to the latest edition of Gray’s 
Manual this species, naturalized from Europe, occurs in “ fields and 
waste places,” locally, from New Brunswick to New York and Ontario. 
It was reported from Concord about nineteen years ago by Mr. A. W. 
Hosmer, Ruopora, i. 223 (1899), and it may be of interest that it 
has persisted until this time. The specimen, deposited in the Gray 
Herbarium, is doubtless the one which formed the basis of the recent 
record in Ruopora, xx. 108 (1918). 
After visiting the bed of Lathyrus, Miss Eaton and I were returning 
towards her house when some handsome tall shrubs or small trees, 
scattered along the line of a brush-grown stone wall, attracted our 
attention. In all there may have been ten or a dozen of them, vary- 
ing in height from two or three to six or seven feet. They looked 
not unlike young Tupelos, having similarly smooth, glossy, obovate 
leaves and sparsely-distributed, reddish, berry-like fruit. But their 
