1921] Fernald, — Expedition to Nova Scotia 109 



reduced to a fraction of its normal size, and is sometimes palest 

 yellow, or even whitish with a faint bluish tinge." 1 



The thickets by Trefry's Lake have a tantalizing complex of 

 Black Alders, Ilex verticillata and its varieties or allies; but one of 

 them was so unlike the ordinary forms of the species that we collected 

 material. This proves, as we then suspected, to be the very char- 

 acteristic shrub described by Bicknell from Nantucket and Martha's 

 Vineyard as Ilex fastigiata, 2 an extreme of this group with fastigiate 

 habit and very small and narrow leaves. The same shrub was 

 afterward seen elsewhere in Yarmouth County, and in October 

 Linder and I collected fruiting specimens on the headwaters of the 

 Tusket. Similarly, here as at many other places in the county, the 

 High-bush Blueberries were baffling in their variations and in work- 

 ing back into the boggy thicket to do our reluctant duty by them we 

 found ourselves in a characteristic growth of the Chain Fern, Wood- 

 icardia virginica, a coastal plain fern already well known from Nova 

 Scotia but not before seen by our party, though subsequently we 

 learned to regard it a dominant plant of boggy spruce swamps at 

 lake-margins and sometimes even of cobble-beaches. 



Coming to a point where the shore was impassible, we turned 

 back into the spruce iswamp, only to find ourselves impeded by a 

 very familiar and unyielding obstacle, a dense tangle of the long- 

 sought Green Brier or Cat Brier, Smilax rotundifolia; Smilax rotund- 

 ifolia with its roots in a cold sphagnous bog, its lithe, green steins 

 embracing the branches of the Hudsonian and Canadian White 

 Spruce and Larch quite as contentedly as if clambering over the Tu- 

 pelos and Leucothoe of Cape Cod. And back of the Green Brier 

 tangle, the spruce bog, with its tussocks of the northern Carex pauper- 

 cula and C. trispcrma and its carpets of Linnaea, Dalibarda and Cornus 

 canadensis, was almost uncanny with a dense undergrowth of Ink- 

 berry, Ilex glabra, now in profuse bloom and swarming with bees. 

 Incidentally, this shrub is considered in Alabama and some other 

 southern states the most valuable wild source of honey, and from 

 the swarms of honey bees which cover it in Nova Scotia it is appar- 

 ent that it might there be made of considerable economic use. 



We had not yet learned to rely on the almost regular lateness of 

 the west-bound trains on the Halifax and Southwestern (part of the 



■ Bicknell Bull. Torr. Bot. CI. xlii. 341 (1915). 

 2 Bicknell, Bull. Torr. Bot. CI. xxxix. 42(5 (1912). 



