THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 7 



tliDU^h if \vc were wiser we niii,dit chang'e our phraseoloj^y 

 seeing how the gray, ghttering strand laughs in the siui. Mere 

 no plant can live. Next are the (h-iving sands which are the 

 sport of the winds, and these gradually merge into the station- 

 ary dunes which have been battle-grounds for ages and ages, 

 and where plants are at last victorious. Often in these hat- 

 lies between \egetatinn and tlie drixing sands, a little bunch 

 of dune-grass has turned the tide in favor of the plants. 

 Dune-grass has winged seeds, is (juick of growth, and a rapid 

 colonizer. It binds the sands with' its tangle of roots, catches 

 other seeds, twigs, and leaves, and little by little forms a hu- 

 mus and the storni-tossed dune becomes a i)lace of plants 

 and a hill of trees. 



Aside from the wonder that plants ever make settlements 

 on the dunes, is the added surprise of finding desert and arc- 

 tic plant> in close ct)mpanionship, along with those of wood- 

 land, prairie.and marsh. This is said to be the case wath no 

 other known region of the United States. In consequence of 

 this, the dunes become wild gardens of especial interest to 

 botanists. 



The prickly pear cactus luxuriates in the dune sand and 

 sprawling in thorny patches bears its flaming yelknv flowers 

 as freely as in its desert habitat, while twun-flowers nearby, 

 are as delicate as their cousins above the Arctic Circle. Direct 

 descendants of trees that grew in the hot Carboniferous age, 

 now dwarfed to delicate herbage, fringe the sands over which 

 trail the long runners of the uva-ursi — a lovely wanderer 

 from the Arctic regions. Over them wave and bloom the 

 slender shad-trees which Matthews, in his book on trees, tells 

 us came down from the North with the glaciers. Sheltered 

 by the pines and oaks, whole hillsides are covered with trail- 

 ing arbutus — the Pilgrim's flower. 



