140 THE PLANT WORLD. 



THE SOUTHERN LIMIT OF JUNIPERUS SABINA. 



By E. J. Hill. 



IN the latest issue of the valuable Minnesota Botanical Studies, 

 Second Series, Part IV, there is an account of the flora of a por- 

 tion of Houston County in the extreme southeast part of the state. 

 Mr. W. A. Wheelei, the collector of the plants enumerated and author 

 of the contribution, says in connection with Jiinii^emis Sahina L. , 

 sparingly found there; "this is about the most southern point of col- 

 lection for the species in the United States, according to Britton and 

 Brown." The error involved in the inference is due to the oversight 

 of the authority cited rather than to Mr. Wheeler, and the use of other 

 handbooks might lead to no better result. But the procumbent 

 Juniper has been known to collectors for more than a quarter of a 

 century to be a denizen of a small area of low sand dunes on the west 

 shore of Lake Michigan at AVauhegan, 111. I visited the locality in 

 1886, and found it abundant, or as the note made in the fieldbook at 

 the time states it, "everywhere on the ground, often covering it like a 

 mat." Wauhegan is thirty-five miles north of Chicago, and gives a 

 station for the plant about one degree south of that in Minnesota. I 

 do not know that it occurs elsewhere so far south on either shore of 

 the lake or its immediate vicinity. If so this station may be considered 

 its southern limit. It was published by Prof. H. H. Babcock in his 

 "Flora of Chicago and vicinity. " (The Lens, (Chicago, 1872), and in 

 Patterson's Catalogue of the plants of Illinois (1876). The geogra- 

 phical range should therefore include northeastern Illinois. In Michigan 

 I have found it on the Manitou Islands near the northern end of the 

 lake, and it appears on the main land of the southern Peninsula in 

 about the same latitude at the head of Grand Traverse Bay and of 

 Little Traverse Bay. North of this range it becomes more frequent, 

 but should be sought for father south along the east shore of Lake 

 Michigan. Otherwise the appearance at Wauhegan is quite isolated. 

 Sand dune areas along the west shore are small, far apart, and an ex- 

 ceptional feature of its topography. It may be noted that if AVauhegan 

 is the southern limit of this Juniper it coincides very nearly with that 

 of another conifer, Pmus divaricata, which finds its most southern 

 station in the dune area at the head of Lake Michigan in Lake and 

 Porter Counties, Indiana, about fifty miles south of Wauhegan. 



Chicago, 111. 



