VEGETATION IN THE DUNES 



pie color. Fortunately in these dunes no at- 

 tempt at cultivation is made, there is no 

 dyking nor draining, no weeding nor planting, 

 so that the cranberry vine grows with its 

 native grace and freedom. Many berries es- 

 cape the pickers in the large bogs, and many 

 of the small bogs, hiding among the dunes, are 

 overlooked entirely. Some years the frosts 

 come early and all the berries are lost to 

 commerce. Other years several hundred bar- 

 rels are picked by hand and with box rakes. 

 In any event the dune wanderer can al- 

 ways pick his pockets full, and, with a little 

 w^ater and much sugar, may quickly convert 

 the berries over the fire into a delicious 

 '' sauce." I have often gathered them from 

 beneath the snow, and their fine resistant 

 qualities keep them sound even when in the 

 spring floods they are floated away and line 

 the shores of the bog pools in windrows. I 

 once for a record made a good sauce of these 

 berries on the first of June. 



Another great attraction these natural cran- 

 berry bogs have which the artificial ones lack 

 is their wealth of extraneous plants,— herbs, 

 bushes and even trees. In fact some of the 

 bogs are so overgrown that the cranberry 



77 



