RARE NATIVE PLANTS FERNALD 377 



and "flora" too often mean garden flowers, farm crops, timber trees, 

 and weeds. These, although the most obvious of plants, are to the 

 thoughtful student the least interesting, unless, perchance, his out- 

 look is strictly pragmatic. 



By far the most familiar element in our wild flora in the neigh- 

 borhood of old settlements is the great population of weeds. Brought 

 chiefly from the roadsides, fields, and waste lands of Europe within 

 the last three centuries, they are covering the disturbed soils of large 

 sections of the North American continent: Common dandelion, bur- 

 docks, daisy or white weed, witchgrass, mustards, hawkweeds, wild 

 carrot, Canada thistle, bull thistle, common plantain, English plan- 

 tain, pigweed, docks, smartweed, and many others, including the 

 various cultivated (and escaped) fodder plants, like the clovers, 

 timothy, and orchard grass. The invasion of newly disturbed or 

 cleared land by the hawkweeds (devil's paintbrush, king devil, and 

 others), dandelion, witchgrass, and others of their ilk is too obvious. 

 They are the youngest species of our flora, the rapidly reproducing, 

 aggressive, uninvited, and unrestrained vagrants, the ultrademocratic 

 and unsophisticated intruders. Their number is well over 1,000, and 

 their army is reenforced by every arrival of uncleaned European 

 seeds, in the stockings, trouser-bottoms, skirt-hems and blankets of 

 immigrants, in the litter and old straw used in packing from abroad. 

 Arrived in a new country they know no restraints and after a short 

 period of adjustment become the bulk of our plant population wher- 

 ever natural conditions have been destroyed, and they will even in- 

 vade and obliterate relict colonies of our original native flora. 



There is no possible question of the present-day biological success 

 of the introduced weeds. When I was a boy in Maine, in the late 

 seventies and early eighties, one of the beautiful garden perennials, 

 raised in a few favored borders and coveted by all who had flower 

 gardens, was Hieracium aurantiacum^ a plant with broad clusters of 

 orange and scarlet tassellike erect heads. It was handsome and at 

 that time unusual, and it was scrupulously shared only with those 

 who would really appreciate and nurture it, as Venus' paintbrush. 

 Soon, however, in the eighties and early nineties, it had become 

 acclimated and began to appear in the fields. It has now ruined 

 thousands and thousands of acres of fallow field and clearing from 

 the tip of Gaspe to Michigan and southward to Pennsylvania; and, 

 whereas it first came to America as Venus' paintbrush, it is now 

 known to all farmers as devil's paintbrush. Furthermore, in that 

 wonderful region containing Oakos Gulf, Bigelow's Lawn, and the 

 Alpine Garden on Mount Washington, where are assembled a great 

 colony of the rarest of arctic-alpine species of plants (of most great 

 groups), small mammals, and insects, the devil's paintbrush repeat- 

 edly comes in from below. Only by close watching by the few who 



