378 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN" INSTITUTION, 19 39 



appreciate a choice and distinctive habitat can it be kept in restraint. 

 Similarly, in the bleak alpine chimneys of the high mountains of 

 Gaspe, the home oi a splendid colony of rare alpines, another of the 

 vagrant hawkweeds, this time the king devil, blows in from the low- 

 land fields. The last time I visited the mountains I carefully ex- 

 terminated all the king devil I found — there suppressing or crowding 

 out Oassiope. It is feared that no one has subsequently done such 

 policing there. 



One of the handsomest plants of pastures, hillsides, and open 

 mountain slopes of the British Isles is a large groundsel {Senecio 

 Jacobcea), known as ragwort or by 50 other local and colloquial 

 names. One of its older cognomens was the dignified St.-James's- 

 wort (whence the Latin name.) In the late seventies St.-James's-wort 

 appeared as a waif or stowaway on ballast, thrown out from a ship 

 at Pictou, Nova Scotia. For several years it remained a local colony ; 

 but by 1884 it had begun to spread along the local roadsides ; by 1900 

 it had become one of the worst pests of northern and eastern Nova 

 Scotia, eastern New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Brows- 

 ing animals avoid it and it has full sway, completely dominating, 

 along with one or more of the European hawkweeds, much of the 

 cleared land of the Maritime Provinces, where no one now calls it 

 St.-James's-wort; it is everywhere appropriately known as "stinking 

 Willie.'* Soon after 1900 stinking Willie reached the waste land 

 about the union station in Portland, Maine, and it now colors a 

 pasture slope in Essex County, Mass. 



Among the most remarkable elements of the flora of eastern 

 North America are the estuary plants, a few very distinct species 

 which grow only on the flats of rivers where twice a day the incom- 

 ing tide pushes back the fresh or but slightly brackish waters. Only 

 a few species can tolerate the rapid changes from drowning and im- 

 mersion in mud and silt, alternating with drying off or toasting in 

 the sunshine. Consequently the distinctive estuary species are a re- 

 stricted and biologically significant group. The finest estuary in our 

 region is that of the St. Lawrence, from slightly below Montreal to 

 many miles below Quebec; others of note are the estuaries of the 

 Penobscot, the Kennebec-Androscoggin system, the Merrimac, the 

 Hudson, the Delaware, and Chesapeake Bay. Twenty years ago 

 any of these estuaries would yield abundant material of their endemic 

 (or epibiotic) species. But Montreal became a great fresh- water 

 port for trans-Atlantic liners. Straw and litter from Europe thrown 

 into the St. Lawrence quickly found lodgment, and the seeds or tubers 

 of meadow plants of England and France discovered a new home. 

 Today for many miles, from above Montreal to below Quebec, the 

 formerly unique and endemic flora of the estuary is being rapidly 



