105 
REPORT OF THE CURATOR OF THE HERBARIUM 
BOR 1Lo35 
Dr. C. STUART GAGER, DIRECTOR. 
Sir: I submit herewith my report for the year ending December 
S193 5: 
In addition to local collections made in the vicinity of New 
York during the spring, I spent two summer months in the south- 
ern states, obtaining seeds for the international seed exchange and 
specimens both for the herbarium and for exchange purposes. 
Despite the extremely hot weather, about 5,000 herbarium speci- 
mens were accumulated. Of the seeds and living plants collected, 
the most interesting were the pitcher plants, Sarracema flava, S. 
minor, and S. psittacina from southwestern Georgia. 
Some time was spent on the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee, 
an area of especial interest to me, since many of the plants grow- 
ing on the sandy and gravelly soils appear also on the most sterile 
parts of Long Island and Cape Cod. In other words, these plants 
now represented on the Atlantic Coastal Plain, have survived for 
countless ages on the flat sandstone surface of the Cumberland 
Plateau. There is great probability that they, together with the 
plants of the Great Smokies, represent the ancestral types from 
which a large part of the present vegetation of the eastern United 
States has been derived. 
The Cumberland Plateau is botanically as interesting as the 
Great Smoky Mountains. Here and there in the northern part 
where the soil seems to be deeper (especially south of Jamestown), 
some gigantic yellow pines (Pinus echinata) remain, the survivors 
iPhesclear 
” 
of the primeval forest of the “ Great Wilderness. 
rapid streams move through extensive thickets of Ahododendron, 
white azalea (Rhododendron viscosum), and Stuartia. In the 
waters of Clear Fork a Potamogeton was collected which Prof. 
M. L. Fernald will describe as a new species. Two years ago 
— 
Professor Jennison, of the University of Tennessee, discoverec 
the same plant in an immature condition growing in shallow water 
of the stream at Rugby, twenty miles to the northeast. Here, 
also, on sandy shores grows the wild rosemary (Conradina verti- 
cillata) known from nowhere else in the world. Rugby may be 
remembered as the utopian village set up in the American wilder- 
