216 
ontory juts out into the Atlantic, known from the earliest times as 
Montauk. ‘To quote from the extensive descriptions by Norman 
Taylor! (p. 9): “ Casual visitors to Montauk are charmed by the 
wildness of the place, the desolate moor-like Downs, the depths of 
the kettleholes, some destitute of woody vegetation, others dark and 
even mysterious in their wooded interior, The feeling that the 
vegetation has always been so, and that from the earliest times the 
Indians, whose relics are common enough on the Point, must have 
roamed through a region such as our modern pedestrian sees, 1s 
natural enough. While this may be wholly true, it appears from 
a study of the records of the earliest settlers that there has always 
been, within historic times at least, a distinct separation of grass- 
land and woodland. Woody vegetation (p. 28) on these wind- 
swept hills appears next to impossible, and yet there are evidences 
that some form of woody vegetation 1s making an attempt to cover 
at least part of what is now grassland. There are today hundreds 
of tiny patches of * bush’ scattered over the Downs, some only < 
foot or two in diameter, others covering, especially in the lee, 
square rods in extent .. . little islands of thicket in an ocean of 
grassland. Almost without exception, the major portion of these 
islands is made up of the Bayberry (A/yrica carolinensis), very 
often associated with which will be Rosa carolina, and perhaps the 
whole mass bound together with Rubus procumbens (which often 
scrambles out into the grassland), or Smilax glauca. It 1s not 
without interest that both these binders make prickly forage, and 
that in nearly every one of hundreds of such patches of * bush’ 
that were examined, one or both of these vines was to be found. 
Both the Rose and the Bayberry, under normal circumstances, 
would be several feet tall, here they are rarely more than a foot. 
ceeps these flattened 
— 
There are scores of places where the wind 
down so that while the patch of bushes may be many feet across, 
the shrubs will be only six inches high. . .. From this stage in 
jar 
the development of a patch, which may start with a single sprig 
of Bayberry, and end with a forlorn and stunted tree i the center 
of it, no one knows how long a time may have elapsed.” 
In the preceding attempts to give an idea of the vegetation which 
confronted the early colonists, and, to some extent, a picture of the 
Phe Vegetation of Montauk: A Study of Grassland and Forest. Brook- 
lyn Bot. Gard. Memoirs. Vol. 2, part 1. 1923 
