Early spring aspects of the coastal plain vegetation of South 
Carolina, Georgia, and northeastern Florida 
ROLAND M. HARPER 
The first week in March, 1910, I journeyed from Washington, 
D. C., to Jacksonville, Fla., on a through train of the Southern 
Railway, traversing the Piedmont region from Washington to a 
few miles north of Columbia, S. C., and the coastal plain the rest 
of the way. That part of the route lying in the Piedmont region 
has been in operation, and the region as a whole has been fairly 
thickly settled, so long that the opportunities for studying natural 
vegetation from the train along there are now rather limited. 
But in the coastal plain portion civilization has not yet made such 
serious inroads. That part of the railroad in South Carolina 
between Columbia and Perry, 32 miles, and Allendale and Hardee- 
ville, 51 miles, is only about a dozen years old, having been built 
by the Southern Railway in the last few years of the nineteenth 
century in order to gain an entrance into Savannah. From 
Hardeeville to Jacksonville the tracks of the Atlantic Coast Line 
are used, and of this the part between Jesup and Folkston, Georgia, 
54 miles, was built by the Plant System, shortly before its absorp- 
tion by the Atlantic Coast Line in 1902, to shorten its mileage 
between Savannah and Jacksonville’ by about 20 miles. Even 
along the older parts of the railroads in the coastal plain, such 
as that between Savannah and Jesup, which has been in operation 
for half a century, there is still a much larger proportion of the 
original forest to be seen than in the Piedmont region. 
The schedules of the only through train on that route at the 
time indicated were most convenient for my purposes. Most of 
the Piedmont region, where what little remains of the vegetation 
had hardly awakened from its winter sleep (spring having been 
a little late in the South in 1910), was traversed at night, while in 
the coastal plain portion of the route, where the vegetation was 
more advanced, phenologically speaking—mainly on account of 
the lower latitude and altitude—and there is more for a botanist 
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