418 BICKNELL: FERNS AND FLOWERING PLANTS OF NANTUCKET 
no flower buds had appeared by June 12, but some of the stem 
tips bore little terminal rosettes showing where the buds were 
coming; buds visible June 11, 1911; first flowers June 17, 1908; 
in full flower August 9, 1906, August 10, 1895 (F. G. F.); a single 
cluster-of pink buds September 18, 1907. 
ERICA CINERA L. 
In Alphonso Woods’s “‘Botanist and Florist,’ edition of 1871, 
it is recorded that this heath, the bell heather, was discovered on 
Nantucket in June 1868, by Mrs. E. E. Atwater. Mrs. Owen’s 
paper, already cited, tells us that only a solitary plant was found, 
that it was found again in 1871, and was rediscovered inde- 
pendently by Mrs. William A. Spinney in 1878. It lived until 
1902 or 1903. Shortly before this a second plant was found not 
far off, and a year or two after, yet a third plant was discovered 
nearby. These facts, taken by themselves, would seem to make it 
perfectly obvious that the two later plants had been derived 
from the older one by self-sown seed. But the evidence gathered 
by Mrs. Owen puts this in some doubt, for it is known that 
heather plants of some kind were at one time set out somewhere 
in the same part of the island where these plants were found. 
Mr. Willis in his note, published in 1886* reported that Mrs. 
Charlotte C. Pearson in September of that year sent him a speci- 
men of Erica cinerea from a new locality and stated that the plant 
had been found in four different places on the island far apart, 
and that she had found it when a child in a locality far from dwel- 
lings and where trees had never been known to grow. 
On June 23, 1911, Mr. John Appleton took me to the locality 
where this heath is said to have grown since 1868. There we found 
one bushy plant covered with flower buds, some of them pink and 
on the point of opening. The spot was among an open growth of 
pines, part of an extensive and much denser tract, and the plant 
was well concealed from every side a few yards away. Many a 
time I had passed close to it without making the discovery. The 
year after this it had disappeared, and I was told that, in order to 
protect it from extermination by visitors it had been transplanted 
to private grounds where, at the middle of July, it was beginning 
to show signs of life. I have to thank Mrs. Albertson for a 
* Loc. cit. 
