416 THE EVOLUTION OF OUR NATIVE FRUITS 



lesser game is frequent! And only fifty miles away is the bus- 

 tling hub of the universe! 



This Cape Cod region is but a part of the sandy waste which 

 stretches southward and westward through Nantucket, along the 

 north shore of the Sound and throughout a large part of Long 

 Island ; and essentially the same formation is continued along the 

 Jersey seaboard. Similarities of soil and topography are always 

 well illustrated by the plants they produce. The 'pine barren' 

 flora of New Jersey reaches northward into the Cape country, 

 only losing some of its more southern types because of the 

 shorter and severer seasons. But more diligent herborizing will 

 no doubt reveal closer relationship between New Jersey and Cape 

 Cod than we now know. An instance in my own experience 

 illustrates this. The striped sedge (Carex striata var. brevis) is 

 recorded as a rare plant, growing in pine barrens from New Jer- 

 sey southward, and yet in these Plymouth woods, in the half 

 sandy marshes, I found it growing in profusion. Even eastern 

 Massachusetts is in need of botanical exploration! So the floras 

 run along this coast ; and it is not strange that Cape Cod and New 

 Jersey are both great cranberry-producing regions. 



The country comprises an alternation of low, sandy eleva- 

 tions and small swamps in which the cassandra, or leather-leaf, 

 and other heath-like plants thrive. The pitch-pine makes open 

 and scattered forests, or in some parts oaks and birches and other 

 trees cover the better reaches. Fire has overrun the country in 

 many places, leaving wide and open stretches carpeted with bear- 

 berry (Arctostaphylos) and dwarf blueberries. There are no 

 fences, no improvements, except such improvised structures as 

 may be seen now and then about some isolated cranberry bog. 

 At one place we came suddenly upon a school house of perhaps 

 twelve by twenty, standing lonely and bare in the midst of a 

 scrub-oak wilderness, with not a house in sight. Clear and hand- 

 some little lakes are found in some parts of the wilderness, and 

 upon the banks of one we found a hermitage where a half-dozen 

 Boston men shut themselves off from the world in the summer 

 months. Everywhere one finds clear and winding brooks, abound- 

 ing in trout. And over all the open glades, the great-flowered 

 aster ( Aster spectabilis) is brilliant in the autumn sun. 



It is in the occasional swamps in this sandy region that the 



