350 



AMERICAN FORESTRY 



in some specimens. Figure 5 shows several of these 

 metamorphoses. 



Pitcher-plants hloom during June and July; but the 

 leaves remain intact so late in the autumn that sometimes 

 the water in their hollows has frozen nearly solid. 



Miss Lounsberry, in her "Guide to the Wild Flowers," 

 says: "These leaves often remain a curious feature of 

 swamp life until Jack Frost covers them with his white 



OUR WAX WINGS DEFER THEIR MARITAL DUTIES UNTIL 

 MID SUMMER IS AT HAND 



Fitf- <J A pair of Cedar birds in June ; reproduction of a photograph from 

 life. They are resting on the naked twig of a sweet gum tree. 



overcoat ; but in the exquisite spring bloom is when the 

 flowers are most ravishing in their beauty. From a dis- 

 tance they appear like the mystic blending of colors 

 in a Persian rug" (p. 47). 



For several years I made a vain search for a marsh 

 or swamp within four or five miles of Washington, in 

 the hope of finding a few pitcher-plants flourishing as 

 they did long before man trespassed upon their pre- 

 serves. During the spring of 1917 I came to the con- 

 clusion that the plant had been exterminated in the 

 District of Columbia, and would probably never be found 

 there again in its wild state. Then reports began to 

 come to me that they were flourishing, in more or less 

 abundance, in a great marsh some fifteen or twenty miles 

 from Baltimore, and to that point, with my wife as my 

 companion, I duly repaired upon a mid-summer's day. 



Fortunately, a man living in the neighborhood knew the 

 exact locality of the swamp in which the plants were to 

 be found, as he had acted in the capacity of guide for a 

 "professor from Johns Hopkins University, who was 

 searching for pitcher-plants some two years ago." He 

 gave me very explicit directions where to go; and, after 

 a long tramp, with a heavy pack consisting of a large 

 camera and collecting outfit, we passed through the 

 scrubby and rather dense undergrowth of a slope that 

 apparently led to the margin of a big marsh several 

 acres in extent. Owing to previous disappointments, I 

 felt by no means sure that I would be rewarded by even 

 a glimpse of the object of my search. I was afraid that 

 all the beautiful accounts I had read of the thrill one ex- 

 periences upon coming for the first time into "some 

 spongy spagum bog," and beholding these glorious 



A CURIOUS REPRESENTATIVE OF THE MILKWEED FAMILY 



Fig. 7 Known as the Milkweed, as it is often found growing in 

 sandy fields. Gray describes this plant as A. amplexicaulis, and_ it has 

 received different scientific names from other botanists, it being the 

 Asclcpias obtusifolia of Michaux. 



wonders of the plant world, was not to be experienced 

 by me. This idea had hardly begun to gain possession 

 (if my mind, when, with unexpected suddenness, I came 

 upon the edge of this great marsh, and almost at my feet 

 there grew, in all of its magnificence, a most superb 

 specimen imaginable of old Sarracenia itself. While look- 

 ing up from the ground where I was picking my way, I 

 was enabled to get a pretty good view of the great, mossy 

 swamp that I had come to ; and here and there, among the 



