IV 



found in bloom in the winter months, and a jasmine in the gardens is, in 

 ordinary seasons, in flower from November to February. Fig trees six years 

 old and eight feet high, grown from seed, might be seen in 1885, in a shel- 

 tered garden in town, and Mr. Henry Coffin tells me there was one in 1845 

 known to be five years old, growing on Brant Point, exposed to all the 

 winds that blow. An English Walnut (Juglans regia), produces nuts of full 

 size in a yard in Lily street, although even in the Middle States this tree 

 ripens its fruit but sparingly. The ivy (Hedera Helix) flourishes in the open 

 air without protection seemingly as well as in England, and no limit has 

 been found to its upward growth, except the top bricks of the chimneys to 

 which it climbs. 



While much of Nantucket consists of dry, sandy plains, level or slightly 

 undulating, there are sheets of water of varying size in the hilly parts, and 

 also a line of ponds of brackish water along the southern shore, al- 

 though most of the smaller ones are dried up in summer. A sandy beach 

 surrounds the island, and salt marshes are frequent, thus there are suitable 

 localities for various kinds of plants. Trees are lacking except in stunted 

 form, and there are few of those, yet the tradition is that the island was 

 well wooded when the first settlers came, in 1659. Houses are standing said 

 to have been built of native wood, and during the Revolution and again in 

 the war of 1812, the people obtained a large part of their fire-wood from 

 Coskaty. Observations indicate that these stories may be relied upon. Mr. 

 Sanford tells me of stumps as large as a man's thigh found when clearing 

 up his swamps in Polpis, and still larger ones are reported between Siascon- 

 set and Sancoty. The surface then was once wooded, but that it was not 

 heavily so is proved by a recorded vote of the early proprietors, limiting 

 the quantity of wood which any person might cut for fuel ; they feared that 

 total destruction of the forests which actually occurred long years ago. The 

 local names "Grove Lane" and "The Woods" show that trees once grew 

 where no living person has ever seen one. About forty years ago there was 

 a group of trees in Polpis known as "The Grove;" there might have been 

 twenty or thirty individuals in the cluster, of what kind unknown to the 

 present writer. Their last hour was at hand. Their trunks, slender, crooked 

 and wind-twisted, some twenty feet high, as gray, first with death and then 

 with lichens, as an old fence-rail, and the few boughs near the top almost 

 leafless, made on the whole a melancholy sight. 



The scrub-oaks have resisted extermination and are still abundant on the 

 commons, and in Quaise there is a small tract covered with a low but 

 healthy growth of oak, beech, hickory, tupelo, and possibly some other spe- 

 cies; the crows, for lack of the tall pines in which they build from prefer- 



