98 Notice of some Plants of Lynnfield, Danvers, 



Asa T. Newhall, in Lynnfield, who generously offered his 

 premises as a rendezvous. It was in front of this old-fash- 

 ioned farm-house, surrounded as it is with a luxuriant 

 growth of the yellow locust, that we were met by a few in- 

 vited scientific friends from Boston, who were bent on an in- 

 vestigation of the several geological and mineral features of 

 the region. There were ledges of serpentine, bowlders of 

 sienites, and many diversified characters of a peculiarly wild 

 region, beside. Of them I may speak more at length in the 

 course of my present remarks. 



It would be doing injustice to the well-deserved fame of 

 our host, were I to omit further notice of the extraordinary 

 vigor and thriftiness perceptible in the copses and belts of 

 the yellow locust trees, to which I have just now alluded. 

 On approaching the homestead, (a fine specimen, in its way, 

 of the old and long cultivated farms of Essex county,) you 

 enter, as it were, an avenue of half a mile or more, of these 

 valuable trees, formed by the judicious permission and even 

 encouragement of their growth near the stone- walls, on each 

 side of the public road. The well known tendency of the 

 tree (Robim« Pseudacacia L.) to throw up from its roots 

 numerous suckers, causes it to be very valuable in covering 

 such portions of the soil as could not be usefully cultivated 

 with any thing else. When needed, as in the present in- 

 stance, for ornament as well as for comfort, shade and use, 

 these suckers may be destroyed in such a manner as to allow 

 a row of standard trees to grow into the requisite size and 

 proportion. As I traversed this almost natural avenue, I 

 easily fancied the exquisite loveliness which it must present 

 in the flowery month of June, when laden with its myriad 

 racemes of snowy white blossoms, all redolent with a per- 

 fume alike grateful to the industrious bees and to man. In a 

 small enclosure, on these same premises, I was shown a thick 

 copse of the same trees, that were left to perform their own 

 pruning, and which had accommodated themselves to a very 

 unpropitious looking mass of rocks ; an area, without such 

 aid, that would have produced little else than worthless 

 brambles or unsightly weeds. The trunk of a very large 



