FLOWERING PLANTS OF NANTUCKET 429 
In its more local aspect two interesting features of the flora 
that will not long escape the exploring botanist are the large 
proportion of its plants that are confined to the eastern side of 
the island and the number of species siete that are strictly 
localized. 
The eastern side of the island is the more diversified in its 
topography and natural features, abounding in knolls and hollows, 
in damp open grounds and straggling swamps beset with crowded 
shrubbery, and hillsides and banks with their herbage and woody 
growth descending to numerous small ponds and mossy or peaty 
bogs. It has also more varied and mature tree growths than are 
found on the western side and reveals better evidences of former 
forestation. Accompanying these conditions are more varied 
and richer soils with their responding plant life, and many of the 
more southern and more northern plants that belong to the 
flora have their place only here. Here, too, surviving in the 
thickets and tree groupings, are little colonies of woodland plants, 
vestiges, we may suppose, of an earlier flora that had its day in 
that unrecorded period before the woodlands were destroyed. 
Extensive dry plains clothed with low herbaceous vegetation 
spread over much of the southern side of the island, invaded to- 
wards the east by barrens of scrub oak and midway in the island 
by open formations of young pitch pines advancing from denser 
growths that earlier made their conquest. Westward towards 
Hummock Pond are veritable tracts of pine barrens which, how- 
ever, as a modern feature of the island’s vegetation, have merely 
adopted their plants from the general plains flora, not contributing 
any distinctive species of their own.* Certain reaches of these 
plains of darker soil call to mind the Hempstead Plains of Long 
Island. Like the Hempstead Plains, too, these Nantucket plains 
have their widely distributed assemblage of particular plants, 
very few of which do not belong as well to neighboring territory. 
* It should be noted that among the Nantucket pines are found a few woodland 
plants that either do not occur at all elsewhere on the island or are nowhere else at 
home. It would seem to follow that the advent of these plants, or some of them, 
must have been subsequent to the introduction of the pines. Four of them that 
have been reported from only one or two localities are Polypodium vulgare, cee 
rhiza maculata, Linnaea americana, and Hypopitys americana; three others, t are 
sparingly scattered, are Hypopitys lanuginosa, Pyrola chlorantha and hse 
mac 

