g TRANSACTIONS OF WAGNER 



THE VEGETATION OF THE HACKENSACK MARSH: A TYPICAL AMERICAN FEN 



between them. There are great tracts of peat laid down in the upper part of 

 old estuaries, and around fresh- water lakes, which are called fens. Such terms 

 as the French "Le Marais immerge," "Le Marais lacustre," the Bohemian 

 "Slating," are akin to that of fen. The soil of a fen is a muck, rather than a 

 peat, fed by telluric water with an alkahne reaction and relatively rich in 

 mineral salts. This character of the soil has a profound efifect on the vege- 

 tation. 



ENGLISH FENS 



Considerable attention has been given of late years, since the ecologic 

 awakenment of English botanists, to the vegetation of fens or reed swamps 

 (reed marshes). One of the earliest accounts is by Yapp, on Wicken Fen, not 

 far from Cambridge, in the region of the Wash.* The dominant herbaceous 

 plants of this fenland are tall, reedy grasses, sedges, and rushes growing out 

 of the wet muck. The raised parts of the fen can be distinguished at a dis- 

 tance by the plants growing on them. Thus, toward the end of July many of 

 these banks are easily recognized by the masses of flowering Spircea Ulmaria 

 and associated species. Most of the plants that grow in the wet have creeping 

 stems and stiff pointed shoots that can easily force their way up through the 

 overlying muck. The roots of fen plants are placed more or less horizontally. 

 The stratification in the vegetation of this marsh has been described in a later 

 paper by Yapp, where emphasis is placed upon the fairly uniform facies of the 

 vegetation and upon the different types of plants which enter into competition 

 in the marshland. 



Marietta Pallis furnishes a chapter in the "Types of British Vegetation" 

 (1911: 214-234) on the fenlands of the Broads in the inner valleys of East 

 Norfolk and East Suffolk. The Bure valley fen shows in summer a dense 

 growth of grasses and sedges, such as Phragmites communis, Molinia ccerulea, 

 Cladium Mariscus, while the Yare valley fen at the same season of the year is 

 a wild flower garden forming a different type of marshland. The Bure fen 

 has only one species dominant, viz., Phragmites communis. Some of the fen- 

 land is characterized by the presence of trees and shrubs, which form the fen 

 thickets, or carr. 



Mossf emphasizes the chemical character of the soil as of importance for 



* Yapp, R. H.: Sketches of Vegetation at Home and Abroad: IV: Wicken Fen. The New 

 Phytologist, VII: 61-81, Feb. and March, 1908; Annals of Botany, XXIII: 275-319, Apr., 1909. 

 ^ Moss, C. E.: Vegetation of the Peak District, 1913: 168-171; Jour, of Ecol., VI: 53-74. 



