154 



probably most extensive in Georgia, particularly in the vicinity of 

 Stone Mountain. 



About 39 years ago^ I listed the plants I had observed on flat 

 granite or gneiss rocks around Athens, Georgia, from memory, 

 in taxonomic order, and including a few weeds. The following 

 year® I made a few additions to the list, from other similar locali- 

 ties in the same state. No list of granite outcrop plants for the 

 whole state of Georgia seems to have been attempted yet, but 

 Rogers McVaugh and others have recently published some interest- 

 ing notes on particular species of such habitats.^ 



The known outcrops of granite in 'Alabama are very limited in 

 extent, their aggregate area probably not exceeding one or two 

 square miles ; and most of them are in one county, Randolph, which 

 borders on Georgia. They were rather remote from railroads and, 

 therefore, inaccessible, in Dr. Charles Mohr's lifetime, and there 

 is no mention of them in his great work, the Plant Life of Alabama, 

 published in 1901. ' 



A soil map of Randolph County, published by the U. S. Bureau 

 of Soils in 1912, shows the location of a few of the larger granite 

 outcrops in the county, and they are described briefly in the text 

 accompanying it. 



Although I had been in all the Piedmont counties of Alabama 

 as early as 1906, and in most of them several times, and had seen 

 a few granite boulders, I had no acquaintance with the typical 

 flat rocks in the state until 1936. In June of that year, while 

 on a camping trip with a party of geologists and zoologists, I 



5 Bull. Torrey Bot. Club 27: 328. 1900. 



6 Ibid. 28: 461-462, 469, 473. 1901. 



^ Castanea (Jour. So. Appal. Bot. Club) 2: 58-60, 100-105 (three articles). 

 1937; Bull. Torrey Bot. Club 66:411-415. June, 1939. (The third of these 

 articles, on Amphianthus, was badly mixed by the printers, but straightened 

 out in the reprints distributed by the author.) 



^ The large granite area around Almond (then called Flatrock) was 

 mentioned briefly in the "Report of Progress" of Dr. Eugene A. Smith, 

 state geologist, for 1874 (page 56), but he said nothing about its vegetation, 

 though he was well versed in floristic botany, and about the same time col- 

 lected many plants around Tuscaloosa, which were cited by Dr. Mohr. Dr. 

 Smith's field notes show that he visited that and other granite exposures in 

 the same county again in the '90s ; but he missed the opportunity to add 

 several species to the known flora of the state, probably indicating that he 

 carried no plant collecting equipment on most of his geological field trips. 



