The Corema Conradii station on Shawangunk Mountain 



Raymond H. Torrey 



The references, in Gray's Manual of Botany, Britton & Brown's 

 Flora of North America, and Norman Taylor's Catalogue of 

 Plants in the Vicinity- of New York, and in the catalogue by the 

 State Botanist, Dr. House, to the occurrence of Conrad's Crow- 

 berry, Corema Conradii, in the Shawangunk Mountains, in Ulster 

 County, New York, long interested the writer before he had an 

 opportunity to find this old station for the plant. The distribution 

 of Corema, as botanical collectors know, is quite remarkable. The 

 southernmost stand in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, principally 

 on the West Plains, ten miles east of Barnegat, and a few smaller 

 stands in that vicinity, have often been visited in recent years, by 

 the members of the Torrey Botanical Club. Its original discovery, 

 more than a century ago, its temporary loss through failure to find 

 it again, and its rediscovery about 50 years ago, are interestingly 

 told in Dr. Witmer Stone's Plants of Southern New Jersey. 



The plant was reported half a century ago, though its identity 

 is doubtful, on Long Island, somewhere between Oyster Bay and 

 Hempstead, but it certainly does not exist anywhere on Long 

 Island now. It occurs on Cape Cod and is frequent on the Maine 

 Coast and becomes commoner northward. The station reported in 

 the Shawangunks interested the writer as the only one, apparently, 

 between the Pine Barrens and eastern Massachusetts. 



An expedition was organized, in April, 1932, to rediscover the 

 Shawangunk station. As the references simply stated, "in the 

 Shawangunk Mountains," which are twenty miles long and two to 

 six miles wide, information which might limit the area to be 

 searched was sought of Prof. M. L. Fernald, Curator of the Gray 

 Herbarium, Harvard University, since the reference in Gray's 

 Manual, Seventh Edition, seems to be the one which is adopted by 

 other manuals and catalogues of our flora. Prof. Fernald kindly 

 sent us the data on the tickets of two herbarium specimens of 

 Corema, one found in 1880 by C. S. Smith, "on the summit of the 

 Shawangunk Mountain" which was still rather vague ; and the 

 other, much more definite, by J. H. Redfield, June, 1883, with the 

 location in Latin, as follows : 



97 



