REVEGETATION OF A DENUDED AREA 
H. S. CONARD 
(WITH TWO FIGURES) 
One-half mile west of Cold Spring Harbor station on the Long 
Island Railroad, extensive changes in the roadbed are in progress. 
In straightening, widening, and changing the grade of the road, the 
hillside has been cut away, and the materials so obtained have been 
dumped directly downhill from the cut to make a wide level shelf 
for the tracks. Where the new level crosses the old grade of the hill- 
side, the soil was practically undisturbed and a curved line of vege- 
tation has grown up from the old roots. On the side of this line 
toward the hill the earth is newly exposed. It has been buried 
since the glaciers left it. On the other side of the line, the ground 
consists of the material dug away from the adjacent hill by steam 
shovels and dumped at once or after a short haul in cars. The 
digging was done in March and April 1911. The material moved 
is coarse sand and fine gravel of the morainic hills of the north side 
of Long Island. The hillside faces south, and was clothed with 
a vegetation typical of such a dry, sunny situation in this region. 
On the apparently denuded area, the prospective roadbed, 
many plants are already (July ro11) well developed. A study of 
the nature and origin of these has proven of interest and is here 
presented. Sixty species of angiosperms and one fern make up 
the present flora of the newly made shelf; 53 of these are now to be 
found growing on the hillside above the cut. Of the plants found 
both above and below, 39 are long-lived perennials. All of these 
except Smilacina racemosa' and Desmodium canescens were growing 
in the made ground from pieces of root, rhizome, or “crown” of 
old plants carried down from the hillside in the digging. The 
fragments had been tumbled in promiscuous!y with the earth, and 
those near enough the surface had sprouted. Thus we have 4 
large experiment in the roughest kind of transplanting of 37 species 
t The nomenclature of the new Gray’s Manual has been followed. 
Botanical Gazette, vol. 55] [80 
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