24 



MEMOIRS OF THE NUTTALL ORNITHOLOGICAL CLUB. 



kled with apple trees, thickets of lilacs, and clusters of wild roses. The roses 

 were in full bloom this morning and cows were grazing under the trees. Alto- 

 gether this portion of the place formed a singularly restful and pastoral bit of 

 landscape, for one situated so near the heart of a large city. 



"To the southward the hill slopes down to the now dry but still well-marked 

 channel of the brook that used to flow into the Blackbird swamp. Its banks are 

 fringed with oaks (chiefly Quercus bicolor), elms, red maples, willows, both kinds 

 of hornbeam, gray birches, rum cherries, a few Norway spruces and some Aus- 

 trian pines. The ground beneath these trees is free from undergrowth, and in 

 most places carpeted with grass turf. Some of the oaks and maples are of large 

 size and evidently very old. The spruces and pines must have been planted 

 here, but all the other species are apparently indigenous. 



" At the base of the western slope lies all that is left of Norton's Woods — 

 a mere fragment covering, at the most, barely two acres yet essentially a still 

 primitive bit of wilderness. The trees are chiefly white pines of fair size but 

 not in flourishing condition, their foliage, like that of most of our Cambridge 

 white pines, being scanty and rusty looking. Among or near them are a num- 

 ber of oaks — white, swamp white, black, and scarlet — all of the forest-grown 

 type (i. e., with long trunks branching high above the earth) and not a few of 

 really fine proportions. There are also tupelos (most of them small, but several 

 sixty or seventy feet in height with trunks three or four feet in girth), red 

 maples, rum cherries, elms and a few clusters of gray birches. The only trees 

 which appear to have been introduced here are a horse chestnut and some Nor- 

 way spruces. 



" Under the larger trees young oaks, maples, elms, wild cherries and a few 

 hawthorns, form a thin but untrimmed and perfectly natural undergrowth, over- 

 run in places with greenbrier. Much of the ground is also densely covered with 

 poison ivy, woodbine and blackberry vines, but beneath some of the pines it is 

 carpeted only with pine needles. I could find none of the plants which usually 

 grow in natural woodland, such, for instance, as the ground pines, pipsissewa, 

 sarsaparilla, partridge berry, etc. Indeed I have named all the species that I 

 noticed. 



"The place has been long since open to the public, and while I was there 

 this morning people were continually passing and repassing along the broad and 

 numerous footpaths which cross each other at intervals of every few yards and 

 divide the thickets into many separate copses. The absence of the shyer wood 

 plants, as well as the languishing condition of the pines, is probably due largely 

 to this constant trampling of feet which has worn away most of the leaf mould 

 and made the surface of the ground almost as hard as that of a city sidewalk." 



