THE VEGETATION OF MONTAUK 49 



The oaks reach really exposed places toward the tops of the Downs 

 only rarely, and with apparently great difficulty. But as in many other 

 things, nothing succeeds like success, and once the start is made, it seems 

 only a matter of time, due to increasing protection from the wind as the 

 growth becomes gradually thicker, when the open Downs itself will be 

 inundated by this ever encroaching woody invasion, infinitely slow as time 

 goes, but from all the evidence available, as certain as the tides. Just 

 how fast this is going on only a study over a series of years would show. 

 But it does seem as though this contact between the Hither Woods and the 

 Downs was perhaps the most energetic of all the different types of vegetation 

 that seem to have as their common goal the afforestation of parts of the 

 Montauk Peninsula, if that is climatically and edaphically possible. 



There are some hints as to the rate of this encroachment of woods over 

 grassland. About 400 feet west of the present contact with the open 

 Downs, and in the midst of the dense shade of surrounding oaks is a dead 

 Juniperus virginiana, which appears to have died within the last ten years. 

 Increment borings show it to be at least eighty years old when it died, and 

 adding ten years since death gives us about 90 years since it was a seedling. 



This could hardly have started in the shade of the forest, and would, 

 if it followed ordinary procedure, have started out in the open, or more 

 likely still, in the area that then corresponded to the present fringe of the 

 forest. Since that time the forest has gone out over the Downs about 

 four hundred feet, submerging and ultimately killing the cedar. In other 

 words, the evidence from this dead cedar would indicate a rate of forest 

 movement of 400 feet in about 100 years. 



Atthe present contact, but quite out in the open, and perhaps 100 feet 

 from the forest edge, there are scattered young oaks, as shown in the 

 photograph (Fig. 14). One, a Q. velutina, 14 feet tall, 6 inches in diameter, 

 proved by core extraction to be 15 years old. By no means all the area 

 between it and the edge of the woods, is yet occupied by pioneers from the 

 forest, so that in the 15 years since it started there has not been any great 

 speeding up of the process. 



There is also other evidence, from the oaks themselves, that the Hither 

 Woods have not always been as extensive as they now are. Many trees, 

 particularly near the margin of the woods, show unmistakable evidence of 

 having, in their young stages at least, developed in the open. The ac- 

 companying illustration (Fig. 16) shows a branching system that no forest 

 grown specimen of oak could have produced. We could, from this evidence 

 alone, say that most certainly the Hither Woods are spreading wherever 

 possible, and that the branching of nearly all the oaks that have been 



