10 Joint Bulletin 6 



palm and parula warblers, and curiously enough, seemingly led from 

 tree to tree by a white-eyed vireo with his rippling mimicry that seems 

 to include them all. Here, too, the honey bees are reveling in the 

 sweet cups of Xolisma fen-uginea with its cinnamon-tipped branches, 

 and twining low are the brilliant red clusters of Smilax pumila; hut 

 of the many beautiful shrubs that grow near the lake, none seems quite 

 so wonderful as staggerbush, Pieris Mariana, with its large white 

 waxy bells touched on sepals and stems with coral red, and its flower 

 clusters almost always including enlarged urn-shaped capsules in green, 

 red and frosted silver that renders the effect particularly striking. 



Almost as lovely is the fetterbush wuth its smaller pink bells — a 

 shrub that almost universally lines the roadsides that are also bor- 

 dered by inkberry, Ilex glabra — with its persistent, bitter, black drupes; 

 by an ornamental blueberry, Vaccinium nitidum, with rose colored or 

 almost white flowers, brilliant sepals and stems; by a showy mint, 

 Pycnothymus rigidus, growing in big rosettes; or by the exquisitely 

 tinted lupine, Lupinus diffusus, with its pastel-blue blossoms and silver 

 grey foliage. 



As we round a turn by the lakeside we see a wax myrtle, MorcUa 

 cerifera, with its greenish-yellow catkins and white, waxy fruit shining 

 out from the dark foliage, and the whole made into a picture by the 

 yellow jessamine, Gelsemium sempervirens, that clambers over it. At 

 its base the southern dew^berry, Rubus trivialis, lifts its rose-like, white 

 flowers with their pink stamens to our admiring view, and near at 

 hand the lanced-leaved violet, Viola lanceolata, and the spring fleabane, 

 Erigeron vernus, gleam white in the grasses. 



We are now turning east across a wilderness that is threaded by 

 a white-shell road 23 miles in length and taking one past cypress 

 swamps, pine and sand barrens, wet marsh land and acres of palmetto 

 and oak scrub. Along the borders of the cypress swamp Virginia 

 willows, Itea virginica. with their drooping racemes, rise out of the 

 dark waters wherein grow lizard's tail, Saururus cernuus, bright pink 

 smartweed, Persicaria hydropiperoides. and a large-flowered bladder- 

 wort, TJtricularia fibrosa. The cypress trees in their feathery new green 

 show gleaming white in their tops, and the field glasses reveal white 

 herons posing with up-lifted heads in perfect safety. These are prob- 

 ably the immatures of the little blue heron, a bird so common that 

 we come upon it in the road and at frequent intervals in the marshes 



w^hen the great blue and Ward's herons rise majestically as we ap- ■ 



■I 

 proach. Meadow larks are singing, bluebirds are warbling, flickers and ■ 



I 



