BOX HUCKLEBERRY 
Gaylussacia brachycera (Michaux) Gray 
During his explorations of the eastern United States about 1790 
the famous French botanist, André Michaux, discovered a blueberry- 
like plant which he named Vaccinium brachycerum. In his Flora, pub- 
lished after his death, the locality was inaccurately stated as “in 
Virginia, circa Winchester,” and for many years the plant was lost 
to science. Other early finds of it, by Pursh and Kin, were also lost 
sight of, and Asa Gray, when making a study of this group of plants, 
was unable to locate any living specimens. Nearly fifty years after 
the original discovery, however, a colony of it was found in Penn- 
sylvania by Spencer F. Baird, and his friendship with Gray, which 
sptang up as a result of their correspondence about the plant, led to 
his selection later as Secretaty of the Smithsonian Institution. For 
many yeats this colony, situated near New Bloomfield, Pennsyl- 
vania, was the only one known, but during the past ten yeats, through 
the activities of Dr. Frederick V. Coville, Dr. Edgar T. Wherry, and 
others, the plant has been discovered in several other localities. 
In addition to the charm of the plant, with its delicate pink flowers 
in early spring, its brilliant blue berries in midsummer, and its shin- 
ing evergreen foliage the rest of the year, this species possesses gteat 
scientific interest, in that it forms colonies through its spread by 
tootstocks, so that, as shown by Dr. Coville, a patch whose area is 
measuted in acres may consist of a single plant, thousands of years old. 
In the mountains of southern West Virginia, where it reaches its 
