|probably introduced to the
garden by accident with nursery stock. Regardless of its origins, it
has spread quickly throughout both Europe and North America. By
examining specimens in a variety of herbaria, Mrs. Shontz was able
to trace the spread of Frenchweed across New England, establishing
the date of its arrival in western Massachusetts by at least the
turn of the century. We have at Smith specimens which demonstrate
this migration--plants collected from Staten Island in 1873, from
Jamaica Pond, Boston, in 1893, from Portland, Maine, in 1919 and
Winchester, New Hampshire, in 1930. In western New England
Galinsoga occurs outside during the growing season in dumps,
vacant lots, and neglected fields. It is frequently a pest in
gardens. In greenhouses it occurs year-round as a weed beneath the
benches. Mrs. Shontz was able to show, by experiments in the Lyman
Plant House and elsewhere, that, since its arrival here, two races
of Frenchweed have evolved, one adapted to the out-of-doors, the
other to greenhouse conditions.
Occasionally the Herbarium takes on other, more esoteric functions. Pamela See ('73) has utilized the Smith collections as a source of materials for illustrating a literary work, Henry David Thoreau's essay Autumnal Tints. Miss See, with intricate ink drawings of living and pressed specimens, has detailed the grasses Thoreau noted, the Indian grass, Sorghastrum nutans (Plate 1), with "yellow flowers, like a banner raised above its reedy leaves. These bright standards are now advanced on the distant hillsides, not in large armies, but in scattered troops or single file, like the red men...The expression of this grass haunted me for a week, after I first passed and noticed it, like the glance of an eye. It stands like an Indian chief taking a last look at his favorite hunting grounds."
Miss See has also drawn the purple wood grass, Andropogon scoparius (Plate 2), which Thoreau considered a "refuge...from college commencements and society that isolates," and the purple-fingered grass, Andropogon gerardi (Plate 3), which "stands like a guide-board, and points my thoughts to more poetic paths than they have lately traveled." Her work captures minute details of purple grass, Eragrostis pectinacea (Plate 4), "hardly a foot high, with but few green blades, and a fine spreading panicle of purple flowers, a shallow, purplish mist trembling around me...viewed at a distance in a favorable light, it was of a fine lively purple, flower-like, enriching the earth," as well as the more nutritious Timothy, Phleum pratense (Plate 5), preferred by the "greedy mower" for his hay.
There has been of late much emphasis on the gap separating science from the arts and the humanities. Plants, vegetation, landscape are of concern, for varying reasons, to chemists, agronomists, cell biologists, geneticists, and all the minions