Stanley A. Rice - Green Planet: How Plants Keep the Earth Alive

9.3. Successional species in eastern North America 186

INTRODUCTION

remnants of paradise

The alder, whose fat shadow nourishet h Each plant set neere to him long flourisheth .

WILLIAM BROWNE , CA . 1613

I t certainly didnt seem like paradise. I was up to my hips in the suck ing slime of a swamp. Because of the water had very little oxygen, the leaf litter and the corpses of mosquitoes and snapping turtles did not completely decompose. Instead they produced a dark brown glue that stained my clothes like a stygian tea. Bacteria released a putrid scent of hydrogen sulfide. I had no idea how deep the muck was, and my left leg slipped in more deeply as I tried to lift my right. There was nothing to grab on to except poison ivy, the thorny branches of green brier and rose, or dead sticks. I was in Hudson Pond in central Delaware. The bridge for U.S. Highway 113, only a few yards from where I stood, rumbled with hun dreds of cars and trucks. The passing motorists who looked down on me might have thought I was crazy if they knew that I was studying the small trees that grew in the swamp. If they knew that I had driven a thousand miles to see them, their suspicions would have been con firmed. But when I looked up at the trees that I had driven so great a distance to see, it all seemed worthwhile. There they were, Alnus mar itima , the seaside alders. Each one consisted of a cluster of little gray trunks, with serrated leaves and puffy, conelike fruits (fig. I.1). What makes this species so special is that it is very rare, and that it has an unusual geographic distribution. All of the seaside alders in the entire world occur in just three populations. The first population lives along