Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 85.djvu/363

Rh somewhat similar jack pine of the north, it is confined to the most sterile soils imaginable, where other pines are scarce or absent. Its favorite soil, about 99 per cent, white sand, is most extensively developed in the lake region of peninsular Florida, where it supports a peculiar type of vegetation known as "scrub" consisting mostly of this pine, two small evergreen oaks (Quercus geminata and Q. myrtifolia), saw-palmetto and several other evergreen shrubs, with very little herbaceous growth: grasses and leguminous plants especially being conspicuous by their

absence. Outside of the lake region this type of soil and vegetation is principally confined to old stationary dunes near the coasts.

Fire sweeps through the scrub on the average about once in the lifetime of the trees, as in the boreal conifer forests, and kills the pines completely; but their cones, which normally remain closed for years, then open and discharge seeds for a new crop.

The wood of this pine is of little value, and the soil in which it grows is worthless for ordinary crops. But on the east coast of Florida south of latitude 28°, where frost is sufficiently rare to make such