A heath in America .7

Lot 29.

Bedeque.

l was now on my own property I felt much pleased with the soil and the woods and considered the climate delightful. I had heard there was some heath about a mile from Kennedy’s house across a small creek or river in front of his house and close to the sea shore. I therefore prepared to go and see this wonder, for I had been assured that there was no heath in America. it was however Empetrum megara and no heath; the land on which the Empetrum grows is a barren sand thrown up by the sea there is an immense variety of plants and flowers on the ground where the Empetrum grows, many of them beautiful and some of them quite new to me.

He returned to Charlottetown on 27 June and then on the same day he set out for Lot 27, describing briefly the landscape along the way:

27 June. Lot 29 (lie. the Crapaud area] is Lord Melville's, is hilly also and the trees are burnt off.

29 June. the country here [i.e. at Bedeque] is exceedingly beautiful, soft and well wooded; much of it however is clear and well cultivated. l strolled through the woods and saw a vast variety of wild plants and flowers and a sort of dwarf yew crawling all over the ground and nowhere more than a few inches high. I also saw a very great variety of ferns and a great variety of forest trees.

* Stewart’s reference to the presence of what he calls ’fir’ in Lot 46 and especially to the scarcity of 'firs’ in Lot 47 raises a question. A straightforward reading would take both references to be balsam fir, though it seems odd that Stewart would consider the absence of balsam fir on Lot 47 as worthy of comment. (It is also unlikely that balsam fir would have been absent from the township.) This leads to a consideration of two other possibilities: (1) he may have been using the name ’fir’ for conifers in general, a not uncommon practice (see ’Balsam Fir, Idem/cation and nomenclature' in Appendix 1); or, (2) since in the British Isles ’fir’ was (and still is) a vernacular name for the Scots pine (P/nus sy/vestr/s), he may have been referring to pine (see footnote 8 of Appendix 1).

124