The Hudsonia are “xerophytes,” plants that are adapted to extremely dry conditions. Their tiny leaves offer a reduced surface in the face of intense sunlight and therefore do not lose water so readily. A “succulent” like the seaside goldenrod, on the other hand, has large fleshy leaves for storing moisture, another adaptation to drought conditions. This region is no desert. Even the term semidesert has to be used with caution. Its annual rainfall is the same as the rest of the Cape, but it is relatively unprotected and lacks the topsoil needed for the plants and trees not adapted to it to send down roots fast and deep enough to get moisture. The beach heather, stem-rooted like the beach grass, probably evolved in an alpine environment, where conditions were considerably worse than they are on Cape Cod at present, and moved in to the Cape during the postglacial period, remaining ever since. Still, the unprotected, dry ground is eloquent enough of the assault made upon it, and the eroding cliffs with the plants that hold down the ground above them become part of the fierce sweep of time and oceanic weather. Here is a lesson in exaction. Perhaps those omnipresent Cape trees, the pitch pines, show the hard effects of a sea-edge environment more obviously than most. They cannot survive too close to salt water, but a little farther back the results of wind and salt spray is to kill their leaders on the windward side, dwarf them so that they grow flat on the ground like the Hudsonia, or to tie them in knots. [Illustration] Everything has its method of survival. Each gradation of the ground, each hollow, slope, or level area, has a life to fit it or to visit it. The plants move forward seeking water. The birds fly through the thickets hunting seeds or insects. The exaction lies in a frame of reference. There is a quality of trial by the seashore, of odds, which taken care of by a mere plant, seem no less formidable. Their success in coping with the situation within its limits and precise needs is allied to all life’s insistence on success. We put great emphasis on the flowering parts of a plant, and certainly the golden, summer-yellow of the Hudsonia, growing in bunches like bouquets, is rare and beautiful over the bare ground with the blue sea stretching beyond; but this plant is also rare in its restraint. Its tuftlike branches, its leaves, spiny scalelike or coarse textured as they may be, have a beauty, a resourcefulness which is the end result of ages past human knowledge of them. They are a successful experiment in creation, artfully finished and well related to the world. XII The Depths of Sight