Dr David WingateIn previous Green Pages, I asked the reader to consider what the Walsingham nature reserves, the Warwick and Paget hillsides, and Cooper’s Island look like now, how they looked a few decades ago, and what they looked like before man arrived in Bermuda.This month, let’s direct our attention to the stretch of North Shore Road between Shelly Bay and the mouth of Flatt’s Inlet. Put yourself back in time, before Bermuda was discovered by man.The vegetation would have been made up of natives and endemics and would have looked entirely different. It is hard to know for sure but the vegetation on the northern coast of Bermuda was probably much the same as it was on the southern coast, and was probably made up primarily of stunted, low thickets of prostrate cedar and buttonwood as well as other coastal plants like sea ox-eye, sea lavender, and Spanish bayonet. These thickets probably extended further inland than on the southern coast.Shelly Bay stretch is now dominated by tamarisk shrubs (known locally as ‘spruce’) mainly on the roadside, and by sea-grape (known locally as bay grape) mainly on the seaward side of the tamarisk. Tamarisk is native to the Mediterranean region and was introduced to Bermuda. In the 1840s, at the suggestion of the governor at the time, Governor Reid, it was planted along North Shore and other coastal areas as a windbreak. (Imagine, some of the trees there now are perhaps more than 150 years old!) There are many winter days when modern road-users are grateful for the protection the ‘spruce trees’ offer from the wind and spray.While the North Shore without tamarisk is not something anyone alive will remember, some readers will remember that, just as recently as a few decades ago, there was no bay grape on the North Shore. And this may seem quite odd to those who know that bay grape is considered native to Bermuda (and well-suited to surviving harsh winds and salt-laden spray) that it was not growing on the North Shore before the 1960s.However, records indicate that the bay grape’s natural range was restricted to the south coast between Devonshire Bay and Marley Beach in Warwick, suggesting that it was a recently established native. It is also possible that bay grape was first introduced in the 1840s to stabilise the Elbow Beach dune and spread from there naturally.After the cedar scale disaster, when most of the Island’s endemic cedar trees were killed, there was a concerted effort by the Government to reforest the Island with a variety of trees. One of the trees the Government and other nurseries began propagating for wide-scale planting was bay grape. It was planted at Shelly Bay and many other areas along the North Shore around the 1960s or so and that is why, today, if you take a walk on the railway trail west of Shelly Bay you’ll have bay grape shading your walk and their lovely orange-red leaves underfoot.