On a recent field trip along Roaring Fork Creek above Gatlinburg into the Great Smoky Mountain National Park, at an elevation of about 1,800 feet Dryopteris marginafis (L.) Gray and Heuchera villosa Michx. were found as epiphytes about 10 feet up the trunk of a large tree of Tilia heterophylla Vent.
During the past summer three plants heretofore not reported for West Virginia were found in Wyoming and Pocahontas Counties.
Royal Eastman Shanks, president of the Southern Appalachian Club, 1951 and 1958, drowned August 4, 1962 while studying marine life along the Caribbean coast at Port Limon, Costa Rica. He was born in Ada, Ohio, on November 11, 1912, and received his precollege education in the schools there. He attended Ohio Northern University where he became interested in plant ecology and from which he received his A. B. in 1933. Subsequently he taught in the public schools of North Bloomfield, Ohio, for three years and started graduate work at Ohio State University during summers. He married Betty Morris in 1935.
In 1958 or 1959 I received from Dr. F. W. Gould of Texas A. & M. College a sterile specimen which had been sent to him from Houston, where it was reported as a nursery weed. It was obviously in the Labiatae, and had conspicuous, tuberous-thickened rhizomes like those of Scutellaria parvula, but larger. It was identified by me as Stachys Sieboldii, which had just been reported from the Carolinas. There was one specimen in the SMU Herbarium so named from Georgia, which appeared to match the sterile one. No flowering material and no precise data for the Houston plant have been obtained.
The authors were led into this study following a collection of a purple-flowered, broad-leaved Penstemon from the edge of a xerophytic sandstone bluff in Saline County in extreme southern Illinois. Because the station is the home of several rare species, the possibility entered our minds that this too might join the list of unusual species.
The mustard family represents a dominant segment of the flora of northwestern Ohio. During the past several years, I have collected 33 species of crucifers in this section of the state (Easterly, 1960). This corresponds to the 39 species listed by Schaffner (1932).
Among the botanical collections made by the writer in West Virginia and other states, certain taxa seem to be sufficiently rare or local to warrant records on geographical occurrences, some of which seem to represent distinctly new stations, and in a few cases, range extensions according to records known to the writer. Some taxa are included because they seem to present taxonomic, genetic, ecological, or distributional problems.
Evergreen trees of medium to large size. Wood resinous. Leaves of two kinds, the primary or juvenile leaves spirally arranged, linear, the predominant form on the young seedling, represented on the older plant by lanceolate, persistent, green or brown-scarious bud-scales; each scale subtending a cluster (fascicle) of 2 or 3 (1 to 5 in other areas) linear, secondary leaves (needles); fascicles wrapped at base in a scarious sheath which persists, as does the fascicle, for several seasons. Male cones clustered at base of season’s growth, each bract with two pollen-sacs on its lower surface. Female cones solitary or verticillate, in some species persisting on the tree for several seasons; cone-scales (together with fused and inconspicuous bracts) each supporting two winged seeds.