Notes and News: Orchis Spectabilis and Mrs. Lucy B. Barber
Notes and News: Orchis Spectabilis and Mrs. Lucy B. Barber
The collections of the Botany department of Marshall College in 1937 yielded a number of rare and interesting plants, several of which are new to this part of the Appalachian region and to the State of West Virginia. Specimens of these plants have been deposited in the Marshall College Herbarium, the West Virginia University Herbarium and the Gray Herbarium, and most of them are to be distributed in the coming century of “exsiccati” from Marshall College.
Members of the Southern Appalachian Botanical Club, the Torrey Botanical Club, and the Philadelphia Botanical Club met for a joint outing as guests of the Muhlenberg Botanical Club at Lancaster on June 16. The botanists met at The Willows, three miles east of Lancaster on the Lincoln Highway at noon on Thursday the 16th. Under the leadership of Mrs. Charles Y. Tanger and Mrs. William F. Myers, members of the Muhlenberg Club, the party visited the home of (Gotthilf) Henry E. Muhlenberg at No. 33 North Duke Street, andO Trinity Lutheran Church, on the square below, where he was pastor from 1780 until his death in 1815. Later in the afternoon the group visited several stations for interesting plants in the limestone region within a radius of six miles or so about the city in various directions, including a trip to Rohrerstown to see the most massive tree in Pennsylvania, a giant buttonwood (Platanus occidentalis), and stations for, Asplenium Ruta-Muraria, A. ebenoides, Pellaea glabella, P. atropurpurea, Camptosorus rhizophyllus, Quercus Muhlenbergii, Arenaria stricta, Menyanthes trifoliata, Smilacina stellata and others. In the evening, back at The Willows, Professor Herbert H. Beck, of Franklin and Marshall College, read a paper on “Muhlenberg the Botanist”, and Dr. Edgar T. Wherry, of the University of Pennsylvania led an interesting and informative discussion of the plant geography of the Lancaster area.
Members of the Southern Appalachian Botanical Club got under way during the early morning hours of April 30, 1938, for a trip to the shale barrens on Stutz Hill, located three miles south of Brandywine, Pendleton County, West Virginia.
The party of twenty-four people were shown some of the best examples of the southern plant communities in the Wilmington, North Carolina, region, a region famous throughout the world for the occurrence there and there only of the Venus’ Fly-trap (Dionaea muscipula). It is also a region characterized by great diversity of soil conditions with corresponding diversity of plant communities.