The long-looked-for and valuable “Flora of the Carolinas” was published late last year and is one of the most important publications on southeastern botany during 1964. In concise, but intelligible style the authors, all members of the staff of the University of North Carolina, at Chapel Hill, have treated 179 families, 941 genera, and over 3,200 species of pteridophytes, conifers, and flowering plants growing without cultivation in North and South Carolina.
A number of colonies of Pontederia cordata L. pickerelweed, were observed growing in Lake Watoga, Watoga State Park, Pocahontas County in late August, 1964. These plants, growing in water from one to three feet deep, had heart shaped leaf blades with straight sides and a dense spike of blue flowers characteristic of the typical form. The extent of growth indicates that it has been established for quite some time.
As reported in Castanea, Vol. 23, page 42, by Dr. L. K. Henry and the writer in the article “The Ranunculaceae of Western Pennsylvania”, Spreading Globe-flower (Trollius laxus Salisb.) has been considered “Rare or local everywhere, and probably extinct in Western Pennsylvania.”
In her monograph of North American Verbena (Ann. Miss. Bot. Garden 20: 239-362, 1933), Perry cites under Doubtful or little known species “Verbena erinoides Lam.” She indicates that the plant “has established itself in several places. It belongs to a South American species complex needing critical study to determine accurately its real identity”. Small, in the Manual of the Southeastern Flora (New York, 1933, pp. 1139), determined the plant in question as Glandularia tenuisecta (Briq.) Small, comb. nov., giving V. erinoides as a synonym. The species has been determined in herbaria indistinctively as V. erinoides, V. tenuisecta or G. tenuisecta.
Several collecting trips through various parts of Kentucky in the past three years have afforded many additional county records for my “Ferns and Fern-allies of Kentucky”, which are to be added to the other checklists which the author has published. Other new records have appeared in various works which are indicated below under the appropriate species. All the new records mentioned below are those of the author, unless otherwise indicated, and the specimens are in the author’s herbarium.
The genus Fagus (beech) with about ten species of deciduous trees in north temperate regions is represented by Fagus grandifolia Ehrh. (American beech or beech) in eastern United States and southeastern Canada. A second North American species described in 1940 from mountains of east central Mexico is here united as a variety of the former.
Bearcamp Creek is one of a series of NE-SW-flowing streams that cut the southeastern face of the Blue Ridge Escarpment in the western part of the Carolinas. These streams and their gorges are fertile fields for exploration in a region where two approximate physiographic regions may show a merging of plant and animal populations.