In a letter dated December 6, 1857 and addressed to Sir William J. Hooker, Dr. Asa Gray wrote, “A noble fellow is Sullivant and deserves all you say of him and his works. The more you get to know him the better you will like him.” This story of the life and achievements of William Starling Sullivant reveals clearly and impressively the accuracy of Dr. Gray’s appraisal, for one could scarcely hope to encounter anywhere a more interesting or a more likeable personality.
A map of Randolph County will show the location of Cranberry Flat, or Cranberry Flats of some maps, located about five miles west of Mill Creek, W. Va at an elevation of about 2750 feet. In this area there is a bog composed of four small units, each about 1,000 square feet in area, connected by a small white pebbled stream. The vegetation immediately surrounding the bog and area between the units is predominately Osmunda cinnamonea, Viburnum cassinoides, Viburnum prunifolium, Lyonia ligustrina, llex monticola, Parnassia asarifolia, Amelanchier canadensis, Eupatorium pubescens and Habenaria ciliaris.
The following plants have been collected by the writers from 1936 to 1940 in Rowan County, Kentucky, near the town of Morehead. All of them show considerable extension of range.
The following species of grasses, collected by the writer during, the past three years, do not appear to have been recorded previously from the State of Georgia. Some seem to be species of recent introduction; others were to be expected and fill gaps in the known range of the species. A few are range extensions. The writer is indebted to Jason R. Swallen of the Bureau of Plant Industry for determinations of all except Paspalum vaginatum, No. 4065:
The collections of the Botany Department of Marshall College in 1939 and 1940 were not so productive of species new to the state flora as in some previous years. However, several were found that are not included in the latest catalogue of the vascular plants of West Virginia and a number of species, heretofore unrecorded except from isolated stations in the mountainous eastern part of the state, now are known to grow in the Ohio valley.
In Mackenzie’s exhaustive treatment of the Cariceae in North American Flora 18: 1-478, there are sixty four species of Carex of which Kentucky specimens are stated to have been examined. Below are listed seventeen species of Cariceae (Cymophyllus and 16 Carex) not definitely referred to Kentucky by Mackenzie. Some of these have been found in Kentucky previous to the writer’s collections, but are included here for convenience in assembling a list of Carices of Kentucky.
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Tie following list of plants, specimens of which are filed in the Herbarium of West Virginia University, represents a collection made by Dr. Howard F. Conn of Smithfield, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1938, during the course of a Johns Hopkins University scientific expedition to Laborador and the Arctic Archipelago.]
A check list of the Kentucky algae including 568 forms was published in “Castanea” in March, 1939. In that report the writer indicated with appropriate symbols the relative abundance of the various species and varieties but in this report no mention is made of that fact, for most of these forms are rather rare or they might have been found early enough to be included in the first report. These forms are listed alphabetically in their respective classes.
In a few recent papers (the latest in this journal for December 1940) I have pointed out that several fairly common plants have long been misunderstood because current descriptions of them have been based on herbarium specimens, in which the flowers had lost their shape or color, or both, or the fruit or some other essential part was lacking. John M. Fogg, Jr., in Rhodora for May, 1940, stressed the importance of collecting more complete specimens than has been customary, and supplementing them with information that may be lost in the drying process, such as. the color of the flowers. In the case of Erythronium he suggested recording flower colors, but said nothing about the fruit, which now seems to be equally important, as will be shown presently.