Au—1$77 
Rhodora 
JOURNAL OF 
THE NEW ENGLAND BOTANICAL CLUB 
Vol. 9. January, 1907. No. 97 
RIBES VULGARE AND ITS INDIGENOUS REPRESENTA- 
TIVES IN EASTERN NORTH AMERICA. 
M. L. FERNALD. 
THe common Red Currant (Ribes vulgare) of our gardens has 
become well established along fence-rows, in roadside thickets, in 
open woods near towns, and in other places where its seeds have been 
easily spread, by birds and other agents, from the cultivated shrubs. 
In these half-wild habitats the plant has thus far shown little or no 
tendency to vary from the Old World type from which it was derived. 
In low coniferous forests and mossy swamps and in subalpine 
districts of New England and eastern Canada, however, where the 
commonly cultivated European Ribes vulgare is as yet unknown, there 
are two indigenous red currents which have been passing as identical 
with or scarcely separable from the introduced plant of the gardens. 
These plants have several characters in common by which they are 
readily distinguished from the cultivated shrub. R. vulgare is usually 
upright, bearing numerous leafy tufts more or less mingled upon the 
old wood with the flower-bearing shoots. ‘The blades of the mature 
leaves are 3.5 to 6.5 cm. broad, somewhat broadened upward, the 
lobes mostly short-ovate, the middle one rarely broader than long. 
'The pedicels are mostly smooth and glandless, in one form only 
soft-pubescent. The rotate calyx is greenish-yellow, its oval lobes 
abruptly narrowed below the middle and the petals are narrowly 
wedge-shaped. At the base of the calyx, between the stamens and 
the slightly-cleft style, there is a high but narrow obtusely scalloped 
ring.’ 
1 As recently shown by Professor Janczewski, two European species have been pass- 
ing as Ribes rubrum. One, the true R. rubrum L., with its “habitat in Sueciae boreali- 
bus," has the calyx somewhat cup-shaped, brown or mottled with red and destitute 
of a disk. This species so far as known to the writer is not found wild in America. 
The other, R. vulgare Lam., with the flat calyx yellowish green and bearing a prominent 
disk, is the common species of cultivation. (See Edouard de Janczewski, Comp. rend. 
acad. franc., cxxx. 1890, 588; and Bull. Acad. Cracovie, Janvier, 1906, 3.) 
