Rhodora 
JOURNAL OF 
THE NEW ENGLAND BOTANICAL CLUB 
Vol. 11. June, 1909. 
No. 126. 
THE VARIATIONS OF ARENARIA PEPLOIDES IN 
AMERICA. 
M. L. FERNALD. 
Ir has long seemed to the writer that the fleshy tufted plant of the 
sea-sands of New England and eastern Canada, which passes with us 
as Arenaria peploides L. or, with those who prefer to separate it from 
Arenaria, as Ammodenia peploides (L.) Rupr., is doubtfully identical 
with the slender plant of northern Europe and our arctic and sub- 
arctic regions. In habit our plant differs strikingly from the European 
type but, owing to the infrequency of its fruiting upon the New England 
coast, the writer has been forced until the present to leave its status 
unsettled. Recently, however, he has collected fruiting material on 
' beaches of the lower St. Lawrence, and this with fully mature fruit 
sent by Miss Mary Robinson from Nantucket shows that not only in 
habit, foliage, and inflorescence, but in the size of the fruit and the 
surface of the seed, is our plant readily distinguished from typical А. 
peploides of Linnaeus. 
In fact, if compared only with the typical European Arenaria pep- 
loides, our plant would be called with slight hesitation a perfectly dis- 
tinct endemic species; but a study of А. peploides from various parts 
of the northern hemisphere leads to the conviction that it is best treated 
as a cireumpolar species with a number of more or less defined ten- 
dencies or varieties in different regions. In North America there are 
five pronounced variations of which the New England and eastern 
Canadian plant is the most extreme. 
The Linnean Arenaria peploides' of northern Europe is a small 
plant with comparatively slender, though fleshy, procumbent, rather 
1L. Sp. Pl. 423 (1753). 
