74 Rhodora [APRIL 
fruited gooseberry of the Northeast. R., oxyacanthoides L., with which 
our gooseberry has been confused, is, as shown by the above authors, 
a much more bristly shrub of the interior — from Hudson Bay and 
Lake Superior to the Rocky Mountains — with the stamens about 
equaling the petals and the leaves usually somewhat glandular, to 
which characters may be added the glandular-ciliate bracts. R. 
hirtellum, the common eastern shrub, has the fruiting canes almost 
never bristly above, the stamens distinctly exceeding the petals, 
and the leaf-surfaces and bracts without the glands which are char- 
acteristic of R. oxyacanthoides. 
As shown in 1905,! the common eastern Ribes hirtellum (then con- 
fused with R. oxyacanthoides) has the leaves of the fruiting branches 
cuneate to cuneate-truncate at base and green and essentially gla- 
brous or only slightly pilose along the nerves and margins beneath; 
while a more local extreme, R. oxyacanthoides, var. calcicola Fernald, 
at that time known only from highly calcareous habitats in eastern 
Quebec and from Michigan, but subsequently seen from Monhegan 
Island, Maine (Miss M. P. Cook), has the lower and sometimes the 
upper leaf-surfaces, the petioles and the young twigs permanently 
and densely white-tomentose, and the calyces hirtellous. The var. 
calcicola thus stands to the smooth-leaved R. hirtellum in a relation 
apparently similar to that of the local Grossularia llamathensis 
Coville? to Ribes inerme Rydb. (Grossularia inermis Coville & Britton), 
the common northwestern representative of our R. hirtellum3 
1 Fernald, Ruopona, vii. 153-155 (1905). 
? Coville in Coville & Britton, N. A. Fl. l. c. 224 (1908). 
3 Grossularia klamathensis is distinguished in the key from G. inermis by its having 
“leaf-blades villous on both surfaces, not glandular; hypanthium and sepals usually 
hirsute on the outside: berry black,” yet the type description states that the hypan- 
thium is “sparingly villous [not hirsute] or glabrous,” while the leaves of G. inermis 
are said to be ‘glabrous or... .sometimes pubescent and glandular”; i. e. in either 
species the leaves may be pubescent; in each they may be glandless; and the hypan- 
thium in G. klamathensis may or may not be pubescent. Judging by the ranges assigned 
the gooseberries, G. inermis is the only member of this immediate group which occurs 
in New Mexico, yet the New Mexican sheets before the writer have the leaves quite 
pilose to villous upon both surfaces (a key character of G. klamathensis of Oregon and 
northern California), two of the sheets (Fendler, no. 253 and Heller, no. 3772) have the 
hypanthium hirsute (G. klamathensis is distinguished from G. inermis by its ‘‘hirsute,”’ 
i. e. “villous or glabrous" hypanthium), and the Fendler plant has plumose trichomes 
upon the petioles, which the writer supposes to be what are intended in the descrip- 
tion of the Oregonian G. klamathensis by the “petioles....often fibrillate toward the 
base." The occurrence of these characters in the Rocky Mountain G. inermis as 
well as the fact that the fruit of the smoothish plant is sometimes said to be black 
(Cusick in Gray Herb.) points to the probability that G. klamathensis is hardly a true 
species but better treated as an extreme variant of G. inermis. 
