Rhodora 
JOURNAL OF 
THE NEW ENGLAND BOTANICAL CLUB 
Vol. 17. June, 1915. No. 198. 
MICHAUX’S PANICUM MURICATUM, 
M. L. FERNALD. 
For some years it has been well known to New England botanists 
that, besides the common introduced Echinochloa Crusgalli (L.) 
Beauv. and the essentially maritime Æ. Walteri (Pursh) Nash, we 
have a third species indigenous in sloughs, ditches, dune-hollows, 
pond-margins, etc., with the glabrous sheaths and comparatively 
short awns of the Old World E. Crusgalli but with the trichomes 
of the second glume and the sterile lemma quite unlike those of the 
introduced species. In European E. Crusgalli the margins and often 
the nerves of the second glume and the sterile lemma bear appressed- 
ascending fine trichomes which are not thickened at base or only 
slightly and inconspicuously so. In the indigenous American plant, 
however, these trichomes in the mature spikelets are stiffer and 
coarser, strongly divergent, and have a conspicuous papillose or pus- 
tular base, giving to the spikelets and consequently to the inflorescence 
a very muricate appearance. This indigenous plant of eastern Amer- 
ica, found in the coastal region from southern Maine to Georgia and 
Mississippi and inland at low altitudes to the Great Lake region, 
South Dakota and Kansas, well matches Michaux’s description 
of his Panicum muricatum from “Canada ad ripas lacus Champlain 
et ad lacum Ontario”; “glumis.... muricato-hispidissimis. Obs. 
affine C. Galli: flores habitu CENCHRI"; ! and is clearly indicated by 
the present writer's notes, made in 1903, after examination of the 
Michaux type. The indigenous American plant is also further 
indicated by Poiret's full description of Michaux's Lake Champlain 
1 Michx. Fl. Bor.-Am. i. 47 (1803). 
