58 Rhodora [Marcu 
HELIANTHEMUM DUMOSUM ON THE MAINLAND OF 
NEW ENGLAND. 
M. L. FERNALD. 
In 1913 Mr. E. P. Bicknell described as Crocanthemum dumosum ! 
a plant of Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard and Long Island which, as 
indicated by him, is abundantly distinct from Helianthemum cana- 
dense, with which it has been confused. The plant, which is cer- 
tainly a good species, blooming earlier than H. canadense and much 
earlier than H. majus, is, however, not confined to the islands men- 
tioned; but the collections of the Gray Herbarium and of the New 
England Botanical Club show it to occur also on Block Island, where 
Mr. Long and the writer found only this species of the genus; on 
Nashawina, where Mrs. Northrop collected it in 1903; and quite 
generally on the barrens of Cape Cod, specimens in the herbarium of 
the New England Botanical Club showing it to extend from Sandwich 
to Chatham and Eastham. Prof. J. F. Collins and the writer found 
it also on the mainland of Rhode Island in South Kingstown in 1914. 
In publishing the species Bicknell places it in Crocanthemum rather 
than in Helianthemum, the inclusive genus to which these plants have 
long been referred. In doing so he presumably follows Britton in the - 
second edition of the Illustrated Flora where the American plants are 
placed in Crocanthemum of Spach and are said to be “with showy 
yellow flowers, and with other much smaller apetalous cleistogamous 
ones,” a genus with “Type species: Crocanthemum carolinianum (L.) 
Spach.” ? 
It is somewhat singular, if Crocanthemum is a distinct genus on 
account of its small apetalous cleistogamous flowers, that Spach, in 
publishing Crocanthemum with the type species C. carolinianum, 
should have overlooked this fact and should have distinctly given as 
the leading character of Crocanthemum: “Flores omnes 5-petali”; 
while the American plants with apetalous cleistogamous flowers he 
placed in a separate genus, Heteromeris3 There is little question 
that the type of Crocanthemum, C. carolinianum, lacks the apetalous 
1 Bicknell, Bull. Torr. Bot. Club, xl. 613 (1913). 
? Britton in Britton & Brown Ill. Fl. ed. 2. ii. 539 (1913). 
3 Spach, Ann. Sci. Nat. sér. 2. vi. 370 (1836). 
