QTRbooora 
JOURNAL OF 
THE NEW ENGLAND BOTANICAL CLUB 
Vol. 24. February, 1922. No. 278. 
SOME VARIATIONS OF CAKILE EDENTULA. 
M. L. FERNALD. 
Tug Sea Rocket, Cakile edentula (Bigelow) Hook., as it occurs on 
the north Atlantic coast—from Iceland and Labrador to South 
Carolina and the Azores—is essentially uniform, a comparatively low 
and, when well-developed, a loosely branched and sprawling fleshy 
plant, with the upper and fertile joint of the fruit ovoid and tapering 
to a short flattish beak. 
About the Great Lakes a plant essentially indentical with that 
of the Atlantic coast is of local occurrence but it there gives place 
primarily to a more slender or less fleshy plant with the slender upper 
joint of the silique long-beaked. This slender-fruited plant of the 
Great Lakes has been treated by Millspaugh! as C. americana Nutt. 
as contrasted with the broader-fruited C. edentula; and with the 
Great Lake plant he has associated a few slender-fruited individuals 
of the Atlantic coast. There is nothing in Nuttall's description, 
however, to indicate that by C. americana he intended anything but 
C. edentula, unless it be the secondary habitat, “also on the shores of 
the great North Western Lakes of the St. Lawrence." Nuttall calls 
for a plant with * Leaves carnose, entire, . . . both articulations 
often seminiferous, uppermost ovate."? This description is applicable 
to much of C. edentula but not to the slender-fruited plant of the 
Great Lakes, a plant which has, as Millspaugh says, “ Leaves 
with crenate dentations tending to laceration, and even lobation.” 
1 Millspaugh, Field Mus. Bot. Ser. ii. 127 (1900). 
2 Nutt. Gen. ii. 62 (1818). 
