Rhodora 
JOURNAL OF 
THE NEW ENGLAND BOTANICAL CLUB 
Vol. 25. January, 1923 No. 289 
THE SOUTHERN VARIETY OF THELYPTERIS FRAGRANS 
M. L. FERNALD. 
IN studying the plants brought back in 1922 from Baffin Land and 
Labrador by Mr. Donald B. MacMillan, my interest was especially 
excited by one fern, because of its unusual aspect. Obviously a 
member of the genus Thelypteris, the plant was characterized by its 
dense habit and rufescent chaffiness. The stiff and coriaceous fronds 
about 1 dm. long, with short stipes densely clothed with conspicuous 
cinnamon-colored or reddish scales, are likewise very chaffy on the 
back of the rachis, and the reddish scales often extend to the backs 
of the crowded and more or less inrolled pinnae. Upon comparison 
in the herbarium MacMillan’s material proves to be exactly Thelyp- 
teris fragrans of the Arctic regions, all material from Greenland and 
northern Labrador to northern Alaska and Siberia being uniform, 
except that very large fronds reach a length of 2 dm. 
This arctic plant is so strikingly unlike the plant of temperate 
regions which the writer has repeatedly collected, always at low 
altitudes, and which has anything but an arctic or arctic-alpine 
range,—dry slaty, shaly or other basic rocks from east-central New- 
foundland to New England, New York and Minnesota and reappear- 
ing in temperate eastern Asia (Japan, Amur and Manchuria)—that 
one wonders that the two have so long passed as identical. The more 
southern plant is naturally larger, and its fronds are nearly if not 
decidedly membranaceous, with more scattered and longer pinnae 
and pinnules, but the most striking difference is in the fewer and 
