BULLETIN 
PUpe os. DUTANICAL. CLUB. 
Vol. XIV.] New York, Palys 1887. [No. 7 
Redfieldia, a new Genus of Grasses, 
By Dr. GEo. VASEY. 
Plate LXX. 
REDFIELDIA FLEXUOSA.—Culms smooth, flexuous, 14 to 3 
feet high, from a strong creeping rhizoma (apparently growing 
in deep sand); leaves 1 to 14 feet long, or more, mostly near the 
base, rigid, slender, smooth, involute and equaling or ‘nearly 
equaling the culm, the sheaths longer than the internodes; ligule 
a short, hairy ring. Panicle elongated, lax, half or more than 
half the length of the culm, with distant, alternate spreading 
branches, naked below, the lower ones 4 to 6 inches long, gradu- 
ally shorter upwards, the sparse filiform branchlets and pedicels 
divergent and few-flowered, pedicels 34 inch to I inch or more 
in length. Spikelets ovate, compressed, 2 to 2% lines long, 
three to five-flowered, the flowers crowded, the base and the 
short rhachilla beset with long or short white hairs. Empty 
glumes about half the length of the spikelet, ovate-lanceolate, 
acute, one-nerved, thinner than the flowering glumes, the lower 
I line long, the upper a little longer and broader. Flowering 
glumes 1% to 2 lines long, compressed, thickish and rather rigid, 
acute or short-mucronate, or erose-denticulate, ovate-lanceolate, 
wide below, tapering above, smoothish or minutely scabrous, 
three-nerved, the midrib curved, the lateral nerves prominent 
and midway to the margin, the base somewhat pubescent. Palet 
equaling or longer than its glume, of nearly the same texture, 
acute, bidentate, folded lengthwise in the middle and with the 
two keels prominently folded in the opposite direction. 
This grass was first described in 1863, by Prof. Geo. Thurber, 
in the Proceedings of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sci- 
ences, from specimens collected by Hall and Harbour in 1862. 
The locality is not recorded, but the ticket says: “ American 
Plains Flora.” Professor Thurber doubtfully referred the grass 
to Graphephorum, which it only resembles in the hairy rhachilla: 
