170 THE AMERICAN BOTANIST 



erect, as the species always does, lies close to the earth, roots 

 at every joint, and produces small heads of flowers that are 

 low enough to escape tlie lawn-mower. There has always 

 been a suspicion that this is a sort of artificial species — a form 

 assumed to escape the inventions of mankind — but the fact 

 remains that for more than a quarter of a century it has 

 maintained its creeping habit and the peculiar character of 

 rooting at the joints. It has been slowly spreading and now 

 ranges over a considerable territory. It has been reported 

 from Connecticut and Massachusetts and the writer has re- 

 cently seen it in Montreal, Binghamton, N. Y. and Eagles- 

 mere, Pa. The plant grows almost exclusively on lawns 

 forming dense little mats that smother the grasses. It 

 would be interesting to know how many others have found 

 it. The makers of the manuals have thus far neglected to 

 mention its occurrence. Perhaps they are waiting for some- 

 body to describe it in sounding Latin phrases. 



High-Bush Cranberry. — Did you ever taste the high- 

 bush cranberry? If you did, it is likely that you received an 

 unexpected shock for instead of the sour cranberry taste you 

 anticipated you found the berries to be intensely bitter and 

 nauseous; that is, if you tasted the fruits of the plant com- 

 monly cultivated. It seems that the plant of our gardens 

 and shrubberies is the European variety Vihumuni opulus 

 whose sterile offspring is the snowball tree or guelder rose 

 so common in cultivation. But there is a real cranberry 

 tree, according to George Darrow in the Journal of Heredity 

 and that plant is the one that up to the present has been 

 known as Viburnum opulus variety Aniericanus. It is 

 strange that this species which circles the globe in the North 

 Temperate zone should be bitter on one side of the earth and 

 sour on the other. Anyway, it seems the part of good sense 

 to plant our own form since it is quite as hardy as the other 



