Wanted. — Short notes of interest to the general bot- 

 anist are always in demand for this department. Our readers 

 are invited to make this the place of publication for their 

 botanical items. It should be noted that the magazine is is- 

 sued as soon as possible after the fifteenth of each month. 



Yellow Pond Lily. — Although the yellow pond lily 

 (Niiphor adzriia) does not attract much attention now-a-days, 

 it was once esteemed as a vegetable in this country. The In- 

 dians ate great quantities of it and there are indications that 

 they cultivated it in a certain rude way. The thick but porous 

 rootstocks are the parts eaten. They are said to be slightly 

 sweet and glutinous. The seeds seem to have been occasionally 

 eaten, also, being first parched. Among the common names 

 of this plant are splatter-dock, frog lily and brandy-bottle, the 

 latter in allusion to the shape of the pistil. 



Tree Roots and Grasses. — The well-known difficulty of 

 keeping up a good lawn beneath trees, has usually been ascrib- 

 ed to the shading of the grass, to the absorption of the moisture 

 by the trees and to the withdrawal of the plant food by the tree 

 roots. Some experiments recently made, however, seem to 

 point to a more fundamental cause. In this competition of 

 grass with trees it is not always the grass that suffers. In sev- 

 eral cases trees were found to be veiw materially affected by 

 the grass growing beneath their branches. On the other hand, 

 not all trees have a harmful effect upon other plants though 

 some certainly do. Potentilla fniticosa, a shrubby cinquefoil, 

 appears to be unable to live in the shade of the butternut 

 iJuglans cinera) though it thrives in the same locality under 



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