DEPARTMENT REPORTS 57 



the time. These plots are instructive to students and visitors, and to no 

 one more than to the one who designed and manages the garden. Here 

 many agricultural students resort and make collections of seeds for imme- 

 diate or future study, and sometimes herbarium specimens as well. 



Such a garden is especially appropriate at an agricultural college or 

 experiment station. A professor of our State Normal School was so much 

 impressed with such a garden as an educator, after seeing ours, that he 

 forthwith secured a suitable spot and started one on a portion of the 

 campus. 



In some respects my experience in connection with these weeds has 

 been different from that of most others, much depending on the particular 

 locality, the exposure and the nature of the soil. The land I have used 

 slopes to the south and more than half of it is moderately stiff clay. The 

 perennials and biennials have remained in most cases each in the same 

 plot; the annuals have usually been self-seeding. The soil, not having 

 been spaded over, has become pretty solid. As every experimenter with 

 plots has observed, where the plants are at all crowded, those around the 

 margins of the plot are larger than those near the middle. As we might 

 expect, seeds of many of these weeds find their way into surrounding 

 plots, there to contest the space with others or to make trouble to the 

 person who tends the garden. It is very instructive to note how much 

 better many of these plants thrive when they get away from the spot 

 where they have been confined for two or four years or more. 



Some grains of Bromus secalinus were sown in the spring of '96 and 

 made a stout growth with not a sign of a panicle. Part of it winter 

 killed. In autumn of "OG more grain was sown adjoining the first that 

 was sown in spring. On June 20 of this year the panicles of both 

 lots of plants are of the same height and vigor, and there cannot be two 

 days' difference in the time of blossoming. As we have this plant, its 

 habit is prett}^ well fixed, so it requires an autumn, a winter and a spring, 

 with a little of early summer, to run its course. Iva xanthifolia we have 

 grown for several years, though it is not known in the southern peninsula 

 of the State. The plants thrive in the upper peninsula, where they prob- 

 ably came from the west and lodged as in the mouth of a great cornucopia 

 open to the west. This plant has not emigrated into the southern penin- 

 sula, probably because it doesn't understand navigating the waters of Lake 

 Michigan. In gathering seeds from melting snow, the last of a snow bank, 

 a single seed of Cycloloma platijphi/lluni was found. Diligent search was 

 made the next summer without finding any plants of this species, and none 

 had formerly been found. 



Shephard's purse is often much affected with a fungus knows as 

 Cystopus, so much so that large patches scarcely produce any seeds and 

 large areas perish from the face of the earth. Cocklebur often has a hard 

 struggle here on account of the attacks of a mildew, and more recently 

 by a rust also. In some seasons, on this account, scarcely any seeds are 

 produced. 



In our weed garden, grass garden and botanic garden proper, June 

 grass causes us more trouble than any other weed. It is small for a time 

 and escapes notice; the rootstocks improving the opportunity, and after a 

 little we are obliged to root out considerable patches of cultivated plants 

 to get rid of it. Couch grass is larger, less common and is more easily 

 detected. 



