Minnesota Plant Life. 



259 



The fourteenth order includes the goosefoots or pigweeds, 

 and the amaranths, known also as pigweeds, redroots or timible- 

 weeds, including the coxcombs and one variety of water hemp. 

 Here also are the four-o'clocks, pokeweeds, ice-plants, carpet- 

 weeds, purslanes and portulacas, pinks, cockles and catchflies, 

 besides some other families not represented in Minnesota. 



Pigweeds. The goosefoots are represented in Minnesota by 

 about fifteen species, many of which are introduced. Here are 

 the common, scurfy-leaved, pale pigweeds of farm-yards and" 

 roadsides. Several sorts of these pigweeds occur in the state. 

 Here are also to be placed the 

 winged pigweeds, plants 

 found on lake shores, espe- 

 cially upon sandy beaches in 

 the central part of the state, 

 and the bugseeds, abundant 

 on the beaches of Mille Lac 

 and near Duluth — also the 

 blites on the shore of Lake 

 Superior, and two salt-marsh 

 plants very rare in Minnesota, 

 but reported from salt marshes 

 in the Red river valley. 



Glassworts. One of these 

 salt-marsh plants, the glass- 

 wort, is a curious, leafless, suc- 

 culent organism, resembling 

 some slender cactus-forms. In color it is green during the 

 summer, but turns red in autumn. The stem is from six inches 

 to two feet tall, repeatedly branched and provided with tiny 

 scales at the nodes of the fleshy branches. These scales are all 

 that remains of the leaf-system. Glassworts are abundant in 

 salt marshes along the Atlantic ocean and occur at various 

 points inland. Such leafless, succulent plants seem to have a 

 peculiar reason for reducing their evaporative surface. It is 

 not on accovmt of the scarcity of moisture, as in the instance 

 of the cacti, nor of surf, to which bulrushes are adapted, nor 

 of high winds, in response to which the switch-plants have taken 



Fig. I'^O. Glasswort. After Britton and Brown. 



