﻿FLOWERING PLANTS OF NaNTUCKET 341 



Never's and Gibb's Ponds, where it was collected by Mr. Walter 

 Deane (see Rhodora, 6: i6o). 

 Setiscapella cleistogama (A. Gray) Barnhart. 

 Utriailaria cleistogama Britten. 



Mrs. Owen, in her catalogue, has reported her discovery of 

 this diminutive plant on Nantucket, where she had found it in 

 abundance in a part of Tom Never's swamp and also at Almanac 

 Pond. Flowering specimens, sent by Mrs. Owen, as I am informed 

 by Professor Fernald, are preserved in the Gray herbarium together 

 with a letter from their collector dated August 28, 1881. The 

 citation of the plant from Nantucket in the sixth edition of Gray's 

 manual evidently rests on this material. 



Although now held to be a species distinct from S. subulata it 

 cannot be said of this plant that it is yet conclusively known to be 

 anything more than a reduced state of that species. Whatever 

 the truth may be the two plants do not always show that wide 

 diversity in their corollas that, by comparison of typical examples, 

 does undoubtedly seem to attest them as distinct. Near Edgar- 

 town, on Martha's Vineyard, on September 30, 1912, there fell 

 to me a most favorable opportunity of observing the extent of 

 variation natural to the flowers of S. cleistogama among the 

 plants of a single colony. The situation was a few square feet of 

 damp sandy soil in open ground. In the weakest examples, 

 some of them not over i cm. high, the corollas, "not larger than 

 a pinhead," were subglobose or saccate, and white or faintly 

 bluish in color, precisely as descriptions require them to be. But 

 in stronger plants the corollas increased doubly in size and came 

 also, by an exact gradation, to a distinctly two-lipped form, the 

 blunt lower lip dusky or purplish lineate and with an evident 

 white spur, the most open flowers showing an unmistakable 

 yellowish tinge. The spur, obsolete in the smallest corollas, 

 varied in the larger ones from rounded to oblong and acutish; in 

 one instance it was bifid. 



In very small examples of S. suhtdata, unmistakable as to 

 identity because components of colonies of the typical plant, the 

 corolla, . perhaps from arrested development, may be somewhat 

 abortive and reduced to a fraction of its normal size, and is some- 

 times palest yellow% or even whitish with a faint bluish tinge. 



