eaves. 



Ion 

 than 



Bicknell : Ferns and flowering plants of Nantucket 477 



127. 1906). Under conditions in which its flowering vigor be- 

 comes impaired the plant takes on a remarkably different aspect 

 by reason of much shortened spikes, and scales often of darker 

 color and with more spreading tips. A few extreme examples of 

 this reduced state were collected, showing many spikes not more 

 than 5-7-flowered and only 3-5 mm. long, although occasionally an 

 elongated, many-flowered spike was developed among the shorter 

 ones on the same axis. This condition of reduced flowering vigor 

 seems often to result from an increased vegetative impulse supplied 

 by a very rich or a very wet soil. Under such conditions the in- 

 florescence is often invaded by a vegetative tendency whereby some 

 of the spikes become more or less proliferous or even wholly trans- 

 formed into tufts of small 1 



I have collected on Long Island rather a marked form of the 

 ger-spiked state of this plant, in which the spikes were narrower 

 in the Nantucket plant, with more numerous and crowded, 

 much shorter scales. 



CVPERUS ESCULENTUS L. 



Common in cultivated and neglected fields and roadsides. 

 A1 ong the sandy banks of the railroad near the town, on Aug. 28, 

 r 904, were many stout plants bearing wide-spreading umbels with 

 ra ys 10-14 cm. long and clusters of spikes 6 cm. across, the nar- 

 r y nn ear spikelets being about 1.5 mm. wide and becoming 2.5 

 • lor >g. At the same place in 1 906 the ordinary short-spiked state 

 of ^e plant was alone found. This form of the plant with elon- 

 gated spikes would ordinarily be referred to var. angustispicatus 

 ntton or var. leptostachyns Boeckl., but there is a rarer and more 

 'stinct plant with the spikes paler in color and almost filiform- 

 lnear to which, perhaps, the name more particularly applies. At 

 n y rate, the long-spiked Nantucket plant would appear to be 

 scarcely mor e than a state of the common species, illustrating that 

 occasional elongation of the flowering axis to which so many of 

 C yperaceae are subject. 



Cy per us speciosus Vahl. 

 i Rar e ; sandy shore of Sachacha Pond, Sept. 16, 1899 and Aug. 



3, 1906, — a few dwarf plants 5-9 cm. high, with subsessile 

 Ca P il ate spikes. 



cm 



