Mar. 1903.] BOTANICAL SOCIETY OF EDINBUKGH 309 



Cakex divisa, Hudson, as a Scottish Plant. 

 By Alex. Somekville, B.Sc, F.L.S. 



(Read 12th March 1903.) 



It mav, I believe, be said with truth that few genera of 

 British plants have more felt the inroads of drainage and 

 agriculture than the genus Carex — our Sedges — represented 

 in these Islands by some seventy species. Being in the 

 main paludal, that is marsh-loving, plants, the conversion 

 during the past century of tracts of country from undrained 

 areas into ploughed land capable of yielding cereals 

 and root-crops, has limited not a little those areas 

 where the lower-ground Carices at least are to be met 

 with, so that the stations for these are now, in many 

 cases, widely dissevered and isolated. 



What I have stated has led me to bring before the 

 Society a Sedge to which considerable interest attaches, a 

 species which, though it occurs in various counties in 

 England, in three in Wales, and in Wexford and Dublin 

 in Ireland, has been reliably recorded from but one county 

 only in Scotland — Forfarshire, — where, curiously, it had until 

 lately continued practically inrdii for no less than eighty- 

 eight years ! 



The species I refer to is Carex divisa, first described by 

 Hudson, a Fellow of the lioyal Society of London, in the 

 first edition of his " Flora Anglica," published in London 

 in 1762, that is a hundred and forty years ago. This 

 Sedge was, in the summer of 1901, re-found near Montrose 

 in Forfarshire by a Mr. James Menzies, as mentioned in 

 the " Annals of Scottish Natural History " for that year, 

 at page 230. 



In regard to the fioral structure of the species it may 

 be said here that the inflorescence consists of a few short 

 spikelets, all similar, and crowded into a somewhat ovate 

 head, each spikelet having several staminate, i.e. male, 

 flowers at its top, those below being pistillate. The stems 

 of the plant are erect and very slender, and rise to a 

 height of a foot or more ; the leaves too are long and very 

 narrow. 



