REED 161 



The stems are stout, leafy, 3-sided, solitary. The leaves are long, 

 keeled, broad, and flat. The flowers are borne in compound branched 

 cymes with slender branches, terminal, and the spikes are in stalkless 

 and stalked clusters, with blunt-pointed, finely furrowed glumes. There 

 are 6 barbed bristles. The nut is bluntly pointed, 3-angled, inversely 

 egg-shaped. 



Wood Club Rush is 18 in. high. The flowers bloom from July 

 up to September. The plant is a herbaceous perennial, propagated 

 by suckers. 



The flowers are pollinated by the wind, and bisexual, and the 

 floral mechanism is similar to that of the Bulrush. The fruit is a 

 nut, which does not open, and falls to the ground when ripe. 



This Club Rush is a peat-loving plant, growing in peat soil or clay 

 soil with some humus in woods. 



A fly, Agromyza nigripes, infests the plant. 



The second Latin name refers to its woodland habitat. It is called 

 also Millet. 



ESSENTIAL SPECIFIC CHARACTERS: 



322. Scirpiis sylvaticus, L. Stem erect, with leaves flat, carinate, 

 broad, lanceolate, spikelets in wide terminal panicle. 



Reed (Phragmites communis, Trin.) 



The Reed may be said to be ubiquitous in both time and space, 

 for it is found in Britain alone in Preglacial beds everywhere, Inter- 

 glacial beds in Hants, Sussex, Lines, Neolithic beds in the Thames 



o 



Valley, Yorks, Glamorgan. It is found in the N. Temperate and 

 Arctic regions in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and in Australia. 

 This common aquatic plant is found throughout Great Britain, except 

 in East Sutherland, as far north as the Shetlands, and in the Channel 

 Islands. 



The common Reed is one of those familiar aquatic plants which 

 has a place in the popular mind on account of its very universality, and 

 because it forms in itself a characteristic botanical formation, a reecl- 

 swamp association. It grows in still water as well as running water, in 

 lakes and rivers, nowhere more luxuriantly than in the meres of the 

 E. counties or the tarns and lochs of Scotland, at two very different 

 elevations. 



The stem is round, tall, graceful, erect, arising from a jointed 

 creeping rhizome, and stoloniferous, with creeping shoots. The leaves 

 are long, flat, broad, rigid, with the margins hairy, and bluish-green 



VOL. IV. 67 



