THE YDCCEAE. 37 



herbarium specimens and viable seeds of the plant. This 

 Hesperaloe appears to be the same as the herbarium material 

 referred to, though neither foliage nor flowers accompany 

 the capsules first collected, and the few flowers distrib- 

 uted by Mr. Pringle from further south are not in very 

 satisfactory condition while the marginal threads, which 

 are slender in the many plants seen by me, are very thick, 

 triquetrous, wavy and rigid on his leaves. 



This species, the at first very concave leaves of which 

 may be as much as 40 mm. wide and nearly 2 m. long, 

 finely striate-grooved on the back and with long con- 

 spicuous marginal fibers, as in the other representatives 

 of the genus, produces a divaricately few-branched, tall 

 panicle, on which, fascicled in the axils of the bracts, are 

 borne the oblong ephemeral flowers. Unlike those of 

 H. parvi flora and its variety Engelmanni, both of which have 

 pedicels and flowers ranging from a creamy tint through 

 salmon-color to typically a beautiful shade of red sugges- 

 tive of Aloe and Gasteria, the flowers and short pedicels of 

 this species are noted by Mr. Pringle as being " purplish, 

 shading to whitish," and in the plants observed about Pe- 

 yotes were of a dingy purplish green and decidedly glau- 

 cous, the spreading flowers being about 25 mm. long, with 

 stamens and style included and of about equal length, 

 and the anthers 5 to 7 mm. long. The globose to broadly 

 oblong solid-beaked capsules are strongly transversely 

 reticulate- veined, and the thin black seeds are like those of 

 the other species. 



In 1898 Mr. Baker described, under the specific name 

 Davyiy a green-flowered Hesperaloe from " California? " 

 which had been sent him by Mr. J. Burt Davy from the 

 garden of the University of California at Berkeley. Mr. 

 Davy tells me that no record is found of the source of the 

 seeds from which this was grown. Dr. F. Franceschi, of 

 Santa Barbara, California, states that two original plants 

 were raised, one of which flowered in 1898, yielding the 



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