22 



is covered with a soft pale reddish bark, and bears small scat- 

 tered appressed scales along its two edges. These stems often 

 ascend to a height of thirty or forty feet, and as the leafy branches 

 are usually several feet apart and project only a foot or two they 

 are not conspicuous. 



No record of this peculiar climbing habit of Picris phillyreae- 

 folia seems to have yet found its way into botanical literature, 

 but it has not entirely escaped the attention of botanists, for there 

 is in the Torrey Herbarium a specimen collected in Florida by 

 Dr. Chapman in 1840, accompanied by the following note: 

 " This plant in its habit is quite singular. I find it growing on 

 live cypress trees in a pond near this place [Apalachicola ?] 

 twenty feet from the ground ! as if it was a parasite. I have not 

 made an examination but I suspect that the stems creep under 

 the bark from the ground." For some reason Dr. Chapman 

 failed to mention this interesting observation in his Flora, which 

 was published twenty years later. 



A few weeks after leaving Okefinokee Swamp I found the same 

 Picris climbing the same species of Taxodium at several points in 

 Lowndes and Brooks Counties, over fifty miles west of the 

 swamp, and collected some more specimens of it (no. 1602) in 

 an extensive swamp between Clyattville and Valdosta, in the 

 former county, on September 2. Before this time it had never 

 been reported from Georgia, but only from West Florida, and a 

 single station in Mobile County, Alabama, where Dr. Mohr 

 found it as a " shrub 5 to 8 inches high." 



This association of Pieris pJdllyrcaefolia with Taxodium imbri- 

 carium and no other tree is rather remarkable, as most of our 

 climbers, epiphytes and even many parasites seem to have no 

 particular preference in the matter of hosts. But in this case 

 there is no other tree having a similar habitat which has a bark 

 composed of such long parallel and easily separable fibers. 



Picris phillyreaefolia is described as having a stem alternately 

 leafy and bracted. This character may be an inheritance from a 

 time when its climbing habit was more universal than now, and 

 the bracted portion of the erect stems probably corresponds to 

 the subcortical portion of the climbing stems. 



College Point, N. Y. 



