B0T AN/CAt 



TORREYA GARm * 



Vol. 32 November-December, 1932 No. 6 



Erigenia bulbosa and some associated and related 

 plants in Alabama 



Roland M. Harper 



The Umbell if erous genus Erigenia is represented by one known 

 species, E. bulbosa (Mx.) Nutt., sometimes known as "harbinger 

 of spring/' because it is the earliest flowering Umbellifer in the 

 eastern United States. The species was described (as Sison bul- 

 bosum) by Andre Michaux in 1803, from specimens collected by 

 himself near Knoxville, Tennessee, about seven years before 1 ; 

 and it has since been found in most of the northeastern states, 

 outside of New England. It was overlooked by Dr. A. W. Chap- 

 man in the first edition of his "Flora of the Southern United 



1 Michaux's journal (edited and published in the original French, with 

 explanatory notes in English, by C. S. Sargent in 1889, and translated, with 

 additional notes, by R. G. Thwaites in 1904) records that while on his way 

 from Nashville to Knoxville, on March 3, 1796, he observed "le petit ombelli- 

 fere bulbeux" (which he said he had noted some days previously, evidently 

 nearer Nashville) along "Fleen's [Flynn's] Creeke," probably in what is now 

 Jackson County, Tennessee, in the "Highland Rim" region just west of the 

 Cumberland Plateau. The ground was covered with snow at the time. On the 

 11th of the same month he records finding it on steep rocks along the "Cumber- 

 land" (apparently a slip for Tennessee) River near Knoxville, where it was 

 associated with Saxifraga, etc. ; and that is probably where he collected the 

 type specimen. The original description says of it: "Hab. ad rupes arduas, 

 prope Knoxville. Martio, nivoso solo, florens." 



Pursh in his North American Flora, 1814, re-named the plant Hydrocotyle 

 ambigua, and located Knoxville in Kentucky. Nuttall, who established the 

 genus Erigenia, based on Michaux's plant, in 1818, evidently had additional 

 specimens, for he gives its distribution as "In shady soils, subject to inunda- 

 tion, ... on the Ohio, Missouri, Tennessee, etc. . . . blooming often amidst 

 the snow, about the 12th or 15th of March." 



Torrey and Gray in 1840 said of it: Shady alluvial soils, Buffalo, New York! 

 and western parts of Pennsylvania! and on the Ohio! Missouri and other rivers 

 of the Western States." They overlooked Michaux's Tennessee localities, and 

 that may explain why Chapman omitted it from the first edition of his Southern 

 Flora in 1860. Several recent botanists have collected it in the vicinity of 

 Knoxville, however. 



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