145 



it could easih' \)c mistaken for an Iris at a little distance, es- 

 pecially at seasons when the latter is not in bloom. And I may 

 thus have overlooked it in all my car-window botanizing (which 

 has extended into or through about one-third of the counties 

 in the United States and a few in Canada). 



It happens that not long after I found it in Tuscaloosa one of 

 the Birmingham papers started a series of daily articles (anon- 

 ymous) on Alabama plants; and the very first one, en Sep- 

 tember 10, 1928, dealt with "Calamus, or sweet flag, as it is 

 commonly called by natives of Alabama, where it is found 

 growing abundantly in the swampy sections of the state." The 

 article consisted mostly of folk-lore relating to the plant, be- 

 ginning with the Bible, and referring to India, and some early 

 customs of American Indians.^ 



As soon as possible I wrote a letter to the paper, challenging 

 the statement about the abundance of calamus in Alabama, and 

 asking if any readers knew of localities for it. That brought a 

 few prompt replies (one from a correspondent about 75 miles 

 away reaching me the same day my letter was published), the 

 gist of which was that each writer knew of the occurrence of the 

 plant long ago in one or two localities. It should be mentioned 

 here that in a copy of Darby's Botany that belonged to Dr. 

 Eugene A. Smith there is a marginal annotation for A corns 

 Calamus, "Ala.," which evidently means that he had seen it 

 somewhere in the state in the 70's, possibly in Tuscaloosa, 

 where I did many years later. 



I left Alabama a few days after the inquiry just mentioned, 

 and did not return to the state to work for three years, or do 

 much botanizing again until 1933. After that I located a few 

 more stations for Acorus. On May 17, 1934, I saw a small patch 

 of it, in bloom, in the western edge of Athens, Limestone 

 County, close to buildings and in pretty weedy surroundings, 

 as in Tuscaloosa six years before. On April 16, 1935, I collected 

 it in a marshy pasture about ^ mile west of Stevenson, Jackson 

 County. A man who came along at that time to see what I was 

 up to suggested that the plants may have washed down from 



- In a History of Agriculture in the State of New York, U. P. Heclrick, 

 1933, Sweet flag — Acorus Calamus — is given in the list of Indian food and in- 

 dustrial plants in the section "Native plants, used but apparently not culti- 

 vated." (Editor.) 



