A new plant joins the Hudson River flora 



Homer D. House 



On September 2, 1929, Mr. William H. Barker, of the State 

 Education Department, whose home is along side of the Hudson 

 River at Waterford above Albany, brought to me specimens of 

 a plant, which at first, because I had never seen the species 

 before, looked strange. Examination of the flowers and fruit 

 and reference to the herbarium soon disclosed the fact that it 

 was Nymphoides nymphaeoides (L.) Britton^ (iV". peltatum S. P. 

 Gmel Britten & Rendle). Mr. Barker told me that he had 

 found the plants, quite a colony of them in fact, growing in the 

 shallow water of the Hudson river near his home. The accom- 

 panying photography was made from these specimens. 



Already two brilliantly flowered plants, unknown along the 

 Hudson river half a century ago, have taken almost complete 

 possession of the marshy environs of the river banks and back- 

 waters from above Troy to New York. They are the Great 

 Hairy Willow-herb {Epilohium hirsutum L.) an ally of our com- 

 mon upland fireweed, and the Purple Loosestrife {Ly thrum 

 salicaria L.) The usurpation of a dominant place in marshes 

 and stream borders by these two species, now well extended 

 across the state, outside of the higher mountains has appar- 

 ently brought no protest. 



In 1932, the Floating Heart, the common name ascribed to 

 Nymphoides nymphaeoides, was collected by Muenscher and 

 Maguire below Schuylerville, and is reported from there by 

 Muenscher.- On August 26, 1936, I motored over a dirt road 

 along the east side of the Hudson river (in Washington county) 

 between Stillwater and Schuylerville. In quiet backwaters of 

 the river I was astonished to see wide stretching colonies of a 

 plant so thickly covered with yellow flowers as to appear almost 

 solidly yellow from the highway and forming a brilliant con- 

 trast against the varying shades of green of the paralleling zones 

 of vegetation and adjacent woodlands. My first thought was 



1 Britton & Brown. Illustrated Flora 3: 19. 1913. 



2 Muenscher, W. C. Aquatic Vegetation of the Mohawk Watershed. In A 

 Biological Survey of the Mohawk-Hudson Watershed (Biological Survey No. 

 IX). Supplemental to the 24th Annual Report of the New York State Conserva- 

 vation Commission, p. 248. 1935. 



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