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BOTANICAL NOTES 

 FROM NORTH-EAST YORKSHIRE. 



F. ARNOLD LEES, 

 Heckmondiuike ; President of the Botanical Section of the Yorkshire Natni-alists Union. 



I. Carduus acaulis in North-East Yorkshire. — I am pleased 

 to be able to record the occurrence of the Stemless Thistle in 

 District III — the Rye and Derwent river-basin— of North Yorkshire. 

 This is a new record for vice-county 62 ; and interesting further in 

 the fact that the discover}^ of it on the North Riding Oolite is an 

 extension of our knowledge of its range up the east side of Britain by 

 fully seventy miles — a degree of latitude ! The credit of the 'find' 

 is due to Mr. John B. Foggitt, who, with Mr. Albert Wilson, observed 

 about fifty specimens of it scattered over the moor above Rievaulx 

 Abbey, in Mid-August. C. acaulis is unmentioned in Baker's ' North 

 Yorkshire,' unrecorded still for South -East York (where, however, it 

 will doubtless be turned up on the Chalk Wold or Oolite) ; and the 

 sole West York station (Lindrick Common) is quite in the south of 

 the county. On the west side of England it runs up to Cheshire. 



II. The Castle Howard Calamagrostis.— Whilst on the sub- 

 ject of North Yorkshire plants, although it is not my province, but 

 Mr. Baker's, I may say that through the kindness of Mr. M. B. Slater 

 I have just had the opportunity of examining some specimens recently 

 gathered in Gilla Leys, Castle Howard. In facies they are a pale- 

 glumed, slender (? shade-grown) C. lanceolafa, and I cannot see 

 C. stricta {D. iieglecta) in them. The keel of the pale glumes is 

 smooth, not scabrous, and the hairs at their base are longer than the 

 palese. Neither is there any trace of the rudimentary second flower, 

 which is one great characteristic differentiating C. stricta from 

 C. lanceolata. The Gilla Leys plant resembles C. stricta in its 

 physiognomy in one respect — the panicle branches are semi-erect 

 and shorter, less spreading, altogether less fine than in ordinary 

 C. lanceolata such as grows in the open swampy thickets of Askhani 

 Bog, Potteric Carrs, etc. Of course there may be, or have been, both 

 species at Castle Howard, and H. Ibbotson's 1844 gathering, only 

 generally, not precisely localised, may have come from Cum Hag or any 

 other one of the several spots on record for C. lanceolata about there. 

 But I apprehend that the explanation will rather have to be found in 

 some inadvertent mis-apportionment of label to specimen or vice versa. 

 Ibbotson collected much, and for sale, from 1845-60, and, I know, 

 visited Oakmere, in Cheshire, where C. stricta grows, for he sold me 

 the first specimens of that which I ever saw, whilst he as undoubtedly 

 knew well the C. lanceolata of Askham, Doncaster, and Castle Howard. 



Sept. 1887. T 



