CRUCIATE-FLOWERED OENOTHERAS OF SUBGENUS ONAGRA 227 
is ascribed to Nuttall. In 1835 Spach^ described a collective species 
Oe, chrysantha, which included, as varieties, three species of earlier 
authorship — Oe. muricata "Murr." (as Oe. chrysantha a: grandiflora 
Spach), Oe. parviflora L. (as Oe. chrysantha (3: parviflora Spach) and 
Oe. cruciata Nutt. (as Oe. chrysantha 7: cruciata Spach). Torrey and 
Gray^ likewise treated Oe. cruciata as a variety, but whereas Spach had 
reduced the allies of Oe. biennis to two species, these authors ranged 
them all as varieties under Oe. biennis. The names Oe. biennis var. 
cruciata T. & G. and Oe. cruciata Nutt. are strict vsynonyms. 
Oenothera biennis var. cruciata "with singularly small and narrow 
linear-oblong petals, and smooth pods" ran through all the editions 
of Gray's Manual, from the first to the fifth, with no specific statement 
of geographic range. In the sixth edition, however, we find the state- 
ment that "var. cruciata Torr. & Gray, with small narrow petals, ap- 
pears to be merely a rare garden (?) sport. E. Mass." The change 
appears to have been made because no wild specimens of Oe. cruciata 
had ever been collected, or at any rate none had been preserved in 
public herbaria, between the time of Nuttall's original discovery of 
the species (probably 1822 or 1823, soon after his arrival in Cam- 
bridge), and 1889, a period of more than sixty years. Cultivated 
specimens, collected in the Harvard Botanic Garden in 1856 and 1875, 
were the only material of the species known to Watson, the editor of 
the sixth edition of Gray's Manual and a monographer of the genus 
Oenothera. His surmise that Oe. biennis var. cruciata might have 
originated as a garden sport shows clearly that until comparatively 
recent years such a form has had only a traditional status as a wild 
plant in this country. 
We have seen that Don cultivated the true Oe. cruciata in 1824, and 
there is no intrinsic improbability but that the form which is still found 
in European botanic gardens is genetically related to it. It is more 
likely that the form cultivated at the Harvard Botanic Garden in 
1856 and 1875 was a reintroduction from Europe than that it had been 
continuously in cultivation since Nuttall's time. Of course, it may 
have had an independent origin. Since the variability of the petals 
3 Spach, E. Monographia Onagrearum. Nouv. Ann. Mus. 4: 355. 1835. 
^Torrey and Gray, Fl. N. Am. i: 492. 1840. "Oe. biennis (Linn.) e. cruciata: 
petals (abortive) linear-oblong, shorter than the stamens; tube of the calyx 2-3 
times the length of the segments; capsules nearly glabrous. — Oe. cruciata Nutt.! in 
DC. I.e. (under Oe. parviflora.) " 
