By Raynal Dodge.
On June 2nd of the present year I again visited the Botrychium stations at Horse Hill, Kensington, N. H., and at Newfound Hill in Hampton Falls. A description of these was given in The Fern Bulletin April 1910. I found that a great change had taken place since my last visit in 1907. The young trees had grown wonderfully and shaded the station, the farm house had been abandoned, the hens had disappeared, and Botrychium ramosum had again taken its place at the foot of the hill. But instead of the many thousands which formerly grew there, I only succeeded in finding about forty plants, some of them however, quite robust and well grown. On the same day, in company with a friend, I made a thorough search for Botrychium simplex at Newfound Hill but failed to find a single plant.
It appears that all the forms in the genus Botrychium increase in numbers very slowly and that the individual plants require many years to attain their full development, but if the station for Botrychium ramosum on Horse Hill escapes damage by fire or marauding hens I think that within twenty years someone perhaps now younger than I, may find a large colony of Botrychium simplex at the old station on Newfound Hill. Several of my young friends have undertaken if possible to make a search.
Perhaps some of the readers of The Fern Bulletin know of localities where Botrychium ramosum and B. simplex are to be found growing near each other. If any such are known it seems that further investigations relating to this subject might be made. Or perhaps it would be enlightening if spores of B. ramosum in sufficient quantity were to be sown on some dry hillside that was easily accessible to the experimenter. Immediate results however should not be expected as these Botrychiums move very slowly, according to some experimenters requiring several years before germination of the spores. Moreover in the present case the continued growth of the young plants would be very much dependent on the amount of moisture they might receive as is evidenced by the total destruction of the plants at Newfound Hill by a very severe drouth.
Since speaking on this subject before the members of the American Fern Society I have been informed of two other instances besides those at that time mentioned where plants of B. simplex once found had disappeared which seems further evidence that the form simplex in Botrychium described by Hitchcock as growing in dry hills is not self-perpetuating.
Newburyport, Mass.
[To the instances of the disappearance of B. simplex, may now be added the disappearance of the colony found at Glen Park, Indiana in 1910. In that year there was perhaps a hundred plants found. Every year since, members of the Joliet Botanical Club and others have searched for them but not a single specimen has been discovered. Some Botrychiums have the habit of resting for a year or more, but it hardly seems likely that they would rest for three summers in succession.—Ed.]
RARE FORMS OF FERNWORTS—XXII.
Still Another Christmas Fern.
In 1893, the late James A. Graves found a curious form of Christmas fern (Polystichum acrostichoides) in the vicinity of Susquehanna, Pa., and removed it to his garden where it continued to put forth its abnormal fronds for many years and may still be alive for anything the writer knows to the contrary. During the period in which Mr. Graves gave his principal attention to the study of ferns he was often advised to describe his abnormal specimen, but he was always so much engrossed in the study and cultivation of the living ferns that he never found time to write a formal scientific description of the plant, though he had settled on a name for it. The form undoubtedly deserves a distinctive name and since the discoverer is no longer with us, it seems very fitting that the form be named for him. I therefore offer the following description of