SOME BOTANICAL NOTES, JANET C . N .
1963
WILLIS
MAYWEED, Anthemis cotula. Mr. H. G. Barrett sent me a fasciated plant of this from his farm at Winston, where he found a large population of them. When he took a specimen to the Castle Museum at Norwich, he was shown by Miss Ruth Barnes a fine collection of other fasciated plants and also some proliferous and viviparous ones. Then Lord Cranbrook sent me fasciated Mayweeds, " j u s t to show that Great Glemham can do as well as Winston ". STINKING
It will be seen in the photograph that the fasciated heads look like a hat of last year's fashion—there are two rings of yellow disc florets, the upper one rather smaller than the other with a tuft of white ray-florets sticking up vertically from the middle. The ray-florets of the lower one turn vertically down like a veil. I have referred to my bible on Morphology and Physiology of Plants, Sachs' huge Text Book of Botany. He says " fasciation or adhesion of several stems from the root upwards to the flowers is the result of very vigorous growth when the intervals between the vegetative points also grow and unite with the stems ". In the case of this Mayweed it will be seen that some of the branches are not involved and bear small normal heads. In an extreme case of fasciation sent to me by the late Henry Boreham in 1958, the many stems of a Malva sylvestris were united in a ribbon of two to three inches broad and the Clusters of flower stalks along the stems were also included and the leaf stalks also, so that there appeared to be Clusters of sessile flowers and leaves along the ribbons. Other people have sent me, or I have found myself, fasciated forms of Thistle, Cirsium vulgare ; Sunflower, Helianthus annuus ; Willow, Salix caprea ; Sneezewort, Achillea ptarmica ; Buttercup, Ranunculus bulbosus ; Purple Toadflax, Linaria purpurea (in my garden). In my garden the same year there was a proliferous Marigold, Calendula officinalis. This had five or six small heads on long stalks sprouting from the normal sized heads—like the Hen and Chickens Daisy that I have not seen for many years. S A W - W O R T , Serratula tinctoria. This is a new find for Suffolk by M r . Derrick Martin. M r . E. A. Ellis went over to see it with a view to asking the Nature Conservancy to get it scheduled for preservation.
A RUST and a M I L D E W new to Suifolk. Mr. Ellis found on the Saw-wort the rust Puccinia tinctoriicola, Magn., new to East Anglia and the downy mildew Peronospora violacea, Berk., on
[Photo F. W. FASCIATED S T I N K I N G
MAYWEED
f o u n d at W i n s t o n by H . G . Barrett.
Simpson
SOME BOTANICAL NOTES
365
tlowers of Succisa pratensis, " new to Suffolk and I believe," he says, " t h e first British record on this host. T w o exciting t'ungi." He returns to the Saw-wort and says " a little regrettably there was a flock of more than a hundred goldfinches there eating the achenes of the Saw-wort". I saw the plants, hundreds of them, a month later and there was nothing left of the heads but wide spreading stiff bracts, not an achene left. PLUM FUNGUS. I sent Mr. Ellis the skin of a plum with a tiny green plant on it that looked to me under the microscope rather like the foliose thallus of a liehen. He teils me it issPenicillium claviforme, Bainier, which grows on a vanety of decaying substances. He finds it regularly on pellets ejected by partridges on the fields, in Autumn. " It may well have started from a plashing of a bird's dropping on your p l u m " . Volvariella bombyeina. M r . Pease has sent me two lovely colour photographs of this fungus which he has observed on a felled elm trunk in his garden. Unfortunately we cannot reproduce colour photographs in our Transactions.