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._]