The Amateur Botanist by Francis Underwood

Addendum to Rare Plants of the Big River Manangement Area

Five additional species not included in the first edition of “Rare Plants of the Big River Management Area” were recently discovered there.
Those species are listed below in bold print and marked with an asterisk (*). The "Rare Plants of the Big River Management Area" web page and its accompanying pdf have been updated to reflect these new finds.

On Friday, May 21, 2010 while botanizing in West Greenwich, RI with Kathy Barton, Hope Leeson and myself, Tom Rawinski discovered a sedge, *Carex aquatilis var. substricta (shown at left), Water Sedge, which had never been reported from RI before. It was growing in a marsh within the Big River WMA.  This sedge had been reported from every New England state except New Hampshire and Rhode Island.
 
This is the fourth sedge new to the flora of Rhode Island which Tom has found. Other state records of Sedges he has found are Carex pedunculata, Long-stalked Sedge in Scituate, Carex styloflexa, Bent Sedge, and Carex debilis var. debilis, both in Westerly. C. styloflexa is found in only two New England states, Connecticut and Rhode Island.   Our botanical expedition took us to several places in West Greenwich within the Big River WMA.  All were sites for some very rare plants.

One site was in Nooseneck Hollow where Tom had recently discovered his third RI  population of *Carex polymorpha (shown below), Variable Sedge, on a hillside of seeps. Nature Serve lists Carex polymorpha as globally vulnerable with populations in only ten northeastern states from N.J. to Maine.  Four of these states had only one surviving population, but now RI, the smallest state, has three extant populations thanks to Tom.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One other rare sedge seen was Carex collinsii.  It is also growing in Big River WMA and is the only population in New England according to Flora of North America.

 

Another interesting discovery was a large population of Bunchberry, *Cornus canadensis (shown at left), near the Big River found by Kathy Barton.  Bunchberry is an uncommon plant in RI and this new population is by far the largest that I have seen in RI.  Although we didn’t see any of these plants in bloom, many of the plants seemed to be young seedlings which would suggest that flowering had occurred in the recent past.
(Note: Bunchberry is not listed in “Rare Native Plants of RI”, September, 2007 by Richard Enser).

Tom also discovered a population of *Liparis loeseli (shown at left), Yellow or Bog Twayblade , near the Big River. This is the first record for this orchid within the Big River Management Area.

 

 

 

 

Other plants of interest seen were *Lonicera dioica (Mountain Honeysuckle) (shown below),  Equisetum variegatum (Variegated Horsetail) and Carex scabrata (Rough Sedge).