Welsh Journals

The interesting fact that a widespread species was not com- pleting its natural life-cycle by consistently failing to produce sexual stages and spores, coupled with its frequency in man-made habitats, suggested to some authorities that Lunularia was not a true native of Britain but had been introduced accidentally. Others used the few existing records of fruiting plants in the extreme south and west of Britain, together with the rarity of sexual stages further north, as evidence that, in the British Isles, Lunularia was truly native to southern and western England only and had been acci- dentally spread further north, where it remained practically barren. Apart from the extreme rarity of spore-bearing plants, ob- servers were also struck by the even greater scarcity of male plants and naturally wondered whether they were truly rarer than females or had merely escaped observation. From a consideration of the life-history of the species there are no grounds for thinking that males should be any fewer than females. After a gap in the records of over twenty years, interest has been focused once again on these peculiar features by the discovery of a fairly large number of records of sexual plants, particularly in South and West Wales, as follows Female Plants :-Female plants were found in the vicinity of Cardiff, V.C. 41, in 1951 and successive years by Benson-Evans and Hughes (1955), who also found spore-bearing plants in the same locality. This was followed later by ten separate records, viz., Pembrokeshire, V.C. 45, four localities, all within a few miles of one another near Narberth Glamorgan, V.C. 41, two localities in the Gower Peninsula, another locality near Swansea and one further locality near Bridgend Surrey, V.C. 17, one locality near Guildiford W. Cornwall, V.C. 1, one locality on Tresco, Isles of Scilly (Goodman, 1956). Male Plants :-Male plants were found by the author in two localities, again near Narberth, in the spring of 1953. In the following autumn, Benson-Evans and Hughes also discovered male plants on Steep Holme, N. Somerset, V.C. 6, and later near St. Mellons, Monmouthshire, V.C. 35, and near Cardiff, V.C. 41. It is interesting to note that the recent records, like the earlier data, suggest that male plants are rarer than unfertilized females. The following table summarises all the available observations known to the author, for female, male and sporogonial plants in Britain, although there must surely be many more records in various herbaria and local journals. Since records may have come from several different places in any one vice-county, figures are given for the number of different localities and also the number of vice- counties in each case. The presence of sporogonial plants of necessity entails the presence of both male and female stages, and therefore a group of records (" Assumed Records") derived from occurrences of sporogonial plants can be added to those males and