NEBC Meeting News

Abstract

January 2020. The New England Botanical Club met at the Field Headquarters of the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife in Westborough, Massachusetts, on January 11, 2020, for its 1143 meeting entitled ‘‘20th Assembly of Associates’ Appetizing Alimentary Acquisitions and Amazing Apparitions of Angiosperms.’’ It was the annual meeting where members share a potluck dinner, raffle, and presentations by members on botanical adventures from the last year. The potluck dinner was again delicious with an assortment of breads, salads, main dishes, and desserts, sporting labels that identified their ingredients using botanical scientific names. This year’s raffle was the largest ever with more than 75 items donated. Many of the books from a retiring botanist’s library were excitedly won by one of the younger members of the Club. Seven NEBC members gave show-and-tell presentations. Richard Primack started the evening with a presentation on a beautiful and highly variable species, swamp rose mallow (Hibiscus moscheutos), which has become common along the banks of the Charles River in Newton, Massachusetts, and towns further upstream. Populations are noteworthy for the extraordinary variability in flower form. All flowers within a plant look the same, but different plants vary dramatically in flower size, color (white to light pink to dark pink), petal shape (narrow or broad), and presence or absence of a red bull’s eye in the center of the flower. This range of variation is found within each population examined along the Charles River, and the variation in size is evident in herbarium specimens measured from across the United States. Cultivated rose mallow plants grown as ornamental plants in Boston have larger flowers, broader petals, and a greater frequency of white flowers and red bull’s eye flowers than plants in the wild. What remains unknown is the adaptive significance of this floral variation to plants in the wild. Keith Williams described surveys of three remote lakes in the Maine Allagash Wilderness, assisted by Sibyl French, Dennis Roberge, Bunny Wescott, and Mark Whiting in late July and early August 2019. Allagash Pond, northwest of the larger Allagash Lake, and Round Pond and Daggett Pond, both south of Allagash Lake, are about 100– 500 acres in size and shallow (8–20 feet). Keith’s intent in surveying these boreal forest ponds, as he has been doing for 20 years, is to inventory the aquatic plants, their prevalence, and correlations with water chemistry (samples collected for Environmental Protection