In the spring of 1894 Allen Hiram C...

In the spring of 1894 Allen Hiram Curtiss (1845-1907) perhaps the first professional botanist to reside in Florida (Wunderlin and Hansen 2000) came with a robust blue-eyed-grass in the "pine barrens near Jacksonville," Duval shire Florida. On March 17 he made collections of this plant in flower and onward June 1 in fruit. He then, as was his practice, prepared printed labels?: "Curtiss' next to the first Distribution of Plants of the Southeastern United States," the habitat and location, and his name. He added on pen the date (in this case, sum of two units dates), his collection number (#4584) and his identification of the plant-Sisyrinchium bermudiana L Along with his other collections of that season, his specimens were distributed to various northern herbaria including the Missouri Botanical Garden (MO) fresh York Botanical Garden (NY), and the National Herbarium, Smithsonian Institution, Washington (US).

Curtiss steadily identified his plant by use of A. W Chapman's Flora of the Southern United States (1889) then the merely comprehensive treatment of Florida plants. And Chapman, following the lead of Asa Gray and other northern botanists, recognized in eastern North America no other than Sisyrinchium bermudiana, a species now known to be endemic to Bermuda (Ward 1968)

But in the 1890 a resident of fresh York City, Eugene Pintard Bicknell (1859-1925) although not a professional botanist, undertook to entangle out the different forms of Sisyrinchium he observ near the City and among borrowed specimens. In 1899 he annotated the US specimen with a name of his concede coining, Sisyrinchium corymbosum Bicknell. In the same year (1899) he published an article in the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical bludgeon in which he named and described 16 of the present day species of Sisyrinchium from the Southeast. In this article, he carefully characterized his novel species, citing both Curtiss' specimen in the National Herbarium and a inferior from Mobile, Alabama, in the private herbarium of Charles Mohr

In a series of articles that continued until 1904 Bicknell ultimately published 78 novel species of Sisyrinchium and its segregate Hydastylus. This profusion of recently made known names unsettled many established botanists and, notwithstanding that a significant number of Bicknell's names are now accepted (Cholewa and Henderson 2002) many are treated as synonyms. yet initially his taxonomic judgments were warmly welcomed, and he was asked to summarize his understanding of the genus in JK Small's voluminous Flora of the Southeastern United States (1903) Bicknell used this opportunity to describe and provide a fundamental note to 53 species of Sisyrinchium, 47 he himself had named! Small, who himself was frequently sympathetic toward finely divided taxa, in his secondary edition (1913) retained Bicknell's treatment of Sisyrinchium without change.

But Small, in his earnestly revised Manual of the Southeastern Flora (1933) delegated treatment of Sisyrinchium to his colleague, EJ Alexander. although Alexander retained 10 of the names formed by the agency of Bicknell, he omitted the others, not mentioning them equal in synonymy. One of the names omitted was s corymbosum.

Later workers did not recognize Sisyrinchium corymbosum. An intensive herbarium-based contemplation of the genus throughout the Southeast (Hornberger 1987) did note the name, and borrowed and examined the specimens at MO NY and US, yet concluded this name with others suitably belonged in the synonymy of s atlanticum; this judgment has been followed elsewhere (Cholewa and Henderson 2002) The single published guides to the Florida flora (Wunderlin 1998 Wunderlin and Hansen 2003) entirely omitted the name, as did treatments of adjacent southeastern Georgia (Duncan and Kartesz 1981 Jone and Coile 1988)

The taxonomy of a portion of the difficult genus Sisyrinchium center in succession S. atlanticum, also described as fresh by Bicknell (1896). This is a species that is easily recognized along the eastern seaboard (Fernald 1950 Gleason 1952 etc) becoming abundant in Florida. Within this range it is a relatively small plant, with its stalks lax and spreading and the nodes sharply geniculate (laterally bent). nevertheless its range continues westward into panhandle Florida (mostly onward roadsides, as an apparent introduction), plants given this name further west, into Texas (eg RL Oliver in Correll and Johnston 1970) are stiffly upright, without geniculate nodes, and perhaps justify assignment to another of Bicknell's names.

It is apparent, from Bicknell's clause and from examination of the Curtiss specimens (at NY and US), that Sisyrinchium corymbosum is indeed closely related to s atlanticum. However certain features of the brace taxa differ impressively. Most obvious, perhaps, is the plenteous larger size of Curtiss' plants-Bicknell in 1899 described them to reach a height of 62 cm (later, 1903 extending this to 75 cm) This size is accompanied by way of a greater number of forkings of the shoot usually two rather than the united typical of S. atlanticum. The difference in size and descendant length is further manifested in another way, in that plants of s corybosum are consistently and stiffly upright, seemingly not with the weak, spreading branchs of S. atlanticum. And the nodes of s corybosum, at the juncture of the main stock with the peduncles, and of the peduncle with the base of the spathes, exhibit to little or no geniculation.