JOURNAL OF THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN VOL. 46 JANUARY PAGES No. 541 19 4 5 1—24 JOURNAL OF THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN CAROL H. WOODWARD, Editor MORE ON ANTIMALARIALS (Continued from the preceding issue) Fifth in a series of editorials designed to show the unique and specialized services that are furnished to the public without cost by the New Tor\ Botanical Garden native of the island of Cyprus, now a naturalized citizen of the A United States, remembered from his boyhood a plant which had long been used as a febrifuge and anti-malarial in his homeland. Its name was unknown to him, and his description of it was fragmentary and imperfect. Some years before the outbreak of the war, he said, Germans had bought up all of the plant available in Cyprus, and he was convinced that this was because of its medicinal properties. He was prepared to fly to Cyprus to bring back seeds of it for cultivation in this country. Some questions on the part of a member of our taxonomic staff and a visit to our library, where a publication on the flora of Cyprus was available, led to the suggestion that the plant concerned was Citrullus Colocynthis, the colocynth. Herbarium specimens gave the final confirma­ tion and in some thirty minutes the unknown had become the known. Native to the eastern Mediterranean, Citrullus Colocynthis has an in­ tensely bitter fruit and has probably been used for centuries as a home remedy. Unfortunately, according to the best information available, it is ineffec­ tive as a cure for malaria. No trip to Cyprus was made for seeds. TABLE OF CONTENTS January 1945 "SILENCE: WINTER"-— By Gustav Adolf Fjaestad, reproduced by courtesy of the Toledo Museum of Art Cover SEDGE BOATS IN THE ANDES Alan A. Beetle 1 JUJUBE, THE CHINESE DATE Willard M. Porterfield, Jr. 4 BASE CAMP IN ECUADOR 8 GARDENING COURSE ARRANGED BY NEW YORK TIMES 8 BLUEPRINT OF THE JUNGLE Mulford B. Foster 9 NOTICES AND REVIEWS OF RECENT BOOKS 17 CURRENT LITERATURE AT A GLANCE 19 BROADCAST Harvey K. Murer 20 NOTES, NEWS, AND COMMENT 22 WINTER EVENTS AT THE GARDEN 24 The Journal is published monthly by The New York Botanical Garden, Bronx Park, New York 58, N. Y, Printed in U. S. A. Entered at the Post Office in New York. N. Y., as second-class matter, Annual subscription $1.00. Single copies 15 cents. Free to members of the Garden. JOURNAL cf THE NEW YORK BOTANICAL GARDEN VOL. 46 JANUARY 1945 No. 541 Sedge (Boats in the cAndes By Alan A. Beetle* O build a boat entirely of the stems of sedges seems like a fantastic T notion to a resident of a well forested country; but in the high altitudes of the Andes where at 12,500 feet there is navigable water but where no trees exist, necessity steps in, as is her custom, and becomes the mother of invention in the manufacture of boats out of native materials. Sedges are the sturdiest and the most abundant plant of the region, and so the Indians make their sailing craft of them. Yet, so improbable does this seem that when mentioned incidentally in a paper of the author a reviewer commented: "This statement is nonsense. Something else was evidently intended." However, these "balsas," so-called, are a common sight on Lake Titicaca. They are not made of balsa logs, like those of Ecuador, but the boats are fashioned from the long straight, leafless culms of Scirpus tatora, a bulrush growing in quantity and to a height of three meters on the shores of the lake. But this region is not the only one in the Western Hemisphere where reed-like plants have been used for boat building. In the November 1944 issue of Desert Plant Life is an illustration of a boat of similar construc­ tion from Tiburon Island in the Gulf of Mexico, labeled "A rare photo­ graph of the last native carrizal reed balsa made by the Seris in 1922." Carrizal reed is the familiar tall marsh grass, Phragmites communis, which is distributed over much of the world and is as familiar to New Jersey commuters taking the train each morning across the meadows into New York as it is to the natives of Tiburon. The sedge that is generally used for the balsas of Lake Titicaca is endemic to the high altitudes around the lake, which is part of the boundary *Dr. Beetle is in the Division of Agronomy at the University of California in Davis, and during the summer of 1944 he spent a month on a scholarship at the New York Botanical Garden working on the genus Scirpus. 1 At the left is one of the reed boats equipped with a reed sail, made of Scirpus tatora and used on La\e Titicaca in the Andes. Right is a closely related species of Scirpus, S. californicus, found throughout the Americas and also used occasionally for boats. This photograph was made near Puno, Peru, on La\e Titicaca by Cesar Vargas C. of University of the Cuzco, who did taxonomic research at the New Tor\ Botanical Garden during the summer of 1941. between Peru and Bolivia. Although it is similar in' habit to the familiar bulrushes, Scirpus z'alidus and 5". acutus in this country, its only close relative here is 5\ californicus, a species common to all the Americas. i". tatora is distinguished by its strikingly yellow-green culms which are largely sterile. Scirpus californicus itself has been used in boats ethnologic-ally similar by the Pehuelches on Lago Nahuel-Huapi far to the south. Nearby too, the Indians at Lake Huanache have employed in addition a species of cattail. However the Cymara tribe at Lake Titicaca has used mainly the native TOTORA. Where the shores are covered they are privately owned and considered a source of wealth. After the green culms are cut they are thoroughly dried. The pulpy stems with large airspaces are then very buoyant. They are tied in large bundles with rope made of the stems of native grasses (Stipa and Festuca species). Two large bundles usually form the bottom of the boat and additional smaller rolls form a railing. The largest of the boats carry five or six people. Near the shore and around the numerous narrows of the lake the boats are paddled canoe-fashion. In the center of the lake sails, which are mats made of Scirpus stems, are suspended on a double mast. The two poles, evidently made of material brought up from the lowlands, are tied above, and one is stuck in each side of the boat. The balsa is used mainly for fishing. The author has in his possession a small model made to scale and of the same materials. It was sold by an Indian boy at the boat dock near Puno, Peru. There is another model in the boat collection in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D. C. At best Lake Titicaca is an out-of-the-way corner, now known as the highest navigable water in the world. The lake is used as a mountain pass by an English steamship line whose boats ply an overnight run between Species of Scirpus growing on bars in La\e Titicaca near Puno, Peru. The many birds which dot the surface of the water are the flightless grebes which are indigenous to this la\e. The blea\, treeless shore of La\e Titicaca, with the reed, Scirpus californicus, growing out of the water. Puno, Peru, and Guaqui, Bolivia. Here, to come upon swarthy Indians speaking an Inca tongue and complacently sailing their own boats, the while dressed in bowler hats and brightly colored ponchos, is a sight to be remembered. Jujube, The Qhinese <Date (.Yo. 14 of a scries of articles on Chinese I'lyclublc Foods in Neiv York) By Willard M. Porterfield, Jr. NE of the dried fruits stocked in glass jars in the Chinatown food O shops is the so-called Chinese date, or TSAO, better known in foreign quarters as the jujube. Its popularity with the Chinese can be judged' by the fact that it has been designated in the classics as one of the five prin­ cipal fruits of China and that it has been eaten there for 4,000 years. Tsao fruits are sweet to the taste and are eaten fresh, dried (like raisins or litchees), preserved in sugar, stewed, or smoked.1 The meat is firm and 1 Mever, F. N. Agricultural explorations in the fruit and nut orchards of China U.S.D.A., B.P.I. Bui. 204: 35-40, March 25, 1911. when fresh the fruit is plump. A light mahogany-colored fruit sold on the streets of Sian-fu in the province of Shensi under the name of TSEN TSAO 2 is eaten fresh. This one has only a medium sweet taste not suited to drying or candying. Most varieties of the fruits have seeds, but a few are seedless. The species commonly seen here is Zizyphus jujuba Mill., which comes from a spiny shrub of tree-like proportions. In China, however, the species most commonly cultivated is called Z. sativa Gaertn. (Z. vulgaris Lam.). This is less tree-like and inclines to thornlessness under cultiva­ tion. Its fruit, which ripens from March to June, is smaller than that of the other (1/3 to % of an inch in length in its wrinkled dried state), and it is short-stalked, ovoid to oblong, and reddish to black in color. In other countries species of Zizyphus have quite different uses.