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Manual of the New Zealand Flora.
4. Zannichellia, Linn
4. Zannichellia, Linn.
Slender submerged water-plants; stems filiform, branched. Leaves usually opposite, filiform, sheathing at the base; sheaths stipular. Flowers minute, axillary, monœcious, a single male and female enclosed in the membranous leaf-sheaths. Male flower: Perianth wanting. Stamen 1; filament short at first, elongating as the flower expands; anther 2–3-celled, linear, basifixed, page 752cells dehiscing laterally, connective produced, apiculate. Female flower: Perianth short, cupular, hyaline. Carpels 2–6, sessile; styles long or short; stigma large, obliquely peltate, crenate; ovule solitary, pendulous, orthotropous. Ripe carpels usually 3 or 4, sessile or stalked, curved, oblong or oblong-reniform, slightly compressed, tubercled or crenate or smooth on the back, beaked by the projecting style. Seed pendulous; testa membranous; embryo cylindric, the cotyledonary end bent into a short coil.
An almost cosmopolitan genus of 4 or 5 closely allied species, probably all forms of one.
| 1. | Z. palustris, Linn. Sp. Plant. 969.—Stems very slender, much branched, leafy throughout, often forming dense masses, 3–14 in. long. Leaves opposite or subwhorled, very slender, ½–3 in. long, filiform, fiat. Flowers sessile or very shortly pedicelled. Fruiting carpels 3 or 4, about 1/12 in. long, stipitate or almost sessile, curved, smooth or very obscurely crenate on the back; styles from half to almost as long as the carpels. —Hook. f. Fl. Nov. Zel. i. 237; Handb. N.Z. Fl. 280; Kirk in Trans. N.Z. Inst, xxviii. (1896) 498.
North Island: Auckland—Abundant in the Waikato River, from Taupiri downwards, also in Lakes Waikare, Whangape, and Waihi, Kirk! T. F. C. Hawke's Bay—Tangoia Lagoon, Colenso! South Island: Otago—Waikouaiti Lagoon, Petrie! December–May. The Waikato specimens have the carpels sessile or nearly so, and decidedly turgid; in those from Hawke's Bay and Otago they are distinctly stipitate, and with longer styles. Both forms have the back of the carpel smooth or nearly so. |