Plate 10 Cyperus ustulatus (coastal sedge)

This member of the sedge or rush family is quite similar in appearance to the classical papyrus {Cyperus papyrus), the stems of which provided paper in ancient times. There are about 550 species of Cyperus, only one of which occurs in New Zealand. Cyperus ustulatus is found in lowland regions, near rivers and on moist ground, especially near the coast, throughout the North Island and parts of the South Island. It occurs too on the Kermadec, Chatham and Three Kings Islands. For some time Cyperus ustulatus was known as Mariscus ustulatus. This illustration is from the botanical atlas of Voyage de l'Astrolabe (1826-1829) and was drawn by Vauthier. The engraving was made by Madame Rebel.

The enlarged section at lower left shows part of an inflorescence of sedge flowers. Figure 2 shows a single flower with three stamens, each bearing terminal pollen sacs, and three central filamentous stigmas to which pollen adheres. Figure 3 shows the central female part of the flower, with three stigmas attached to a cylindrical style, which is attached at its base to the ovoid ovary. A single seed develops within each ovary.

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described seed plants. These volumes appeared between 1827 and 1834, at first in sixteen separate parts. The Atlas, which was published between the same dates, had two parts devoted to botany. The first illustrates lower plants and consists of forty plates (thirty-nine in some copies). Plates 1 to 24 (hand-coloured engravings) illustrate seaweeds (algae) and were drawn by Bory de Saint-Vincent. The other plates, by Pancrace Bessa (1772-1835), a botanical artist at the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, were uncoloured and included two New Zealand ferns that were described as new species in the text by Bory de Saint-Vincent. These were Polypodium eleagnifolium (now Pyrrosia serpens) and Lindsaea lessonii (now Lindsaea cuneata var. lessonii). It has been established that another fern, Grammitis scoplopendrina, described as a new species from New Zealand, was not in fact collected there. The second set of illustrations, covering seed plants, consisted of sixty-seven plates numbered from 1 to 78 with plates 55, 57, 58, 63, 65 to 67, 72 to 74, 76 not published. These too are superb engravings, uncoloured. Pancrace Bessa drew the first fifty plates, the others were by Joseph Decaisne (1807-82), a Belgian botanist attached to the National Paris Museum of Natural History. The only New Zealand plant to be described in the text, also illustrated in the Atlas, was Lampocarya affinis, a sedge that is now known as Morelotia affinis.

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