THIERET, SPARGANIACEAE THE SPARGANIACEAE IN THE SOUTHEASTERN UNITED STATES' JOHN W. THIERET SPARGANIACEAE Rudolphi, Syst. Orb. Veg. 27. 1830, nom. cons. (BUR-REED FAMILY) A monogeneric family of perennial, rhizomatous, monoecious, marsh oraquatic, herbaceous monocotyledons distinguished by distichous, linear,sheathing leaves; simple or branched stems; flowers in dense, globose headson the upper part of the stem or on the branches, the staminate heads distalto the carpellate; perianth of 1-6 tepals; carpellate flowers with I ovary; andfruit drupelike. TYPE GENUS: Sparganium. Engler grouped Sparganiaceae with Typhaceae and Pandanaceae in thePandanales, placing the order at the beginning of the monocotyledons. Thatthese families are primitive is an idea that is no longer tenable (indeed, inWettstein's system they close the monocotyledons). Their affinities, how-ever, remain partly unsettled. Sparganiaceae and Typhaceae, now generallyconsidered to be the sole families of Typhales, are so closely related thatthey may even be confamilial (see below), but their relationship to Pandana-ceae is equivocal. One suggestion is that they are "very closely related toPandanales" and have "a common origin" (Takhtajan); another, that "what-ever similarity there is between . . . Pandanaceae and . . . Typhales reflectsparallelism or convergence, rather than inheritance from a common ances-try" (Cronquist, 1981; see also Hutchinson, and Thorne). (For further dis-cussion, see Briggs & Johnson; Cronquist; Harada; Mallick & Sharma;Sharma; and Takhtajan.) 'Prepared for the Generic Flora of the Southeastern United States, a project of the ArnoldArboretum currently made possible through the support of the National Science Founda-tion, under Grant DEB-81-11520 (Carroll E. Wood, Jr.. and Norton G. Miller, principalinvestigators). This treatment, the 88th in the series, follows the format established in thefirst paper (Jour. Arnold Arb. 39: 296-346. 1958) and continued to the present. The areacovered by the Generic Flora includes North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida. Ten-nessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Louisiana. The descriptions are based pri-marily on the plants of this area, with supplementary information about extraregional mem-bers of a family or genus in brackets [ ]. I am indebted to Carroll Wood and Norton Miller for their careful review of the manu-script and for other aid, and to the staff of the Lloyd Library, Cincinnati, for help in bibliographic matters. The illustration was drawn by Karen Stoutsenberger, under the su-pervision of Dr. K. R. Robertson and Dr. Wood, largely from material collected by Dr. Robertson. � President and Fellows of Harvard College, 1982. Journal of the Arnold Arboretum 63: 341-355. October, 1982.
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