Chenopodium, Linn.

George Bentham & Ferdinand Mueller, 1870, Chenopodium & Dysphania, Flora Australiensis, London: L. Reeve & Co., pp. 157-165 : -1

2 CHENOPODIUM, Linn.

( Ambrina, Moq. , Blitum, Moq . (partly).

Flowers hermaphrodite or rarely polygamous. Perianth herhaceous, deeply divided into 5 or rarely 4 or 8 lobes or segments which are obtuse and concave or rarely acute and erect, scarcely altered or slightly enlarged after flowering. Stamens 5 or fewer, filaments filiform or flattened. Ovary globular or ovoid; styles 2 or rarely 3, usually united at the base. Fruit depressed or ovoid, partially or completely covered by the persistent perianth, pericarp dry, membranous, distinct from or inseparable from the seed. Seed horizontally flattened, or vertical and less compressed; testa crustaceous; embryo circular, enclosing a mealy albumen. - Herbs or rarely shrubs or undershrubs. Leaves alternate, fiat, entire toothed or divided. Flowers small, sessile in clusters, either axillary or in interrupted terminal spikes or panicles.

The genus is widely distributed over the globe, but appears to be really indi genous chiefly in temperate and subtropical regions, some species, including four of the Australian ones, probably of European origin, are amongst the most generally dispersed weeds of cultivation. Of the remaining eight Australian species one is also in New Zealand and New Caledonia, the other seven appear to be endemic although one of them is perhaps too closely connected with an East Asiatic one.

The precise limits to be assigned to the genus are as yet very uncertain. The last four species here include d, with the seeds all erect and the inflorescence axillary, are certainly nearly allied to the European Blita originally characterized by the succulent perianth, but recently extended to the majority of Chenopodia with erect seeds. The adoption of the latt er character entails however the assigning C. nitrariacea and C. Bonus-henricus to Blitum , a most unnatural combination, and leaves C. glaucum and C. rubrum , in which the seeds of some of the flowers are often erect, ambiguous between the two genera. I have therefore followed F. Mueller in reuniting them, at least as to the Australian species, and the very variable consistence of the fruiting perianth in C. carinatum and C. rubrum , leaves it very doubtful whether even the Linnean Blita, with their berry-like fruits, can be distinctly separated from Chenopodium.