Three Non-Native Vascular Plant Species New to the Flora of Alabama

Abstract

ABSTRACT Three species of non-native vascular plants are reported here as new to Alabama. Persicaria capitata (Buch.-Ham. ex D. Don) H. Gross, Pistacia chinensis Bunge, and Sedum diffusum S. Watson are all species cultivated as ornamentals, and likely represent escapes from nearby plantings. Recent collections of three non-native species in Alabama represent the first documented examples of these taxa as naturalized elements of the state's flora. In each case, the taxon was not included in the most recent statewide comprehensive publications including the Annotated Checklist of the Vascular Plants of Alabama (Kral et al. 2011) and the Alabama Plant Atlas (Keener et al. 2021). Additionally, Weakley (2020) did not include Alabama within the known distributions for each of them, and searches of BONAP (Kartesz 2020) and SERNEC (2021) failed to locate any additional non-cultivated specimens from Alabama.