And now, ladies and gentlemen, for your late-summer enjoyment, I am proud to present a plant that is common as dirt — and a member of the sedge family.
You may remember from your first botany class that “sedges have edges” — specifically, that sedges are grass-like plants that have stems that are generally triangular in cross section, so that when you hold one, you can feel the edges.
Every single flower of this week’s Mystery Plant is subtended by a cluster of wildly crinkly, brownish bristles, which together form a cottony brown fuzz amongst the developing flowers. Because of this, some people find this a very beautiful plant, and it has been used with some success in water gardens.
Grasses, of course, belong to a much different family — the Poaceae — and their stems are usually round (or circular) in cross-section, along with the rushes, representing yet a third family (Juncaceae). It turns out that for beginners, sedges, grasses and rushes can be notoriously confusing in the field, at least before they start blooming. In bloom, however, the members of these three important plant families are very easily distinguished, as their flowers and fruits are quite different among the three groups.
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The sedge family really is a large one, with many thousands of species, distributed all over the world — especially in the tropics and warm temperate regions, although there are plenty that prefer to grow in cooler climates. Sedges aren’t nearly as important as the grasses, in terms of human economy, and there aren’t many that are used as food sources, other than water chestnuts, which are the crispy corms of a certain sedge (Eleocharis dulcis, from Asia and the western Pacific).
This week’s Mystery Plant is a sedge, and