Apparently, there is a habitat they won’t grow in. I had BIG PLANS for a water garden in my sun-scorched, parched yard. I was going to grow cattails in one of those big Sterilite tubs you’re supposed to store holiday corpses in. I wandered through a neighborhood that had cattails next to the sidewalk and stuffed a couple of them into a plastic grocery bag. I carefully shucked a few inches off each cattail and wiped the seedy fluff onto four layers of soggy paper towels in an un-zipped Ziplock gallon-size bag. After waiting and waiting for the little green sprouts, I carefully laid them on the surface of a layer of wet yard clay in the bottom of the tub.
Way to go boingboing. Let’s encourage people to try this at home and help spread invasive species that are threatening our already endangered wetlands.
They are pretty blandly horrible tasting. I have tried roasting them with any number of sauces (traditionally, I believe you use butter) but I’ve never finished eating a whole one yet.
Bulrush isn’t Typha (cattail), it’s Scirpus (bulrushes and club-rushes). The Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland should be ashamed of themselves for polluting the namespace.
But reedmace is a perfectly cromulent name, IMNVHO much better than corn dog grass!
Cattails are native in my wetlands, not invasive, and threatened both by development and by competition from true invasives like purple loosestrife and phragmites. And Rusty isn’t encouraging anyone to do anything.
There is only one species of cattails that is native in North America and even most experts cannot distinguish it from exotics or hybrids on sight. They are just as problematic as phragmites, and posting stuff like this no matter the intention is going to encourage people to try this at home and it is highly likely the species they are going to try it with ARE the invasives.
If it’s any consolation, the fluff makes an excellent firelighter so maybe encourage people to do that with it? The rhisome is also edible and very high in carbs (although in the UK it’s illegal to forage for it).
This precise issue with vernacular names is the reason that the scientific adoption of Latin names occurred in the first place. The term bulrush can be used for either (indeed, people recognise Typha as bulrush more readily than other, less distinctive plants that we would not see the need to differentiate from rushes generally - even though it’s ‘wrong’).
That said, I still hold that buffalo are not buffalo - those are bison, or in Eastern Europe, wisent. Buffalo are the ones that hang out in water a lot. Yes, I know it’s inconsistent. No, I don’t care.
In some company, yes, because the BSoB&I decided to endorse a bunch of stupid Church of England children’s handouts that pictured “Moses among the bulrushes” illustrated with cattails, a historical and theological travesty.
That’s simply evidence you are a distinguished and clever mouse.
reedmace fluff has a flavor
like wooden woolen socks
it is bad
My green thumb is all about cacti. I have lots and lots of different varieties of cacti, most of whom were started from seed. What isn’t cacti, is short-grass prairie natives.
We used to collect them, soak them in Aqua Net so they wouldn’t pop, and sell them! I enjoyed those outings less after I walked through an enormous orb weaver’s web with the weaver sitting right in the middle. It ending up skittering off my cheek as I frantically brushed the web off my face. Dropped my collected cattails in the water, too. Not my best day as a kid.
