A Tisket a Tasket, a Muhly Sweetgrass Basket

Muhlenbergia capillaris var. filipes

There’s “just something” about ornamental grasses. Grass plants are intrinsically beautiful, and they keep on keepin’ on. About 50 or more native species are available commercially in Florida, used mostly in land restoration and often in wetlands. A few are backyard garden friends: Fakahatchee Grass, Dwarf Fakahatchee Grass, Chasmanthium (mostly north of here), and sometimes others. In the autumn around our area and beyond appear misty clouds of “Pink Muhly Grass,” aka Muhlenbergia capillaris. (Yes, it also comes in white.) Going beyond pretty in pink, let’s take a better look at Muhly. After all, it was the 2012 Garden Club of America Plant of the Year. Wooohooo!! It caught on big-time around the world, planted extensively in Europe and Asia.

https://www.koreaherald.com/article/2117357

Its natural range runs from New England to Central America on rocky sites or sandy flatwoods, prairies, and similar situations, mostly moist but not necessarily. As might be predicted in a prairie-loving species, being burned improves its next flowering flush. Some time ago in this blog I wondered why it is so colorful, after all, being wind-pollinated it needs no floral visitors. The key to that is probably unpalatability to pests and to grazers. The pink is possibly warning coloration—if you eat me, you’ll remember the tummy ache next time you see pink. The explanation may be, speculatively, high content of silica, and the species definitely is highly fibrous.

Photo by Jenny Evans

Highly fibrous you say? That ties to something else. Sturdy baskets. There are two, very similar, varieties of Muhly in South Florida: let’s call one the “normal” variety. The other is Muhlenbergia capillaris var. filipes, which differs mostly by having long awns (stiff threads) on the spikelets. Does “filipes” occur in our area? Yes, although with a popular ornamental species you always have to wonder about horticultural influences. In any case, filipes extends from Miami-Dade County northward to its favorite habitats: the coastal mid-South, in particular barrier islands from Florida to North Carolina. That is also the homeland to the Gullah People living there for countless generations dating back to the early slave trade era.

Courtesy Woody Hibbard

A tradition of the Gullah People, to this day and dating all the way back anciently to West Africa, is making beautiful and elegant sweetgrass baskets. You can buy them today, say, in Charleston, Mt. Pleasant, SC, or Hilton Head, and the nice ones can be as expensive as the time and artistry required to create them. They are made of coiled bundles of Sweetgrass (var. filipes) stitched together, usually, with fibrous strands from Saw Palmetto leaf stems.

https://gullahsweetgrassbaskets.com

Cyperaceae

Funny how half of what humans eat are grasses, more than that if you count livestock food. So what’s up with Sedges? There are many thousand of them too, and they look like grasses and make “grains.” Don’t we eat Sedges? Scarcely. Why not, and which do or did we eat?

Sedge grains (achenes) are very rarely eaten. Some peoples in extreme northern climates where the sedge genus Carex is common while other foods can be scarce, eat grains from a few species. More prominently and about as direct evidence as you can get for a “Paleo Diet,” there are Sedge grains from bulrushes in human coprolites at multiple U.S. caves going back almost 4000 years. Evidence shows them to have been prominent staples spanning a couple thousand years. Charred bulrush remains date back in Nevada some 12,000 years. (Bulrush rhizome starch was eaten as well as the grains.)

Why don’t you see Sedge grains much in human food? Well, they are smaller than the grass grains we eat, but those have experienced millennia of artificial selection to get big and starchy. Why did that never happen with Sedges? Speculatively, a couple reasons: 1. There were oodles of grasses alongside human evolution, and cultivated. Wheat has been in cultivation forever. Sedges are more marshy: not so front & center and vastly more difficult to cultivate, you know, in wetlands. 2. Grasses are relatively easy to hybridize, but sedges have very weird chromosomes that don’t pair up readily for artificial breeding. 3. Sedges are more likely to invest their starch into rhizomes than grasses are, not so prone to bulk up their seeds.

Thanks AI. (And do mind those parasites—flukes, unpleasant hitchhikers.)

More starch to the rhizome in Sedges? Well yes, that’s what gives them their (limited) path to the kitchen. Do you like horchata? Horchata in Spain is mostly made of a species we think of as an introduced weed locally, Yellow Nutsedge (Cyperus esculentus). Esculentus means “good to eat.” You see it around PB County, mostly in disturbed moist places. It likes where water collects in construction sites. The species is also called “chufa” or “tiger nut” when grown for its tasty tubers. After Spain, much chufa cultivation happens in West Africa, where they are soaked before eating, then used in varied ways from “soup to nuts.” A little bit is grown deliberately in the U.S. as wildlife fodder.

Cyperus rotundus, by John Bradford

Another weedy tuberous Sedge species around here is Nut “Grass,” Cyperus rotundus. Its tubers are less useful, being more loaded with aromatic stinkiness. King Tut liked Cyperus tubers, C. rotundus (in fragrances) or C. esculentus (as candy). They’ve been found in Egyptian tombs going back 6000 years. They were ground and mixed with honey. Sedge candy! Makes me want to try it, the “secret delights of Cleopatra bathing on the Nile” reawakened in Jupiter slogging in waders along the Loxahatchee.

Not being in Spain, or a Pharaoh, what sedge might I eat? Just the day before yesterday, I enjoyed an ice-cold can of Water-Chestnut Beverage, with W-C chunks similar to chunky bubbles in bubble tea. Water-Chestnut remains crunchy in stir-fry. It’s the corm (thick ground-level bulblike stem) of the Asian sedge Eleocharis dulcis. (Dulcis means sweet.) Sedges, as we know, are a pain to cultivate because of that proclivity for wetlands. Oh, that’s not a problem where you already grow rice in wetlands. You can rotate them, or intercrop them.

Eating “Water-Chestnut” is about as ancient as eating itself. In the Jordan Valley, archaeological remains (identifiable starch grains still clinging to stone-age grinding tools) date back some 780,000 years. That’s not a typo. That’s the Flintstones. But the “Water-Chestnut” in question is probably a different and non-sedge species, Trapa natans.

Eleocharis flavescens by JB

We have a few species of Eleocharis around South Florida, so do we eat them? No, but maybe “they” used to. The native Yellow Spikerush is related to Water-Chestnut, as Eleocharis flavescens. It has a smallish corm, like a mini W-C, hidden behind a broom of muddy roots. Remains of the genus turn up in North American archaeology, including over 12,000 years ago as charred remains at a hearth. There’s no telling if it was there as a “seed food,” or “tuber food,” or scraps from basketry or a similar purpose.

So then, if your idea of the way to enjoy wild plants is to eat them, Sedges aren’t the Florida family for you — unless you take a time machine back 3800 years to a Texas cave. But then don’t step in a coprolite!

Alternanthera philoxeroides

Amaranthaceae

An  evil scientist at Palm Beach State College takes over Lake Worth Lagoon with a swarm of aquadroids made with a combination of stingray, gator, and manatee DNA.   They pierce flesh, they bite with gusto, they graze on seagrass.  Far-fetched you say?  Maybe so to blinkered animal-o-centrists, but reality in the heartless world of green.   Fear Alligator Weed smothering the water from Florida to China, one canal at a time.    Resembling the Lake Worth Lagoon  Stinging-Gator,  Alligator Weed is a deadly combo of three species,  hybridized long ago and far away.    It retains the DNA of all three ancestors, three sets of paired chromosomes. 

The green Frankenstein is well armed for aquatic conquest with rafts of floating hollow stems, dangling root tangles mopping up nutrients  from the fertilizer-polluted waters, and regrowth from broken fragments.

That regrowth matters a lot.   If you have the DNA from three different species packed into one individual, how ever are you going to reproduce?   Those eggs and sperms just won’t be right.   Guess what, throughout its global conquest, Alligator Weed is unknown to make seeds.   Kinda ironic-eh?    One of the world’s most aggressive reproducers is sterile.   But blast it with a neutron laser destructo-beam (or a string trimmer)  and where you had one  you now have 100.  

If you want to dominate the Earth you must adjust as you go:   climate differences & stuff.     With that in mind, check out this USDA article about Alligator Weed taking hold in California.

The plant seems to be evolving (“altering its genetic makeup”) to expand northward.   Okay, but isn’t evolving and altering genetic makeup what the birds and bees do?    Today’s invader has no birds and bees.   And that may be where having DNA from three species shows up.   A Swiss Army Knife of DNA.   The Lake Worth Lagoon alligator hybrid can sting yer’ ass, chomp yer’ bones,  or eat some grass.   Maybe the Alligator Weed hybrid has DNA from one ancestor attuned to warmer water while DNA from Ancestor B helps in cooler canals.   DNA for every contingency. Or something very very roughly like that.  You get the idea.

[Oh yea, and by the way,  there are many naturally hybrid plants that do make seeds, and don’t aspire to take over the world….it’s just that AW is an extreme and fun case.]

Grasses: http://www.floridagrassesandsedges.net

John’s Sites and Blogs

In the pre WWII era botanist John Kunkel Small (1869-1938) documented the daylights out of South Florida when you had to get muddy, thorn-pricked, and heat-exhausted to earn your creds.    Not bad for a flautist in the NYC Philharmonic.

Today, for reasons unrelated to the blog,  I looked up Coreopsis leavenworthii (Leavenworth’s Tickseed) in JK Small’s 1933 plant manual and bumped into an odd little comment tacked onto the species description:  

“A hot infusion of this plant is used externally by the Seminoles in cases of heat prostration.”   

Generally “out there” are many reports on historical plant uses, many of them derived, hearsay, and third-hand.   And truth is, the ratio of modern confirmed benefits to reported historical uses has turned out to  be sorely disappointing despite enthusiastic efforts by researchers to mine for gold.     But Small’s non sequitur caused me a double-take, and his use of the present tense, “is used.”  sounds like experience rather than something he read.   He took an interest in the Seminole People of his era, which no doubt underpinned his observation.    Small did say “externally,” but let’s cheat a teensie and stretch that plausibly to “internally,” because Native Americans  beyond Florida reportedly used Coreopsis tea internally for many ailments.

As an aging botanist myself who has experienced “heat prostration” in a nasty way, I also wondered if Small had his own personal interest in  that Florida occupational hazard.  After all, he was basically a city-dweller whose scrambling through brush lugging plant press and camera under the Florida sun was an acquired taste.     Could there be anything to sipping Coreopsis tea against heat illness?   Happily and sadly, contemporary computer-based research sure is easy. So here is what online sources say on the possibility of Coreopsis against heat illness (which does not make it all necessarily true, effective, or harmless!).   Reportedly:

1. Coreopsis produces antioxidants, including that sunshine yellow flower pigment.  Heat illness causes excessive immune responses and vascular inflammation tamped down by antioxidants. Additional Coreopsis (phenolic) compounds likely reduce intestinal damage  and consequent self-poisoning associated with heat illness.
2. Tea made from Coreopsis causes sweating,  with evaporative cooling, although it is a reasonable bet (?) that the patient was placed in cool water.
3. Heat stress disrupts sugar metabolism.  Coreopsis extracts have been shown in modern research to resist blood sugar spikes.

So then, I’ll bet the Seminoles knew a thing or two about heat illness, and how to deal with it.   I’ll bet JK Small knew a thing or two about heat illness too, and had interest in how to deal with it.  

 (Personally I’d like to try it but have an absolute ban on ingesting wild plants, which are not binary “safe” vs. “toxic” .)

Last few days I’ve been exploring mostly native plants expanding through the mean ecological filter into urban habitats.   Not many country cousins succeed in town.

Out of many challenges (and opportunities)  to native urban expanders are “urban heat islands.”   A cool park beats hot times in the city.   That matters to plants and critters.   It also complicates assessments of climate change.   And you know what heat islands are hotter than hell?  Rocky railroad beds.    They can be more or less 40 degrees F hotter than surrounding areas on hot sunny days,  worse than a Publix parking lot. Not only toasty, but also stones instead of soil,  drained dry,  shadeless, stinky trains polluting past, and occasional herbicides.  No wonder almost nothing grows there.   I was hot-footin’ around the tracks yesterday marevelling at railroad rock dwellers.  There you find Euphorbia lasiocarpa (aka Chamaecyse lasiocarpa), native mostly to Mexico.

Try to look it up in the 1971 classic “Flora of Tropical Florida.”   Not in the book, because in 1971 it was grabbing a Florida toehold south of Miami, however it may have arrived.  And look where it was found first….a RR track, foreshadowing the next 20 years.  This is a species whose northward (and eventually east-west) expansion featured train tracks.  Gathering data from several museums, the earliest 15 records of the species in Florida are shown in the timeline below.

An observer might say, “trains are natural seed transporters,  expanding species distributions.” Sure, but I suspect a minor factor for this species.   An observer might say, “global warming could help a tropical species migrate northward/.”   Okay, but the blazing hot RR track bed is vastly hotter than whatever global warming is in play.

Euphorbia lasiocarpa appears to be at heart adapted to very hot, very dry, very rocky, very unshaded Mexican deserts.    I think the main reason I found it yesterday workin’ on the railroad is that for E. lasiocarpa, “the railroad bed is a little slice of home.”  That unique habitat IMHO extends the Euphorbia’s happy place into Florida where btw it has almost no competitors.

Grass site: www.floridagrassesandsedges.net

John Bradford links: https://tcbradford.wordpress.com/

The native plant community has lost a superb botanist, naturalist, and photographer.   And I’ve lost a 20-some-year collaborator and wonderful friend.  John Bradford passed away peacefully on April 24 after a spell of illness.  John was utterly unique in his razor-sharp knowledge of plants, photographic talents, enthusiasm for nature,.    And it wasn’t all greens:  his nature realm extended to birds, frogs, and a special warm spot for spiders.

John tackled the local flora shortly after relocating with his wife Dee from Grand Cayman to Jensen Beach in the 90s, his first steps being botany classes at the University of Florida Ft. Pierce.  After learning all they had to teach, the professors suggested he drop by Palm Beach State College because we conducted weekly native plant field trips. He took that advice and rapidly became an integral component of those excursions.   Then he proceeded to help us set up a small herbarium,  and started building a photo collection central to illustrating classroom curriculum materials.  That was just a beginning.

Not only did John contribute photos but he acquired a knowledge of botany on a par with professional botanists.   We turned out to be natural collaborators and worked jointly on too many projects to list, including wildflower guide booklets,  a grass and sedge website,  revision of a weed booklet, an online native plants class, a research paper on Butterworts, and plenty more.   He suggested starting the present blog to document our weekly fieldtrips.  Maybe 40 trips a year X 20 years.  John on his own developed website photo and video guides to most of the local  natural areas.   His knowledge and abilities exceeded those of many prominent naturalists, but he disdained self-promotion and did not enjoy public speaking, nor  did he enjoy writing despite being a fine author if coerced.  Like many highly talented people, doing what he enjoyed was the reward. With little fanfare, John’s photos appear in a lot of publications and websites.

John had an unusual bragging right.    Many people find county record plant occurrences.  Those may warrant sending a specimen to a museum.   A state record can result in a journal article.  National records are rare in the U.S.   John had a continental record.  We were working in Halpatioke Park in Stuart, and John had compiled a chart of useful identification characteristics for some local grasses.   He encountered a specimen that did not fit his chart.   My  erroneous reaction was, “shoehorn it into one of those species.”   In typical adamant fashion, John  contended that failure to fit was cause for action,  so we sent a sample to a specialist at the Missouri Botanical Garden who determined it to be the first finding of Steinchisma laxa in North America, perhaps a seed arrival on Hurricane Wilma.

This is not the place for an obituary, but some readers might be interested in knowing that John wasn’t all just nature and cameras.    Few folks know that in the Army he recovered and repaired disabled army tanks in Germany, and that young John was a race car driver,  pit crew chief, and scuba diver.   More recently, he hand-constructed artistic  wood-framed  stables and similar buildings for rural clients with such tastes.   And if you had any mechanical  or home maintenance problem, or a question about Formula 1 his advice was solid.  John Bradford was absolutely one of a kind, and speaking of kind, he was that as well.     He proved that brilliant talents with a modest ego can fill the largest shoes.  

In a separate blog  will appear links to John’s on-line legacy.

The blog today is not about Cypress trees, but let’s wade there first as a step into swamp tree shapes.   Back in 1987 Georgia biologist Howard Neufeld wrote a fascinating article about Bald Cypress and Pond Cypress.  His observation was that  Pond Cypresses tend to be taller (for any given trunk diameter),  to have fewer branches, and to have leaves along the branches (as opposed to toward the branch ends), and broader based.   By contrast, Bald Cypress is stockier, more branched with the leaves more concentrated toward the branch tips, and not broadened so much basally. 

As Neufeld saw it, the thinner, more-conic Pond Cypress was less costly to build (fewer smaller everything ),  less prone to sun stress,  and more drought tolerant (by having simpler and overall less  plumbing).   The more-conical shape allows nice even filtered light deeper into the tree, and allows the lower branches good illumination.   Neufeld interpreted pond cypress to have evolved frombig domineering muscular bald cypress as a lighter nimble cousin in changing drier habitats, as opposed to competing massive single-species stands in plenty of water.

Thus inspired, as a semi-swamp dweller, today I was messing around in a swamp near the southern limit of the beautiful Loblolly Bay sharing its cottonmouths with large Dahoon Hollies.   Both species rise up above the dense swamp canopy, and when the Hollies and Bays get above the lower canopy  their shapes contrast, reminiscent of the Cypress situation.   Dahoon Holly is the “Bald Cypress” copycat, comparatively hunky, highly branched, and  irregular in shape.   

To the point!, Loblolly.

Loblolly Bay rises like Space-X, pointed and conic.    It seems to punch aggressively through the understory with one thought: “get above shade”  undistracted.  So purposeful!   And when it achieves that purpose, its base can broaden and expose those big glossy leaves to photosynthesis.    The Holly does ok too in its own more cautious fashion:   it tilts this way, then tries another, investing in multiple trunks and branches at all angles,  experimenting,  and exploring obstacles,  competitors,  sunspots, openings, and shadows.   

Sort of resembles human affairs.  Rush brashly  to the goal, and you might win with luck in  an ideal place and time.   On the other hand, if you bob and weave you might win in diverse suboptimal places and times.  Wonder if the tree shapes have anything to do with Loblolly Bays living confined to a few particular habitats,  Dahoon Holly wangling into more diverse circumstances, even though their overall geographic ranges are the same.

Fun fact:   Loblolly Bay is in the tea family and Dahoon Holly is an historical source of yaupon teas. 

Different Styles of Swamp-Dwelling:   Straight to the Point or Hedge Your Bets

The blog today is not about Cypress trees, but let’s wade there first as a step into swamp tree shapes.   Back in 1987 Georgia biologist Howard Neufeld wrote a fascinating article about Bald Cypress and Pond Cypress.  His observation was that  Pond Cypresses tend to be taller (for any given trunk diameter),  to have fewer branches, and to have leaves along the branches (as opposed to toward the branch ends), and broader based.   By contrast, Bald Cypress is stockier, more branched with the leaves more concentrated toward the branch tips, and not broadened so much basally. 

As Neufeld saw it, the thinner, more-conic Pond Cypress was less costly to build (fewer smaller everything ),  less prone to sun stress,  and more drought tolerant (by having simpler and overall less  plumbing).   The more-conical shape allows nice even filtered light deeper into the tree, and allows the lower branches good illumination.   Neufeld interpreted pond cypress to have evolved frombig domineering muscular bald cypress as a lighter nimble cousin in changing drier habitats, as opposed to competing massive single-species stands in plenty of water.

Thus inspired, as a semi-swamp dweller, today I was messing around in a swamp near the southern limit of the beautiful Loblolly Bay sharing its cottonmouths with large Dahoon Hollies.   Both species rise up above the dense swamp canopy, and when the Hollies and Bays get above the lower canopy  their shapes contrast, reminiscent of the Cypress situation.   Dahoon Holly is the “Bald Cypress” copycat, comparatively hunky, highly branched, and  irregular in shape.    Loblolly Bay rises like Space-X, pointed and conic.    It seems to punch aggressively through the understory with one thought: “get above shade”  undistracted.  So purposeful!   And when it achieves that purpose, its base can broaden and expose those big glossy leaves to photosynthesis.    The Holly does ok too in its own more cautious fashion:   it tilts this way, then tries another, investing in multiple trunks and branches at all angles,  experimenting,  and exploring obstacles,  competitors,  sunspots, openings, and shadows.   

Dahoon, exploring its options

Sort of resembles human affairs.  Rush brashly  to the goal, and you might win with luck in  an ideal place and time.   On the other hand, if you bob and weave you might win in diverse suboptimal places and times.  Wonder if the tree shapes have anything to do with Loblolly Bays living confined to a few particular habitats,  Dahoon Holly wangling into more diverse circumstances, even though their overall geographic ranges are the same.

Fun fact:   Loblolly Bay is in the tea family and Dahoon Holly is an historical source of yaupon teas.