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