Bulrush
Typha latifolia
Family · Typhaceae · Harmless
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The plant with the brown cigar on a stick, which everyone recognises and almost nobody can name. It only grows with its roots submerged, and means standing water all year.
Streams and ditches · Fields and pasture
Also known ascattail, reedmace
How to tell it
Long, flat, stiff sword-like leaves, and the dark brown cigar inflorescence that bursts into a cloud of cotton in autumn. Always with its feet in water.
What it is confused with
Yellow flag
Iris pseudacorus
Out of flower the sword leaves are confusable and they grow side by side. Yellow flag is toxic and fans its leaves from the base; bulrush has loose leaves and the brown cigar.
What it is for
Chair seats, mats and baskets across the Peninsula. The rhizome and young shoots are edible cooked, but the plant filters whatever is in the water it grows in, which rules out gathering from urban or farm ditches.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
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