Sunday, September 30, 2012

Purple Loosestrife


Weather: Sporadic afternoon showers and cool mornings with high humidity; last rain 9/128/12; 11:51 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid perpetual roses, silver lace vine, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, African marigolds, zinnias.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallow, white and pink bindweeds, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primroses, snakeweed, native sunflowers, áñil del muerto, Tahoka daisies, heath, purple and golden hairy asters.

In my yard, looking east: Maximilian sunflowers.

Looking south: Floribunda and miniature roses, crimson rambler morning glory.

Looking west: Calamintha.

Looking north: California and Shirley poppies, nasturtium, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Snapdragons.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia, petunias.

Animal sightings: Small brown birds, geckos, bumble bees, other bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Weekly update: Purple loosestrife is to water what bindweed is to land: a tomato that will eat Chicago.

Lythrum salicaria has gobbled acres and acres of wetlands in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, changed the flows of water, displaced native plants including cattails and left little of value for frogs and salamanders.

The flowers are striking. I remember the first time I saw them about 1955 or 1956. My mother was driving some country road hunting for wild flowers when we saw a mass of rosy purple in what looked like a backwater from some creek feeding the Kalamazoo river. The late summer color against the browns of marshes and the never ending corn of the farm land was captivating.


Nurserymen responded to the threat of banishment as a noxious weed by developing sterile hybrids in the 1990's. Only, Kimberly Ottenbreit has found some of the cultivars produce seed that fertilizes the wild plant. Earlier researchers had found bees and other insects had already crossed the European import with native Lythrum species to enhance purple loosestrife’s ability to survive the wide range of new world environments.

Daniel Thompson and his colleagues believe the spread of the plant occurred in two phases. It grows along European estuaries, where sand was dug to ballast sailing ships. Edward Voss says it was already in Michigan in 1837 when Douglass Houghton surveyed the state’s mineral wealth. The perennial spread along the canals in New York and Ohio, but Thompson’s group believed dust sized oval seeds stayed within the region carved by the retreat of the last glaciers.

Things changed dramatically in the 1930's. Camille Rousseau found reports from 1865 that French settlers had brought the medicinal herb to Grosse Ile, near Montmagny. In the 1930's the reddish square stems suddenly began invading the pastures along the river’s flood plain. One possible explanation is that farmers were using more fertilizers whose run off enriched the shallows with nutrients that stimulated this plant at the expense of others. More seeds were produced that travel by water and can remain viable for at least two years.


It’s always tempting to blame the Saint Lawrence Seaway that opened in 1959. However, it had already spread along the lake shores of Michigan where lumber carriers had docked in the nineteenth century, with the earliest reports coming from Muskegon in 1879. The early ones had been sailing ships. It also spread through the inland counties like mine where small lakes had formed in glacial depressions. The change from manure to other forms of fertilizer in the 1950's probably did the rest.

Thompson’s team also reported it spread into the arid west in the 1930's with the promotion of large scale irrigation programs, though it wasn’t as aggressive as it was in the Great Lakes area. However, while it now is reported in most of the country, it is spotty in this area. The USDA map for New Mexico shows it in Bernalillo and Grant counties. In Colorado, it’s concentrated in the area from Denver north. Arizona is one of the few states with no reported colonies.


I hate to break the news, but it’s growing with the cattails on the south side of the Griego bridge here in Española. Lord knows how it got there, but there is no mistaking the tall spikes when you see them. I suppose somewhere someone ordered some plants from a nursery that allowed it to jump the mountains.

Notes:
Ottenbreit, K. A. The Distribution, Reproductive Biology, and Morphology of Lythrum Species, Hybrids and Cultivars in Manitoba (1991); cited by Urbatsch.

Rousseau, C. “Histoire, Habitat et Distribution de 220 Plantes Introduites au Québec,” Naturaliste Canadien 95:49-169:1968; cited by Thompson.


Stackpoole, Sarah. “Purple Loosestrife in Michigan,” Michigan Sea Grant bulletin E-2632, 1997.

Thompson, Daniel Q., Ronald L. Stuckey, Edith B. Thompson. “Spread, Impact, and Control of Purple Loosestrife (Lythrum salicaria) in North American Wetlands,” U. S. Department of the Interior, Fish and Wildlife Service, research report 2, 1987.

Urbatsch, Lowell. “Purple Loosestrife,” U. S. Department of Agriculture, Natural Resources Conservation Services plant guide, 2002 revision.

Voss, Edward G. Michigan Flora, volume 2, 1986.

Photographs: Purple loosestrife growing with cattails south of the Griego Bridge in Española, 15 August 2012.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Broad-Leaf Cattail


Weather: Morning temperatures dropping into the forties; last rain 9/13/12; 12:06 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid perpetual roses, silver lace vine, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, African marigolds, zinnias.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallow, white and pink bindweeds, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primroses, snakeweed, native sunflowers, áñil de muerto, Tahoka daisies, heath, purple and golden hairy asters.

In my yard, looking east: Maximilian sunflowers.

Looking south: Floribunda and miniature roses, crimson rambler morning glory, scarlet flax.

Looking west: Calamintha, leadplant.

Looking north: California and Shirley poppies, nasturtium, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Snapdragons.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia, petunias.

Animal sightings: Small brown birds, geckos, bumble bees, other bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.


Weekly update: If there’s water, so it goes, cattails will follow.

But, I’m still surprised to see them growing downstream from the Griego Bridge in Española. That’s not because this is the southwest. Typha latifolia grows everywhere from Alaska south on this continent. To the west, two species have evolved in drier areas: the narrow-leaved Typha angustifolia and southern Typha domingensis.

However, where I grew up in Michigan along the Kalamazoo River they did not grow everywhere. From the center of town upstream to the city limits the river flowed through what had been private land and then was a city park. The sides were lines with stone or concrete, the water flow maintained. Downstream there were factories that had polluted the water, so nothing grew.

It was possible to find the reeds if one drove along the county roads, but they only appeared in some places. At my summer camp, cattails did not grow around the lake, but only along the outlet. The plants prefer still waters; they disappear if they are disturbed too much.

In New Mexico in the early twentieth century, Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley reported they grew around Farmington and Shiprock on the San Juan in the northwest, and along the Rio Grande south from Albuquerque - not in this area. San Felipe once ground the shoots with corn meal and Isleta used the leaves in their thatched roofs, but up here, even though John Peabody Harrington found local Tewa speakers had three words for the plant - ‘awa, ‘awap’a and ‘awase - no one mentioned a use for it.

Cattails not only are not ubiquitous, they do not constantly reproduce themselves. The brown flower stalks contain both male and female flowers. While a great many will be fertilized, few will germinate. Instead, cattails expand from their underground rhizomes. Most patches are genetically homogeneous.

The seeds come back after volcanic eruptions and generally germinate better when they have been exposed to ashes. New plants appeared in the newly created soil after Mount Saint Helens blew in 1980. This is an early species in the evolution of flowering plants and survived by adapting to the changing environment with seed banks.

They were important to native Americans before there was corn. Frances Elmore found that among the Navajo the pollen had been used in many of their ceremonies, but was being replaced by corn. The Chiricahua, Mescalero and White Mountain Apache too were still using the pollen in the 1920's and 1930's in their ceremonies.


The use of the plant was deeply embedded into the lives of the Ramah Navajo. The reeds were coiled into round mats bound by narrow-leaved yucca and woven into square mats. Both were used as mattresses and hung in the hogans to protect them and their animals from rain and lightening.

More important, the square male mats were hung on the east side, and the round female ones on the west to bring rain. While the mats were being made, the weaver was not to cook, chop firewood or drink water. Some women even refused to make utilitarian baskets from the leaves for fear of lightening. When the mats were too worn for use, they were not burned, but set aside, because they were still medicine.

Similar uses survived among the Hopi, but in the ways such things do when their ritual significance has passed to another plant: the narrow-leaved species became the province of children who were given stalks to chew during the Kachina ceremonies performed to bring rain.

At my summer camp, we had a most superficial understanding of the native uses of the plant. We thought because we wrapped the ends of the tall, woody stems with something flammable to light our council fires, that the Potawatomi must have used them as torches. Instead, they used the silky hairs that form to disperse the seeds to line infant blankets, used the root to treat inflammations and sewed the leaves together to create waterproof linings for their wigwams.


Dan Moerman reports no one uses them for light.

Notes: Elmore, Francis H. Ethnobotany of the Navajo (1944).

Gucker, Corey L. “Typha latifolia,” 2008, in United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies, including Edward F. Castetter, Uncultivated Native Plants Used as Sources of Food (1935); Castetter and M. E. Opler, The Ethnobiology of the Chiricahua and Mescalero Apache (1936), Volney H. Jones, The Ethnobotany of the Isleta Indians (1931); Albert B. Reagan, “Plants Used by the White Mountain Apache Indians of Arizona” (1929) and Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Forest Potawatomi Indians (1933).

Robbins, William Wilfred, John Peabody Harrington, and Barbara Friere-Marreco. Ethnobotany of the Tewa Indians, 1916.

Vestal, Paul A. The Ethnobotany of the Ramah Navaho (1952).

Wooton, Elmer O. and Paul C. Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915, reprinted by J. Cramer, 1972.


Photographs: All taken 15 August 2012.
1. Broad-leaved cattails south of Griego Bridge.

2. Broad-leaved cattails in irrigation ditch next to main road in Española.

3. Broad-leaf cattail.

4. Broad-leaf cattail patch, where previous year’s plants outnumber this year’s blooming stalks.

5. Broad-leaf cattail in seed with down used for linings.

6. Broad-life cattail patch with river behind the green grasses at the back.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Ash



Weather: With the rain and generally overcast days, I haven’t been watering much; last rain 9/13/12; 12:21 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid perpetual roses, silver lace vine, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, African marigolds, zinnias.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallow, white and pink bindweeds, white sweet clover, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primroses, snakeweed, native sunflowers, áñil de muerto, Tahoka daisies, heath, purple and golden hairy asters.

In my yard, looking east: Maximilian sunflowers.

Looking south: Floribunda and miniature roses, crimson rambler morning glory.

Looking west: Calamintha, leadplant, David phlox.

Looking north: California and Shirley poppies, nasturtium, chocolate flower, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Snapdragons.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia; brought the petunias indoors.

Animal sightings: Blue bird, small brown birds, geckos, bumble bees, other bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Weekly update: Earlier this summer, my neighbor finally gave up on his globe willows that had been damaged by sun scald, and brought in a back hoe. Then, he told me, he bought some ash trees because he missed his shade.

I know the reason he bought them - they were left over from some construction project and at the end of the spring season, the local store who had procured them was selling them cheap to recoup its investment. They even delivered the things with their root balls wrapped in burlap and a good six foot across.

I assume they are green ash, although landscapers sometimes choose more exotic species. None are native to Rio Arriba county. Fraxinus pennsylvanica has escaped in Colorado. Farther north and to the east it likes wet areas.

In the past the ash was grown for fire wood. It’s European cousin, the common ash, will burn quickly and cleanly, even when green. Farmers there and in early Virginia cut the trees so they would regenerate from the stumps.

The combination of combustibility and regeneration gave Fraxinus excelsior mythic status: when hit by lightening ash trees burst into flame and then regrow. In the Icelandic Younger Edda, Snorri Sturluson recorded man was created from a tree wrenched from the earth, and that woman came from an elm. As the symbol of creation, yule logs were burned in the ceremonies that celebrated the return of the sun after the winter solstice.

The other reason the trees were coppiced is all ashes make good tool handles. White ash, which grows east of the Mississippi, may be used today for ball bats and cabinet facings, but in the west the Havasupai, Omaha, Pawnee, Cheyenne, Sioux, Winnebago and Ojibwa used green ash for bows and arrow shafts.

Whether because of its use in hunting or its general utility, wood from green ash trees was used to make sacred poles by the Omaha and Sioux. The Cheyenne used the ash to build the sun dance ceremony lodge, while the Omaha, Pawnee, Ponca, Cheyenne, Lakota and Dakota used the wood for pipe stems.

I don’t know if the ashes are a good choice: the members of the olive family are late to leaf, early to drop, and currently being attacked by pathogens. On the other hand, they can survive bad air and high winds and still grow a hundred feet tall. In Europe, they once believed the common ash acted as a lightening protector, taking hits intended for their homes. If that were an ash genus trait, that alone would be worth the price in late summer when storms aimlessly prowl the area.

Notes:
Gucker, Corey L. “Fraxinus pennsylvanica,” 2005, in United States Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, available on-line.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies, including J. W. Blankinship, Native Economic Plants of Montana (1905); Dilwyn J, Rogers, Lakota Names and Traditional Uses of Native Plants by Sicangu (Brule) People in the Rosebud Area, South Dakota (1980); Melvin R. Gilmore, Uses of Plants by the Indians of the Missouri River Region (1919); Jeffrey A. Hart, “The Ethnobotany of the Northern Cheyenne Indians of Montana” (1981); Huron H. Smith, Ethnobotany of the Ojibwe Indians (1932); and Steven A. Weber and P. David Seaman, Havasupai Habitat (1985).

Photographs: My neighbor’s trees, soon after they were planted, 23 June 2012; small fruit tree, possibly a peach, in the rear.

Sunday, September 09, 2012

Bindweed


Weather: Overcast much of the week, with water occasionally condensing into rain; last rain 9/7/12; 12:37 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid perpetual roses, buddleia, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, red yucca, rose of Sharon, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, Russian sage, purple garden phlox, single sunflowers, zinnias.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallow, white and pink bindweeds, white sweet clover, silver leaf nightshade, knotted spurge, prostrate knotweed, goat’s head, yellow and white evening primroses, pigweed, ragweed, Russian thistles, snakeweed, gum weed, horseweed, wild lettuce, Tahoka daisies, heath and golden hairy asters; buds on purple asters.

In my yard, looking east: Hollyhock, winecup mallow, large flowered soapwort, Autumn Joy sedum.

Looking south: Rugosa, floribunda and miniature roses, Dutch clover, crimson rambler morning glory.

Looking west: Caryopteris, Siberian and Seven Hills Giant catmints, calamintha, leadplant, David phlox, perennial four o’clock, sea lavender, Mönch asters.

Looking north: Larkspur, California and Shirley poppies, nasturtium, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Petunia, nicotiana, snapdragons.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Small brown birds, geckos, bumble bees, other bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.


Weekly update: Insidious, hateful, ruthless - those are the adjectives Agatha Christie reserves for one of her worst enemies, bindweed.

It’s a good thing I read her novels before I moved to New Mexico, because I knew the plants that looked so pretty growing by the roadside - and they are attractive from the car - were not to be trusted.

Of course, the member of the morning glory family doesn’t content itself with the roadside. If there’s a fence, it climbs. If there’s an abandoned corn field, it takes over.


If it can find a toe hold where a gardener, even the most assiduous, can’t get to it, it will.


It only takes one brown seed. They fall from the parent, get chilled in the winter, then wait. They’re patient. They can survive in the ground for more than a decade. The pink or white or pink and white flowers love dry conditions. You see some in the spring, but they appear everywhere in the heat of summer.

But most of the time, it’s not the seeds that spread. That one plant, sends out its white, fleshy roots sideways, and sends up new plants at a distance. Men take their plows and cultivators to it. That breaks up the lateral system in the top few inches of soil, but that plant has also put down a tap root that, if it gets a chance, get reach down much more than two feet. It doesn’t have to do that well to be below the level of a hoe or fork. Then, it recoups, and up it comes.


You want to try Round-up? Good luck. Clyde L. Elmore and David W. Cudney say chemicals are good at suppression, but not eradication. They probably can’t reach the deep little fragment that sends up growth looking for sun.

Starving it doesn’t work. The roots are particularly efficient at creating and storing reserves to see it through. The lower the root, the greater the food supply. Now is the time it’s building those reserves. The plants will be the weakest in the spring.

I had one appear a year ago April in a flower bed. Its first leaves weren’t exactly the arrow shaped ones I expected, but they looked suspicious. Every time I tried to pull it, it came back. It sent out an exploratory shoot beyond the bed that I sprayed. No effect on the parent. The more I pull and dig, the more it finds a new place to emerge, usually right next to the stem of a desirable plant so I can’t go after it as I should.


I’ve lived here now for more than two decades and this is my first problem. It’s one of the few noxious things that’s not growing in one of my neighbor’s yards. The nearest plants are several lots away, upwind, with several wood fences between. I’m assuming the plant came from something I bought that was grown with contaminated seed. That’s the other way it spreads. It’s not a native to this country, but was found in Virginia in 1739. Later, farmers on the plains blamed their Ukranian neighbors for bringing it. It’s a hitchhiker that steals water from its benefactors to make more room for itself.

Convolvulus arvensis is one of the few things that no one has found much use for. Dioscorides tried. He found a tea made from the seeds helped spleen problems. Unfortunately, Kris Zouhar says, he also mentioned that if you took it for more than 37 days, you became sterile.

Notes:
Christie, Agatha. Sleeping Murder (1976), Crooked House (1949) and Crooked House.

Elmore, C. L. and D. W. Cudney. “Field Bindweed,” University of California Pest Note, April 2003.

Zouhar, Kris. “Convolvulus arvensis,” United States Forest Service, Fire Effects Information System, 2004.


Photographs:
1. Bindweed blooming in the village, 22 May 2012.

2. Bindweed blooming on the farm road, 12 July 2012.

3. Bindweed taking over an abandoned corn field on the main road, 18 May 2012.

4. Bindweed growing inside a yucca plant in town, 6 July 2012.

5. Bindweed growing in the shade on the main road, 12 July 2012.

6. Bindweed coming up in my garden, 12 May 2012.

7. Bindweed growing in the sun in the village, 22 May 2012.

Sunday, September 02, 2012

Nebraska Sedge


Weather: Afternoon sun back to drying the ground; last rain 8/23/12; 12:56 hours of daylight today.

What’s blooming in the area: Hybrid perpetual roses, buddleia, bird of Paradise, silver lace vine, trumpet creeper, red yucca, rose of Sharon, datura, Heavenly Blue morning glory, sweet pea, alfalfa, Russian sage, purple garden phlox, single sunflowers, zinnias.

Beyond the walls and fences: Leatherleaf globemallow, ivy leaved morning glory, white and pink bindweeds, white sweet clover, silver leaf nightshade, knotted spurge, prostrate knotweed, goat’s head keep germinating, yellow and white evening primroses, bee blossom, pale blue trumpets, pigweed, ragweed, Russian thistles, snakeweed, gum weed, horseweed, wild lettuce, Tahoka daisies, heath and golden hairy asters; buds on purple asters.

The grasses are active. Ring muhly and redtop are blooming, as are some gramas. Barnyard grass, which never comes up where it’s wanted, is also blooming, as is the ever awkward quack grass. Next season’s cheat grass is emerging.

In my yard, looking east: Bouncing Bess, Jupiter’s beard, hollyhock, winecup mallow, large flowered soapwort, Autumn Joy sedum.

Looking south: Rugosa, floribunda and miniature roses, Dutch clover, crimson rambler morning glory.

Looking west: Caryopteris, Siberian and Seven Hills Giant catmints, calamintha, leadplant, David phlox, perennial four o’clock, sea lavender, ladybells, Mönch asters, purple coneflowers.

Looking north: Larkspur, California and Shirley poppies, nasturtium, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, black-eyed Susan, Mexican hat, chrysanthemum, yellow cosmos.

Bedding plants: Petunia, nicotiana, snapdragons, sweet alyssum.

What’s blooming inside: Zonal geraniums, aptenia.

Animal sightings: Small brown birds, geckos, bumble bees, other bees, hornets, harvester and small black ants.

Weekly update: I’ve had many visions of my garden, but never as a riparian meadow featuring plants that attract buffalo. However, I’ve somehow managed to get Nebraska sedge to grow.

Something looking like an iris or garlic came up in the drainage way at the base of the sloping front garden in mid-August of 2007. I left it on chance it might be a blackberry lily. Then the sheath divided and a grass head emerged.

I consigned it to my mental category called Johnson grass, meaning something unknown that has the potential to get very large and uncontrollably invasive.

The cycle has repeated itself every year. I note it comes up with a flat set of fan leaves that look like a desirable bulb


then pull it when it blooms. I usually notice the removed fibrous roots look like the radiating short white ones of onions.

This year, things changed. I had someone work on my driveway that went along that ditch. After he left, plants came up in at least three places along the gravel border where he worked. I thought new seeds could have come with the dirt - some of it came from the Velarde area - or in the tires of his backhoe - he works the area between Tierra Amarilla and Farmington. Or, he may have spread existing seed from the ditch plant.

It was time to know more. It was possible the plant could grow quite safely along the edge of the drive, or it could become a royal nuisance.

If it is Carex nebrascensis, and I’m never absolutely sure about identifications done from books, it’s unusual for it to grow from seed. The seeds are produced in protective sacs that need to be destroyed before the seed can germinate. Chris Hoag and his colleagues also found they had to treat the seeds with cold water for 32 days, and that it helped if there was something like peat moss dissolved in the water.

Once the seed has been stratified, Hoag suggests it needs to be kept wet, hot (90 to 100 degrees F) and uncovered for at least a week. Once the plants have emerged, they still need standing water, although fluctuating levels help.

This suggests the emergence of so many plants this year may have been the result of unique circumstances. Before he returned to finish the drive, I was watering the edges to counteract last year’s drought by putting enough water in the soil to plant some fruit trees. Then, when he came and shoved gravel around, he probably loosened the outer shells on already wet seeds. The post-solstice heat did the rest.

The fact no more may germinate doesn’t answer the critical question - what to do with the ones that have. Even though I pull at the ones in the ditch every year, they return in the same place, suggesting some part of the perennial roots survives and sends up new shoots.

Nebraska sedge is primarily a plant of Rocky Mountain wetlands, especially in the Ponderosa belt. In 1915, Elmer Wooton and Paul Standley listed the Cyperaceae as a Taos area plant. Today, the USDA map shows it growing from Rio Arriba to Colfax counties on both side of Taos, and down through the contiguous counties of Santa Fé, Mora and San Miguel straddling the Sangre de Cristo.

In those areas, it can form dense stands that are grazed by cattle, who, in turn, destroy the stands and make room for other vegetation. However, its spread is limited by its requirements for lots of water in the soil.

Next year, I’ll probably irrigate like I did this because I intend to put in more fruit trees. After that, I hope the trees will have adapted and I can return to my normal watering regimen. This means, it’s probably safe to let some of the plants go for a year or so, to see how they look, confident that the eventual withdrawal of water will limit their spread.


If not, it won’t be the first time I’ve spent time pulling out something I let grow from curiosity.

Notes:
Hoag, J. Chris. “Nebraska Sedge,” USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service Fact Sheet, 23 May 2006.

_____, R. Kasten Dumroese and Michael E. Sellers. “Perigynium Removal and Cold, Moist Stratification Improve Germination of Carex nebrascensis (Nebraska Sedge),” Native Plants Journal 2: 63-66:2001.

Wooton, Elmer Otis and Paul Carpenter Standley. Flora of New Mexico, 1915.

Photographs:
1. Female flowers on Nebraska sedge the second year it appeared, 23 August 2008.

2. Young plant in the drainage runoff ditch, 6 April 2008.

3. Base of one of this year’s new plants growing along the drive, 1 September 2012.

4. Roots and base of plant that was removed from the drainage ditch, 5 September 2010.

5. Male flowers on one of this year’s new plants with quack grass, 22 August 2012.

6. Same plant as #4, 5 September 2010, showing the alternating leaves and flower head just emerging from the sheath.