Green Sheath Sedge Seeds (Carex feta)

Sedges can be enigmatic and inscrutable for many of us. There's such an expansive diversity of species that it can be a bit confounding not only to identify which one is which, but also to develop of sense of which one grows where, and why. Or, what makes one more or less desirable in a certain location. And, how specific sedges interact with the other plants and animals that they live among.

So with green sheath sedge, here are some of the basics most relevant to the native plant gardener or habitat manager:

• This is a legitimate wet feet sedge (not like Chamisso sedge that can stand a bit of dry ground). Green sheath sedge enjoys both surface and sub-surface moisture. If your feet sort of sink into wet soil, green sheath sedge is going to be happy where you stand. It tends to hang out with the rushes.
• This sedge also seems to enjoy cooler temperatures and cooler water – but not extremes of cold. It shows up at both mid and low elevations, around the shores of cool water lakes and spring-fed marshes. Water quality may also be factor for this plant, it’s not something we tend to see in polluted wetlands.
• Green sheath sedge is green-green-green! A bright, true green. It’s quite beautiful. The seed heads arise on 2-foot tall-ish stems that roughly resemble common orchard grass at a great distance (with the seeds arranged in semi-alternating clusters in the stem), but if you know the green intensity of this sedge, you can start to discern it even at a distance. (And the more familiar with it you become, the more you see it out and about in the world).
• This plant forms loose, sparse tussocks (it is clumping but not densely so), but it can form large colonies, collectively becoming a dense planting.
• Green sheath sedge also has a tendency towards lodging – flopping over with stems becoming bent and drooping back into the soggy ground below (probably a good way to reseed itself). This growth form is sometimes off-putting to pedants who want to see every graminoid robustly upright in posture. And yet, animals see things quite differently: a flopped over sedge mass is where you make your nest if you are a redwing blackbird. It’s the cover you seek when you are a muskrat or meadow vole which is why marshes have beautiful harrier marsh hawks. Lodged sedges provide breeding cover for frog eggs, and concealment for garter snakes which use aquatic habitats extensively for both foraging and hibernating (yes, they often hibernate in and around water).
• This sedge is also a likely caterpillar host for various butterflies, including likely the Umber skipper (Poanes melane), Macoun's arctic (Oeneis macounii), and the Melissa Arctic (Oeneis melissa).

So there’s a lot going on with this particular sedge. Its range is mostly limited to the West Coast (from British Columbia to central California), and mostly west of the Cascades and the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada.

It’s a great plant for doing all the things you might want a sedge to do – making wild networks of fine root systems that stitch themselves together into a wonderful fibrous soil network – occupying lots of ground to reduce invasion by noxious things such as reed canary grass, etc. And yet, you might also just enjoy this plant for its vibrant green that broadcasts life to everything that encounters it.

Use it in rain gardens, bioswales, marsh restoration, and for guerilla gardening those mandatory, rectangular, chain link-fence surrounded eyesore stormwater detention ponds that get installed behind big box stores and next to nursing homes. It’s like a supercharger for wetland wildlife. 

Approximately 800 seeds (1.0 grams)