38 NEW YORK STATE MUSEUM 



the base, the flowering scapes rather tall, bearing numerous branches and 

 pedicels in whorls of three to ten, with very small, white flowers. Like 

 most other members of the Alismaceae, it inhabits shallow water or muddy 

 places. 



Sedge Family 

 Cyperaceae 



Sheathed Cotton Grass or Hare's Tail Rush 

 Eriophorum callithrix Chamisso 



Plate za 



The Cotton Grass may be regarded not so much as a wild flower as 

 one of the most ornamental of the sedges, since it is not a true grass. It is 

 an inhabitant of cold, mossy bogs. The stiff culms, forming tussocks, 

 rise eight to twenty inches above the surface of the bog and each culm bears 

 at the summit a solitary spikelet of small, perfect flowers; each flower with 

 six scalelike divisions, three stamens and a three-cleft style. Within the 

 scalelike perianth are numerous soft, white bristles, which become greatly 

 elongated in fruit, at which time the bog where the plant is growing becomes 

 beautiful with hundreds or thousands of these waving white plumes. 



Common in sphagnum bogs from Newfoundland to Alaska, south to 

 Massachusetts, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Flowering in early spring, 

 the white plumes being at their best in June or, in the far north, in July. 



The Sheathed Cotton Grass is but one of a number of related species 

 which add much to the beauty of our wet meadows, swamps and bogs in 

 summer. Perhaps even more abundant in the north is the Thin-leaved 

 Cotton Grass (Eriophorum viridicarinatum (Engelmann) 

 Fernald) with five to thirty nodding white plumes, and the Virginia Cotton 

 Grass (Eriophorum virginicum Linnaeus) , in which the soft 

 bristles of the mature plume are of a dingy brown color. 



