THE SEDGES 



^ I 'HE sedges { Fainily Cypcraccac) , are grasslike plants but 

 easily distinguished from the true grasses by the follow- 

 ing characteristics : The culms are solid, pithy, cylindrical, 

 trigonous or flattened ( Grass culms by contrast are mostly hol- 

 low, and cylindrical). The sheaths are not open lengthwise 

 opposite the leaf blade and tightly enclose the culm. The spikes 

 are simple or compound, and mostly subtended by leaflike 

 bracts which are sometimes longer than the culm. The spike- 

 lets are one to many flowered, each flower subtended and some- 

 times embraced by a single short, herbaceous or scarious bract 

 or scale, the most characteristic mark of -the family. The fruit 

 is an achene, trigonous, lenticular or plano-convex. In the 

 g'enus Carcx only, it is enclosed in an herbaceous sac called the 

 perigynium. 



Like grasses they grow in all kinds of soil from the wet- 

 test to the driest, in the densest shade and on the open prairie, 

 from the tropics to the limits of vegetation in latitude and alti- 

 tude. Many are especially hardy and flourish in the latitudes 

 where grasses are few and start in the spring when pastures 

 are still bare affording short feed for stock at a time when it 

 is most needed. On the average they are not as valuable for 

 hay and pasturage as the grasses, which is plainly shown by the 

 fact that man has never found one that seemed worthy of 

 cultivation, while the grasses constitute the most valuable 

 famil}^ of plants for the use of man in civilization. 



Nevertheless the sedges form, in a stock raising state like 

 Nebraska, a not unimportant part of both hay and pasturage 



