Typha, cattail, catninetail, punks, corn dog grass, bulrush, reedmace, get your veggies free!

Spring Cattails II

 These are companion paintings to my last post on  the "First Light Edge Lit Cattails" painting. That was  an oil on 18 x 24 inch (30cm x 61cm). These are  11 x 15 inches (28 cm x 38 cm) oil on gessoed panel for  Cattails II and 12 x 9 inches (30.5 cm x 23 cm) oil on linen covered panel for Cattails II.

 

Spring Cattails I

Now, for everything you ever wanted to know about cattails. Typha ('taifa) is a genius of about eleven species in the family of Typhaceae which are largely a Northern Hemisphere distribution.       The many common names in American English are cattail,      catninetail, punks, or corn dog grass.  In British English, bulrush or reedmace. The rhizomes are edible and evidence of preserved starch grains on grinding stones indicates they were consumed in Europe 30,000 years ago. Before you  rush  to harvest some for your table, plants growing in polluted water can accumulate   lead and pesticide residues in their rhizomes. However,  the rhizomes  have a protein content similar to maize or rice and can be made into flour.  The outer portion of young plants can be peeled and the heart can be eaten raw or boiled like asparagus, In late spring when they are tender the leaf bases can be eaten raw or cooked. In early spring the  sheath from the developing green flower spike  can be boiled and eaten like corn on the cob. Mid-summer pollen from the male flower can be used as a flower supplement or thickener.

Other uses are chair seating with the dried rushes,  feeding the seeds to cattle and chickens, thatching roofs, construct rafts and other boats. The down (seen in the above paintings) was used by the  US Navy as a substitute  for kapok in life vests, The down can be used as insulation in buildings, stems and leaves can make paper (hand made-decorative), Fiber from the stems can be used to make raw textiles and leaf fibers can be used as an alternative to cotton and linen in clothing. They are considered as a source of starch to produce ethanol and are considered to be a bio-energy crop. The seed hairs can be used as tinder to start fires. They are frequently eaten  by wetland mammals such as muskrats and birds used the seed hairs  as nest lining.

Sex and the Cattail.
The plants have uni-sexual flowers (biological term is monoecious) with the male flower forming a narrow spike at the top of the stem which withers once the pollen in shed. The dense, sausage-shaped spike is a large number of female flowers below the  male spike. The minute seeds are attached to fine hairs and when ripe turn into a cottony fluff  eventually dispersed by the wind.

The above is a condensation and paraphrasing of  information found  in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia if you are interested in more detail.