Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center


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Aquatic and Wetland Vascular Plants of the Northern Great Plains

62. Cyperaceae, the Sedge Family

2. Carex L. -- Sedge

44. Carex rostrata Stokes ex With. -- Beaked sedge

Densely tufted from short rootstocks, also with long rhizomes; culms bluntly trigonous, 3-12 dm long, spongy-thickened at the base. Leaves strongly septate-nodulose, 4-12 mm wide; ligule about as wide as long; sheaths white-hyaline ventrally, conspicuously septate-nodulose dorsally, usually not ladder-fibrillose. Spikes unisexual, the upper 2-5 staminate, well above the pistillate spikes, the terminal one 3-6 cm long; lower 2-5 spikes pistillate or occasionally 1 or 2 androgynous, usually remote, cylindric, 1.5-10 cm long, 8-12 mm thick, the upper ones sessile or short-peduncled, lower ones peduncled, erect; bracts shorter than to somewhat exceeding the inflorescence; pistillate scales acute to awned, shorter than, or with awn, to longer than the perigynia. Perigynia ascending to ultimately spreading in 8-10 rows in the spike, yellowish-green to brown, shiny, subterete, ovoid, inflated, 3.5-8 mm long, 1/2 to 2/3 as wide, strongly 7- to 9-nerved, contracted to the slender smooth beak 1-2 mm long, the teeth 0.5-0.7 mm long, mostly straight; achenes trigonous, 1.7-2 mm long; stigmas 3, the style strongly S-curved toward the base. Jun--Aug. Wet meadows, marshes, fens, swamps, shores and springs; n and w ND to ne SD, also the Black Hills and Sand Hills; (Circumboreal, in N.Amer. s to DE, MD, IN, IA, NE, NM and CA).


Carex rostrata (from Hermann 1970).

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