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Story Time
In the coming weeks, Lloyd Library will feature a new story each week that comes from one of our historic children's books about nature. If you want to know more and want to introduce your children to something truly new and different, check out the Lloyd!
(click here for more information about the stories - for parents and caregivers)
Check out the New Coloring Book
The Cat-tail Flag
No plant adds a more decorative effect to the scenery along the margins of lakes and ponds than that which is familiarly known as the "cat-tail" or "cat-tail flag," though sometimes called the bulrush, and occasionally known by its botanical name, Typha.
The long, flat, straight, green leaves of this plant project obliquely upward above the water, on each side of the straight, smooth, cylindrical leaf stalk, crowned with the larger cylinder of the brown seed-mass. The grace of this in turn is emphasized by the smaller, more steeple-like stem that projects above it. The whole forms a charming study in a simple decorative design, the beauty of which artists have long appreciated.
The plant is equally interesting to the botanical student. From our present point of view it is very well worth while to pick off a little of the brown fuzz from the stalk and examine it under a simple lens. If you pull out a tiny bunch from a seed-head which has not yet begun to expand, you will see at first that the bunch consists of a great number of slender stalks, each of which has numerous small white hairs arising along its surface and lying parallel with it.
But soon after you have removed the mass to a table or the stage of a simple microscope you will see it gradually become fluffy, and it will soon occupy many times the space it did at first. Look carefully now and you will see that each of the little side branches instead of lying parallel with its stem is at right angles to it. On the tiny stem above these hairs is a little oval brown body which contains the seed. The stem mentioned is the stalk of the fruit, so that in this case the parachute is developed stalk below the ovary, instead of above as with the dandelion and other plants. Blow gently upon the fluffy mass and see how the seeds scatter.
You are now in position to appreciate better the meaning of the masses of "cat-tails" to be found by the side of nearly every pond. All through the winter the brown seed-masses project above the ice and snow, where they are visited by many seed-eating birds which peck the heads apart. Thus exposed to the air the tiny parachutes open, forming great fluffy masses that are taken up by the wind and scattered in every direction. Of course the vast majority of them will never be carried to places favorable to their growth, but a few are almost certain to reach the borders of ponds and swamps, were suitable conditions exist. If you attempt to estimate the number of seeds in a single head you will be convinced that if only one seed in ten thousand grows, the plant will be able to multiply rapidly.
In case birds do not peck at the heads, they finally are broken open by the action of wind and weather, and the similar way.
from Seed-Travellers by Clarence Moores Weed (1899)