Cattails

At the corner of Rattlesnake Road and Cream Hill Road lies a sweep of open water, surrounded by reedy marshland. Historically, this kind of place had a bad reputation: bogs, swamps and marshes are breeding grounds for mosquitoes, as everyone knows, and everyone hates mosquitoes. And bogs offer a kind of irritating passive resistance - they're too shallow to swim in, too deep to walk through. Difficult to navigate, they're murky and secretive, full of darting creatures, thick reedy foliage and fine clouds of mud. We've never liked them. For a thousand years marshes have been routinely drained to eliminate mosquitoes, and make arable land. Recently, though, we've begun to learn the value in the natural hydrology system: bogs are loamy sinks, that allow water to seep deep into the aquifers on which we all depend. Now we've become more tolerant of them. And now we know that they're good, we can see that they're beautiful, too. Tall standing grasses edging quiet, dreaming water, a wide sheet of sky: still water has its own appeal.
Something that has always liked bogs is the cattail, which grows with cheerful abandon along the water's edge beside Rattlesnake Road. The common cattail
Typha latifolia , is a handsome plant, with tall, flexible, sword-shaped leaves that bend casually away from the root. At the end of a stiff round stalk is a thick brown cigar-like club, surmounted by a bare spike. Cattails are monoeicious, so each plant contains both male and female parts, and is self-pollinating. The plushy brown cigar is the female part of the flower, the bare spike, the male part. The male flower ripens early to an insignificant pair of stamens that quickly disappear, but the female part is robust and long-lasting, and gives the plant its common name.
Now, in the fall, the stalk is dry and limber, and holding one is oddly satisfying. It feels like a scepter, the brown club a modest, sold weight. It's pleasant to wave it, as though it were a sparkler, inscribing its journey through the air.
Actually, it is a bit like a sparkler, dispersing pollinated seeds like tiny points of light. The slightest touch on that dry plush will make it yield a finely shredded white substance, like a pillow leaking down. Fine white filaments radiate from the tiny seeds, like a miniature starburst. Floating airily on the breeze, these will drift for miles. They'll settle anywhere, but what they need is bogland - quiet, shallow water - and sun.
Unlike the non-natives - purple loose-strife, and phragmites - that threaten them, cattails offer habitat for lots of native creatures. They're a favorite of another local favorite, the red-winged blackbird. Red-wings, with their handsome graphics (neat red, yellow and orange bars at the top of the glossy black wings, like the insignia for an Italian rcing club) arrive early in the spring, nesting in cattails when they can. Red-wings' cheerful buzzing whistle, their bold pale gold eyes and the vivid sheen of their plumage remind us each year that spring is back, and the landscape is waking up.
And, like the answer to another of the ingeniouis natural puzzles that surround us, it turns out that red-wings don't hate mosquitoes like everyone else. In fact, they love them. Boglands, cat-tails, red-wings, mosquitoes - there's no end to it. Can it be that eveyrthing is good?
November, 2007