About the Slender Sedge

Description

• Slender sedge is a perennial plant with long, narrow leaves that surround flowers on arching stems 12- to 30-inches tall. The female flowers have white stigmas, the part of pistils that receive pollen, and grow higher on the stem than the male flowers with light-yellow stamens. As the plants mature, both flowers turn various shades of brown, and the male flowers leave behind scales along the stems, as they fall after pollinating the females.

Geographic Areas of Growth

• Slender sedge grows in many areas of the Northern Hemisphere. In the United States, it is most prevalent in Utah’s Uinta Mountains, most areas of Montana, southeastern Idaho, eastern Washington and in the central region of Yellowstone National Park.

Growth Environment

• When beaver ponds are abandoned, lake basins lose water and turn into swampy bogs and large potholes in the wild are left unfilled, sedge typically takes over and thrives on the peat that accumulates on the surface of shallow puddles and in the saturated soil along the banks of dwindling lakes, streams and rivers. It occasionally grows on floating mats of peat. If the dried-up areas are replenished by rain or floods, most types of sedge survive the influx of water.

Management

• Prolific growth of slender and other sedge types is hard to control by burning due to the excessive moisture in the soil. Sedge plants growing on floating peat islands can sometimes be burned if the islands are exposed to sun for extended periods. If drought dries up the beds of the faltering bodies of water enough to make them semisolid, wild and domestic animals graze on sedge and trample the roots, although their hooves usually damage the solid earth on the perimeters of the water bodies. The ground is typically too wet to support heavy equipment, so conventional mechanical weeding methods are impractical. Heavy equipment use is also discouraged because it disrupts the organic components in the soil where sedge grows.