Plant
Common cattail
Typha latifolia
Also known as: broadleaf cattail
A tall (4–10 ft) wetland reed-like plant with distinctive brown cigar-shaped seed heads — one of the most-recognizable freshwater wetland plants in North America. Native to the continent. Edible roots, pollen, young shoots, and immature flower spikes (a long-standing wild-foods tradition). Common in Staten Island's freshwater marshes and pond edges. Important habitat for red-winged blackbirds, marsh wrens, muskrats, and amphibians.
Scientific
Typha latifolia is a 4–10 ft monocot perennial of freshwater wetlands across most of North America. Reproduces both by rhizomes (forming dense clonal stands) and by wind-dispersed seeds. The brown cigar-shaped seed head is a dense aggregation of female flowers that release thousands of cottony-tufted seeds in fall and winter.
Edible at multiple life stages: young shoots in early spring, immature green flower spikes (steamed and eaten like corn on the cob), pollen (used as flour supplement), and starchy rhizomes. Long-standing food source in indigenous Northeastern foodways. Modern wild-food foragers know it well.
In some habitats, common cattail can hybridize with the more-aggressive non-native narrow-leaved cattail (T. angustifolia), forming an invasive hybrid (T. × glauca) that can dominate wetlands and reduce diversity.
On Staten Island
Common at the borough’s freshwater wetland edges — [[mount-loretto-unique-area|Mount Loretto]]‘s freshwater pond, [[wolfes-pond-park|Wolfe’s Pond Park]], the Greenbelt’s interior wetlands, ditches, and slow streams. A short freshwater wetland walk on the borough nearly always includes cattail.
See also
Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.
- Member of: [[plants]]
- Contained by: [[staten-island]]
Sources
- USDA NRCS Plants Database: common cattail
- Wild-foods foraging references (Samuel Thayer, Steve Brill)
- Northeastern wetland-ecology documentation
Rooted in life.
What links here, and how
Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.
Nothing yet. This entry is currently one node away from the rest of the graph — links will appear here automatically as the wiki grows. Each new entity that mentions this one in its relations frontmatter shows up here.
0 inbound links · 2 outbound