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Gray's Sedge

Carex grayi

Also known as: Mace Sedge

Gray's sedge is grown for its fruit rather than its foliage: each stem ends in a single green sphere of inflated sacs radiating in every direction, an inch or more across, exactly like a medieval mace — which is where the other common name comes from. Those heads dry to a pale tan with their spikes intact, making this one of the few sedges worth cutting for arrangements. The plant itself is a substantial upright clump of wide, flat, bright green leaves, coarser than most garden sedges and better used as a single accent than massed. It takes seasonal flooding without complaint and belongs in a rain garden, a swale, or the wet edge of a shaded bed. In the wild it grows in bottomland woods and floodplain forest across the eastern states, in ground saturated in spring and merely moist by August. Sparrows and waterfowl take the seed, and it is a larval host for several satyr butterflies.

Family

Cyperaceae

Type

grass

Lifespan

perennial

Height

2–3 ft

Spacing

1.5–2 ft apart

Light

part shade, sun, shade

Soil moisture

moist, wet

Soil pH

acidic, neutral

Bloom

May, June, July, August

Bloom colors

green

Wildlife value

songbirds, larval host

Landscape uses

specimen, border, rain garden, naturalizing

Native states

AL, AR, CT, DC, FL, GA, IA, IL, IN, KS, KY, MA, MD, MI, MN, MO, MS, NC, NJ, NY, OH, OK, PA, SC, TN, VA, VT, WI, WV