But by late spring, it's a lush place full of dappled sunlight and shifting shadows.
Sedge meadows form in bottomland floodplains of fairly sizable creeks. The periodic flooding keeps woody undergrowth to a minimum. This meadow is in the floodplain of Lick Creek. It's moist all year and downright squishy during rainy seasons.
The meadow is criss-crossed by dozens of water channels and small oxbow "lakes." These represent parts of the former paths of Lick Creek and its tributaries. In the dry season, they are mostly empty and paved with fallen leaves.
During the wet season, all of the meanders and oxbows hold water.
A few of the larger oxbows at the bottom of the sedge meadow hold water year round.
This is a good place to find duckweed, watermeal, knotweed, aquatic grasses...and snakes.
Due to the wetland nature of the sedge meadow, we have acquired a new set
of canopy
plants. The oaks are a bottomland variety of Post Oak. Winged Elm is
replaced in
lowland areas by this tree, Cedar Elm or Ulmus crassifolia, which
prefers wetter
conditions.
Cedar elm has very rough, round-tipped leaves in contrast to the smooth,
pointed leaves
of Winged Elm. This elm flowers and fruits in the fall, making it even
easier to tell the
two apart.
Most of the carpet here is made up of Cherokee Sedge, Carex
cherokeensis. This
is about as close to a monostand as you will find in nature. Separate
male and female
flowers are borne in nodding "spikelets." Most owners of sedge meadow
land ruin it in a
short time by overgrazing. Sedges don't have the nutritional content of
grasses nor do
they recover from grazing as well as grasses. This is one of the nicest
sedge meadows in
the Brazos Valley.
There are a few grasses mixed with the sedges. Inland Sea Oats,
Chasmanthium
latifolium, has graceful arching panicles of wide, flat spikelets.
We also find
Canadian Wildrye and Autumn Bluegrass (which blooms in the spring.)
One of the most interesting plants in the sedge meadow is White
Crown-beard or Frost-
weed (Verbesina virginica.) The plant is not much to look at, and
the flowers are
sort of a dirty white. If, however, a sudden sharp freeze follows warmer
weather, the
plant shows how it gets its name. The sap freezes and ruptures the stem.
It seeps out and
freezes as it does, hardening into thin, fragile, transparent wings of
ice that swirl around
the plant. There is a lot of Frost-weed here, and when this happens, it
looks as if the
whole meadow has been swathed in cobweb or angel-hair. This rare sight
is well worth a
frigid hike.
Another resident of the sedge meadow is a summer-blooming thistle,
Cirsium
engelmannii, which looks somewhat like the spring blooming Cirsium
texanum. Some of the plants are upwards of six feet tall.
There are also some interesting vines here. Trumpet Creeper, Campsis
radicans,
climbs to great heights in some of the trees.
The stems can grow to rival the trunks they grow on. It's a very
aggressive plant that
frequently escapes control in home landscape settings.
Here is a small Trumpet Creeper at the start of its career, hanging on
with dozens of aerial
rootlets.
The flowers are bright orange-red and trumpet shaped. Sadly, most of the
blooms are
high in the canopy; often all one sees is fallen corollas at the base of
some tree.
Hummingbirds just love these flowers.
Something else readily found in the sedge meadow is Green Ash,
Fraxinus
pennsylvanica. The seedlings are easy to spot; the adults are sort of
nondescript.
