Beautiful Creeping Cattails

Reader Contribution by Kenneth Rust
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Cattails (Typha species) are a frequently occurring plant member along the edge of ponds, lakes, and ditches. They have such a classic look in these settings that they are included in most photographs of an aquatic setting and represented in art as well. Even my seven-year-old daughter automatically includes them in her drawings of a pond.

They are a native plant and they provide some vertical display in a pond setting, but they grow fast and need to be managed. The brown seedpod at the top of the stalk is like a very compact dandelion, producing airborne seeds including a small tuft of material that keeps them floating indefinitely. I often joke with pond owners that one pod could repopulate all of Planet Earth with cattails, because there are approximately 250,000 seeds on a single cattail head.

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