The Independent-News, Volume 100, Number 6, Walkerton, St. Joseph County, 6 September 1973 — Page 17

The overlooked cattail

Head out on any highway and if you observe the roadside botany, within a short time you’ll see a cluster of cattails. The cattail somehow’ has gotten a bad press, and it’s a shame! Its brown flowers in cylindrical terminal spikes are beautiful! It served as potatoes for the red man when food was scarce, and our great grandfathers used it many times as a torch to light his way. Bibles were read by pioneer parents using cattail torches. The cattail has many folklore names: Marsh beetles, marsh pestles, bulls-eggs, candlewick and great seed mace. In England the roots are boiled in early spring and called Cossack asparagus. My grandmother, who lived in Kinyon Settlement, now a forgotten segment of Washington County, Illinois, had a very pleasing mantel decoration in the “sitting room” of the old log farm house. It was an ancient corn likker brown jug brought from the Carolinas. Into its mouth she pushed as many slender cattails as the jug opening would permit. Not so long ago I walked into a local home, distanctly far removed from a log cabin, and there as part of the fireplace decoration was a piece of crockery with the same type of cattail decoration. Incidentally, the cattail is at its peak in mid-July, a reminder the summer is fleeting and autumn w’ill soon be here. Although the cattail, down through the centuries, has never been associated with allergies, it has suffered from a very indifferent public. This reporter is making rather a humble, belated effort to correct this fact. The buttercups, the daisies, the asters, even wild mustard and parsnip dotting the roadside in profusion, all get their share of Ahs and Ohs! But rarely is the ancient cattail glorified even a wee bit. It seems unfair. The cattail has a long history that outfocuses many of its more publicized contemporaries. Even in prehistoric days, the cattail was a model for rude drawings on cliffsides. The plains Indians used the roots for food, a starchy dish that resembled our owm mashed potatoes. Yellowed journals inform us that the settlers in Virginia made a succulent soup by boiling the young blossoms. Pioneer families used the long stems as candle molds, and Indian squaws, just as solicitous for their babies as young mothers today, plucked the soft down to line their papoose boards for baby’s comfort and warmth. If you’re old enough to remember some of the torchlight parades that usually heralded

some presidential candidate, when cattails were dipped in kerosene (coal oil then, my dear sir!) and used for torches, you’ve been drawing social security checks for some time. Botanically, the cattail is an unusual plant. It is a child of the wind and thus propagates

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itself. One cattail head produces as many as 175 million pollen grains which are carried on the breeze to fertilize the pistils. Cattails stand in swampy places like inverted exclamation points. As the summer’s end approaches, the chocolate-

brown, cylindrical heads turn deeper-hued. Recently this reporter picked up a jar of pink jelly in a local supermarket that was made, of all things, of corncobs! But this is nothing stupendous, really. The Indians made jelly out of the cattail root long be-

by Grover Brinkman

fore the supermarkets were born. Too bad the cattail has had a bad press. With the right public relations men exploiting it, the cattail might still turn into a botanical wonder.