Still Here: Weird and Familiar Eastern Gamagrass

When I first saw the flowering body of eastern gamagrass at a community garden in Bush Terminal, I was reminded of many things at once, and while some things hit close, nothing hit home. Its flowers are about the length of a hand, three-pronged and scaly, textured like a snake or a grasshopper’s abdomen, but with the overall effect being a deboned, declawed sea serpent’s foot. The prongs are stamens, and they have deep burgundy pollen-containing fringe that would look at home on a purse from the ’70s or with Victorian funerary attire.

On my way home from that encounter, I rode my bike past a deli on the corner of 44th Street and Third Avenue. There was a row of corn growing out of white paint buckets. I saw the erect, plumed inflorescence that each plant wore proudly on its crown. I am from the Midwest and have encountered enough cornfields to know what corn looks like before it becomes something you eat. Suddenly eastern gamagrass started becoming familiar.

Native grasses support a lot of wildlife, and so anyone who tends to a wildlife-friendly native plant garden always has a Rolodex of grasses on the brain when the perennial question of what will we plant next comes up. Little bluestem, northern sea oats and purple love grass are all common in a native plant garden. But grasses are everywhere, and many will show up in a garden unannounced because that’s what plants do. When a plant shows up in the garden at Bush Terminal, as long as it’s not mugwort, nut sedge or bindweed — all introduced species that create monocultures and subsume ecologically beneficial plants — there’s a strong chance it will get to stay, at least for a while.

That’s how I met eastern gamagrass, Tripsacum dactyloides, which also happens to be distantly related to corn. It grows next to a fence where it went unnoticed until midsummer. Also near the fence, and everywhere else, is nut sedge. Its bright green blades are narrow and have no flop; they are always at attention. Though it seeds and grows tenaciously, nut sedge is pretty easy to pull, especially if you get it while it’s small.

When I first saw eastern gamagrass, I knew it wasn’t nut sedge. Its leaves are a gentler green. A crayon manufacturer might label it lily pad green. It was also not small. Its much longer, broader leaves arched gracefully, and the plant stood almost as tall as my waist, with a sentient-looking inflorescence that looked like it might crawl up my arm and maybe even under my skin or into my ear and take command of my cerebral cortex.

It wasn’t always like that. Earlier in the summer, it looked like a clump of overgrown lawn — like Kentucky bluegrass on steroids. It was too thick and tall to be hacked with a mower, but it didn’t call too much attention to itself. A few weeks later, it was a different situation. I was weeding with another volunteer, and we consulted our plant ID apps, expecting to be told we had a beast that clones itself with an underground root system that spreads twenty feet out and down, with seeds that have a half-life of a hundred years — something whose only biological control is a giant sloth from another continent that is extinct, by the way.

But our apps bore good news that day. It doesn’t always happen that an unknown plant is exactly the kind of plant you want in your garden, but this was one of those times. Eastern gamagrass’s natural range includes the eastern half of the United States, all the way down to Paraguay — which is interesting because the bobolink, a migratory bird that nests in northern grasslands, ranges that far as well and includes grains in its diet.

Eastern gamagrass is also a popular crop for cattle, but before that it was part of a buffet of grasses that supported herds of millions of bison. At Bush Terminal, birds will not be intimidated by its inflorescence and will enjoy the scales after they ripen into kernels. They may use the dense foliage as cover or even a nesting site. I like to imagine a migrating bobolink stopping for a rest in Bush Terminal and spotting the eastern gamagrass. Perhaps it will recognize something familiar and grab a bite to eat before journeying onward.