Various Rushes
There are a variety of plants that grow in the wet ground at the bottom of the ditch running alongside our road, and I took pictures of a bunch of them on July 24, 2025. These include a family of plants that all look similar, in that they have a roughly cylindrical, hollow main stem, and occasional grasslike leaves branching off of them.
These are the plants variously known as “rushes” or “bulrushes”. It isn’t really practical to tell them apart based on the morphology of their stems and leaves (which are frankly all about the same), but their actual flower/seed heads are radically different, and so that is another story altogether.
For example, this one with the spiky seedhead growing part-way up the central stalk,
is likely to be Juncus_nodosus.
This next one has a seed head that looks more like certain grains,
and is likely to be the closely-related Juncus effusus.
This next one has a seed head that looks more like tiny pinecones on stalks,
and is most likely the Softstem Bulrush, Schoenoplectus tabernaemontani.
This one with what looks like a spray of seedheads coming out of the tip of the mainstem,
looks to be the Pendulous Bulrush, Scirpus_pendulus.
And this last one, with a dense cluster of scruffy-looking flowers partway up the stem,
is probably one of several similar-looking rushes in the genus Scirpus
I was honestly surprised to see such a wide variety of related-but-dissimilar plants all in a single habitat up here. We normally don’t get this level of species diversity, since plants are still recolonizing the area following the melt-back of the glaciers (which was only complete about 8000 years ago). I expect that the reason we have so many different kinds of rushes, is because they were both cold-tolerant and had windblown seeds. This likely made them the first plants to recolonize the new wetlands that the glaciers left behind, and so they have had all of the intervening 8000 years to get themselves established. All of these plants are therefore considered to be “Native Plants”, not invasives.