About

Eriophorum angustifolium, commonly known as common cottongrass or common cottonsedge, is a species of flowering plant in the sedge family, Cyperaceae. Native to North America, North Asia, and Europe, it grows on peat or acidic soils, in open wetland, heath or moorland. It begins to flower in April or May and, after fertilisation in early summer, the small, unremarkable brown and green flowers develop distinctive white bristle-like seed-heads that resemble tufts of cotton; combined with its ecological suitability to bog, these characteristics give rise to the plant's alternative name, bog cotton.

Eriophorum angustifolium is a hardy, herbaceous, rhizomatous, perennial sedge, able to endure in a variety of environments in the temperate, subarctic and arctic regions of Earth. Unlike Gossypium, the genus from which cotton is derived, the bristles of E.

Where it grows

Eriophorum angustifolium is native to the Northern Hemisphere, and distributed across Eurasia, North America and the British Isles, where there is open bog, heath, wetland and moorland, with standing water and calcareous peat or acidic soil. It can survive in the Subarctic and Arctic, and is found in Alaska, Finland and Greenland as far north as 83° N. The British botanist William Turner Thiselton-Dyer recorded E. angustifolium in the South African Republic in 1898.

Uses

Eriophorum angustifolium seeds and stems are edible and are used in traditional Native American cuisine by Alaska Natives, Inuit and Inupiat people. The leaves and roots of E. angustifolium are also edible and, because of their astringent properties, used by the Yupik peoples for medicinal purposes, through a process of decoction, infusion or poultice, to treat ailments of the human gastrointestinal tract, and in the Old World for the treatment of diarrhoea. In abundance, E. angustifolium can grow with enough density to disguise wetland and bog. Consequently, it may be used as a natural indicator of areas which are hazardous and to avoid travelling through. Attempts to make a cotton-like thread from the hairs of the plant's seed-heads have been thwarted by its brittleness, but it has been used in the production of paper and candle wicks in Germany, and was used as a feather substitute in pillow stuffing in Sweden and Sussex, England. In Scotland, during World War I, it was used to dress wounds.

Other Eriophorum plants

Northland cottonsedge · Arctic cottongrass · Chamisso's cottongrass · Slender cottongrass · Broad-leaved cottongrass · White cottongrass · Fewnerved cottongrass · Tussock cottongrass · Tawny cottongrass · Thinleaf cottonsedge · Cottongrass