The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Typha domingensis
Also called Southern cat-tail, Cattail, Lesser Reed Mace, Narrow Leaf Cumbungi, Southern Bulrush
Typha domingensis is a tall perennial marsh reed in the cattail family, Typhaceae, growing 2 to 2.5 m. It needs constantly wet soil or shallow standing water, and it tolerates brackish water better than most cattails.
Typha domingensis, known commonly as southern cattail or cumbungi, is a perennial herbaceous plant of the genus Typha.
It is found throughout sutropical and tropical regions worldwide. It is sometimes found as a subdominant associate in mangrove ecosystems such as the Petenes mangroves ecoregion of Yucatán. The Southern Cattail grows between 2.0 and 2.5 meters in length and has flat sheaths to protect its core. It thrives in marshes and ecosystems where the land has a similarity to wetlands. It can also survive in high salinity water sources, making it much more resilient than similar species to this kind of cattail.
In the Mesopotamian Marshes of southern Iraq, Khirret is a dessert made from the pollen of this plant. In Turkish folk medicine the female inflorescences of this plant and other Typha are used externally to treat wounds such as burns. Extracts of T. domingensis have been demonstrated to have wound healing properties in rat models.
Typha albida · Typha alekseevii · Lesser Bulrush · Typha ×argoviensis · Typha austro-orientalis · Typha azerbaijanensis · Typha ×bavarica · Cape Bulrush · Typha changbaiensis · Typha davidiana · Elephant grass · Typha ×gezei
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Typha domingensis by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
