Article by Abigail Pedlow
What do you call the tall wetland plant topped with a brown spike that turns to fluffy seeds? The Americans (and the Canadian in our office) call them Cattails and our UK common one has the scientific name Typha latifolia.
So; Bulrush or Reedmace?
and,
what do you call the less well-known wetland plant with a tall rounded stem with a brown flower coming out of the side (think of a big rush) that has the fantastic scientific name Schoenoplectus (it used to be Scirpus) lacustris. You need a book that covers the rushes for this one.
So; Bulrush or Club-rush?
For a little experiment I looked up the two plants in a few books to see what the consensus was: The earliest books from the early 60s had S. lacustris as Bulrush and T. latifolia as Reedmace, then in the mid 60s through to the 80s there’s a bit more uncertainty. One book (Keble-Martin) sits firmly on the fence with Bulrush as the first choice name for both T. latifolia and S. lacustris! Recent publications have firmly had T. latifolia as Bulrush and S. lacustris as Club-rush.
Richard Mabey in his Flora Britannica states: “Bulrush,
T. latifolia.
The name bulrush represents a rare victory for common English
over botanical protocol. Up until the 1970s the fat brown busbies
that everyone knows as bulrushes (or sometimes more graphically
as “bull-rushes”) were called “reedmace”
by botanists who reserved the name bulrush for S.
lacustris. The mix up is normally traced to Sir Lawrence
Alma-Tadema’s picture of Moses in the bulrushes in which
the infant is encased in a basket plainly hidden amongst
Typha. (Properly it should have been papyrus.) Generations
of children thus saw confirmed in their Sunday School books a
plant name which they probably used anyway.”
I thought I’d have a look at this famous painting and what I found on the internet was ‘The Finding of Moses’ painted in 1904 by Sir A-T. It shows a procession with (presumably) the Pharaoh’s daughter carried on a palanquin and next to her, carried by two female slaves, baby Moses in his basket. The basket is decorated with tassels that I eventually managed to work out were White Water-lily flowers on stalks.
Not a Typha in sight and the details of the picture I was looking at weren’t really what Richard Mabey describes; the baby wasn’t at all hidden - he was being processed!
I suspect that there is however a well-known picture - perhaps in a children’s illustrated bible that shows baby Moses hidden in a bed of T. latifolia. But I haven’t been able to track that down.
I also had an interesting time on a website that has lots of different versions of the bible on it. The basket or ark baby Moses was put in was made out of bulrushes, papyrus, wicker, reeds or rushes and it was daubed with bitumen, pitch, tar, slime, asphalt or resin and placed in reeds (the most popular), flags, tall grass, weeds, sedge or rushes! So the naming problem has obviously been around a long time!
So, although T. latifolia looks like a mace and S. lacustris looks like an enormous rush, the pendulum does seem to have to have swung back to the popular Bulrush for T. latifolia.
And, thinking about it, that’s ok - the English names don’t have to make taxonomic sense - that is, after all, what the scientific names are for.