Black Sedge

Black sedge or black bog rush, which is scientifically known as schoenus nigricans, is a species of sedge which grows in the San Bernardino Mountains and the eastern portion of the San Gabriel Mountains as well as a few other isolated areas in San Bernardino County where there are marshes.
Sedges are flowering plants, which superficially resemble the closely related rushes and the more distantly related grasses.
In addition to its presence locally, black sedge is native to Eurasia, parts of Africa, Australia, and other places in southern North America, including Mexico and the southernmost United States. It occurs nearly exclusively, with an estimated probability of 99 percent, under natural conditions in wetlands and other moist and alkaline habitat, primarily including marshes, calcareous bogs, and wet flatwoods, springs, seeps, peat bogs, heath, and alkali flats.
A perennial plant, schoenus nigricans grows in low, tight clumps eight to 30 inches high, the clumps formed by stems, threadlike leaves bearing wide and dark brown ligules, which are thin outgrowth at the junction of leaf and leafstalk. The stems are squarish, smooth and wiry. The leaf blades are erect, wiry, thin, triangular, and channeled. Their sheaths are dark reddish brown to black.
This plant’s flower cluster consists of a small, flattened set of very dark brown spikelets. The fruit is an achene. Achenes are singularly formed carpels, which contain a single seed inside a hardened seed coat to which the seed does not fully adhere. A carpel is the female reproductive part of the flower, which exists as a modified leave-bearing structure. In the case of black sedge, the coated seed, or nutlet, is a hard, glossy white shell.
It blooms from spring to summer.
Black sedge might first be encountered as clumps of wiry stems and leaves, having blackish long-tipped clusters at the stem tips. Each cluster of blackish spikelets has one very long, stiff, pointed bract, jutting out from below.
From Wikipedia; https://plants.ifas.ufl.edu; the National Biodiversity Network’s website:   https://nbn.org.uk/   and https://howlingpixel.com.

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