Heath Sedge Carex flacca
Heath Sedge is an introduced perennial grass, found in Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 0.8 ft.
More about this plant
Carex flacca, with common names blue sedge, gray carex, glaucous sedge, or carnation-grass,, is a species of sedge native to parts of Europe and North Africa. It is frequent in a range of habitats, including grasslands, moorlands, exposed and disturbed soil, and the upper edges of salt marshes. It has naturalized in eastern North America. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Hardiness
- ≥ zone 7 derived from its U.S. range
- Height
- 0.8 ft
- Lifespan
- Perennial
- Foliage
- Broadleaf
- Flower colour
- Brown AI AI image-analysis of community-science photos — lower-confidence (a more subjective call, often an inconspicuous flower); not a botanical record
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~36 caterpillar species
Carex supports ~36 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a strong genus.
Recorded feeding on Carex in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 1 bee visitor
1 native & managed bee species is documented visiting Heath Sedge :
Wildlife & visitors 1 mammal
Open records of who else uses Heath Sedge — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 1 mammal species (fruit, seed, browse):
Related plants
More Carex →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
McKenzie et al. assigned each species a flower colour with a GPT-4V vision model over iNaturalist photos. We use the confident tier plus a separately-labelled lower-confidence top-up (mostly inconspicuous green/brown flowers), and render it as a small tint — never as an asserted fact, and kept out of the written synopsis.
Honest limits: AI image inference (~87% expert agreement on the confident tier); a decorative, confidence-tiered indicator, not a measured trait.
Sources for this entry (23) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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